BENUE STATE PEOPLE: SYMPTOMATIC OF THE BATTERED WIFE SYNDROME.

ICHEOKU says have tried without success to rationally understand the skewed love relationship between the House which Joseph Tarka built and the House of Mohammedan Othman Dan Fodio aka the Sokoto Caliphate. The only thing discernible and worth sifting out therefrom is that the people of Beune State are exhibiting symptoms of the battered wife syndrome, which sees an abused wife or even a woman, constantly attracted to her abusive husband or man and without any meaningful reason or explanation whatsoever. The allure is so irrational to comprehend that people wonder and question whether the woman drives some kind of high, a special dark pleasure, from being abused. Anyone who has ever experienced dominatrix "love" will understand that some people really likes it hot and rough. 

They will tell you that is the only way they actually feel expressed. It is a fact that psychologists have studied this syndrome over the many years and have also tried to psycho analyze such victims, but unfortunately no meaningful diagnosis has succeeded in explaining what makes such women do what they do. Sometimes, some of these victims end up being physically maimed for life and even killed, thus rendering any intervention ineffective or rather too little too late as an effective recourse. 

Several times have the people of the former Benue Plateau State now Benue State, Plateau State and Kogi State been provided the opportunity to free themselves from the strangulating choke-hold of the House of Othman Dan Fodio; but with each opportunity, saw them getting more ingratiated to the Fulani Sokoto Caliphate. Like with every second class mentality citizen, the appearance of being accepted by the people they admire and want to be like, is always a preferred option to truly being assertive and demanding to be respected. Joseph Tarka fought mightily to secure respect and statesmanship for his people of the Middle Belt and nearly succeeded until death took him away. 

Genocidal Yakubu Gowon led them back into the vice-grip control of the Caliphate during his reign as a neophyte illiterate Head of State and through a war of attrition which they waged against the people of Biafra. At the end of the war, the same Caliphate decided that a Middle Beltan was not good enough to be their leader and engineered a military coup that overthrew Yakubu Gowon and installed one of their own Muritala Mohammed, yet they remained loyal to their Caliphate masters with no questions asked.

There was a failed Middle Belt counter coup led by Bukar Sukar Dimpka which killed the Caliphate's Muritala Mohammed. The Caliphate responded with heavy hand and used the opportunity to nearly exterminate the entire population of the Middle Belt soldiers from their Fulani Nigerian army. Several officers including General Iliya Bisala as well as other rank and file from the Middle Belt were summarily slaughtered in mass executions. Even Gowon himself was marked for execution but the Berom coward hid in the United Kingdom until President Shehu Shagari granted him amnesty; admitted he still lives in fear of the Caliphate till today. During this purge, those Middle Belt soldiers who were deemed not connected to the coup and were not executed, were summarily dismissed from the Nigerian military. But instead of the Middle Belt people reexamining their association with their Caliphate, exclaimed their appreciation to the Caliphate, Master, master, you did nothing wrong, we are still loyal and we still love you. 

Some decades later, another Benue son, Gideon Orkar, became fed up with what was going on in Nigerian including in the Nigerian Army and tried to push those miscreants out of Nigeria. But unfortunately, his drunkenness did him in as a premature announcement of excision of some five North most States from the country, rallied soldiers from the five States, led by Sani Abacha, to fight back to reclaim their stay in Nigeria. The coup was quelled and when it was over, Orkar and his group of mainly Middle Belt Benue soldiers were blown to pieces with anti aircraft guns and sticks of dynamites festooned around their bodies like suicide bombers and whatever remained of their minced flesh were dissolved in sulphuric acid. But did the people of Benue State review their association following the callous fate which befell Gideon and co travelers, to see if it is still worthy of pursuing, working or still beneficial to them? ICHEOKU says no; instead they stuck to their love of their Caliphate masters and went even further and deeper in their romance; and now this ongoing slaughter of the people by the Caliphate's terrorists cattle herders. 

This is a fact of history and this is the fate which the people of the Middle Belt has continued to suffer in the hands of their supposed Sokoto Caliphate brothers; and for so long that you wonder when is enough finally going to be enough for this one-sided love affair to be re negotiated. They were marginalized, they were massacred, they were denied, they were deprived, they were rejected and they were not accepted as full members of the Caliphate, yet they kept on loving the Caliphate more and more. Their only request is to be loved in return but the Caliphate would have none of that.  They sang and they serenaded the vampirish Caliphate, which continuously grows fat on the blood and backs of Benue people; yet they are not welcomed. Why Benue people continues to sing the praises and doing the dirty laundry of the Sokoto Caliphate, despite what they have been thrown at is simply beyond any meaningful and rational comprehension, short of somebody trying too hard to be loved and accepted as bona fides Northerners. 

But why any people would continue to grovel in such perpetual servitude to another people, who continuously derides them, is beyond ICHEOKU; except to add it is the stuff lack of self esteem and pride in oneself is made of. To this end therefore, Benue State people cannot stop to amaze ICHEOKU with their lower caste disposition in the matter of their relationship with the Sokoto Caliphate. But why? What would Joseph Tarka and even Godwin Daboh say or do to what has become the fate of their people in their bromance with their brothers from the other end of the North.

As far as the Caliphate is concerned, the people of the Middle Belt remains part of the Southern infidels except for election purposes or when doing their bidding is concerned and some lowly servants of the North has to do the heavy lifting. It also does not matter to the Caliphate that the people of Benue State and/or the entire Middle Belt see themselves as Northerners, because in their tacit understanding, there are Northerners and there are other wanna be Northerners - the Northerners in name only. At every turn, those real Northerners never misses the opportunity to tell the "foreign" Northerners to know their place and to only speak when spoken to. Yet this second class treatment was accepted and accommodated by the people of Benue State and the greater Middle Belt and for so long. But why a people would be this so servile and groveling to another people is beyond any emancipated person's fathoming.


ICHEOKU says but acting as a devil's advocate, if as agreed that Benue State is neither Hausa nor Fulani, but a State located in the central geopolitical region of Nigeria and is not part of the Southeast and definitely not part of the Igbo ethnic extraction, and has a distinct language, genealogy, culture, tradition and ethnicity, what then is their correlation and affinity to the Sokoto Caliphate, one may ask? Their argument usually is that Benue State has no traceable cosmogony or any cultural affinity whatsoever to Igboland; but they fail to establish their nexus and consanguinity to the Fulani Sokoto Caliphate. The implication being that the people of Benue would rather manufacture nonsensical reasons to justify their alliance with a people so far away and so diverse in everything material particular with them; but would jump and protest any connection with some other people with whom they actually have some connection, including State boundary lines, inter-marriages and criss-crossing borders. 


This is the convoluting thing in the whole Benue State people idiocy of distancing themselves from Ndigbo Southeast, but readily grovels at a people  they do not share any homogeneous identifications with either, including boundary lines. However, all these notwithstanding, the real question remains why are Benue State people stuck in this abusive relationship with the Sokoto Caliphate and for this long? Why not just walk away and let the gaddam thing, where they are not treated fairly but so shabbily and so poorly, go puff. So put in another way, ICHEOKU says that Benue State people as well as the rest of the Middle Belt, by necessary implication, is somewhat incohoot in the fate which has befallen them. 

The people of Benue State are behaving like an abused wife who no one understands nor can explain why she keeps on going back to her abusive husband, and won't walk away or divorce him or feed him rat poison or take a Magnum to his cranium. Lastly, if according to Samuel Ortom, Benue State people have been under the tortuous pummeling of the Sokoto Caliphate Fulani since 1800, why are they still in bed with these their admitted traducers. But unfortunately, only Benue State people are the ones who can truly help themselves and free themselves from their bonded servitude to the Mohammedan House of Othman Dan Fodio. 

So, until then when they decides to do the needful, ICHEOKU advises the rest of Nigerians to please maintain a safe observation distance from them and let Benue people make up their mind as to the future course they want to navigate. Please do not let them use you in settling their brotherly dispute with their Northern brothers from the Sokoto Caliphate. Their leaders have time without number maintained that they are Northerners and that they belong to the Sokoto Caliphate as distant cousins. So it will be very unfortunate for anyone or tribe to give the two spouses reason to go to bed with you, discussing you as the reason they wanted to part ways. So until they seek the help and intervention of other Nigerians, especially the ever-ready busy-body only volunteer force in Nigeria, Ndigbo, please give them the much needed space to do some serious soul searching on their desired way forward.