By James Ishó
On 9th March, 2024, Benue State Governor, Revd. Father Hyacinth Iormem Alia, a Catholic priest, declared to the whole world his status as a son of the Islamic Caliphate of Sokoto, when he bowed before the Sultan of Sokoto in obeisance addressing him as “My Daddy”.
The occasion was the official launch of the Sokoto State Community Guards Corps by the Sokoto State Government, and ordinarily in Nigeria, such obsequies are normal with the elite at such functions.
However, in the case of Governor Alia it was totally out of the order of his known antecedent given that he has made it clear that as a Catholic priest he is oriented and cast to bow before no mortal man, except his superiors in ecclesiastical authority, and, of course, God Almighty.
While during the campaigns he had deferred to Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Senator George Akume, as “My Leader”, he demoted the same man to the status of “My Son” after he became governor.
Similarly to put paid to a nagging demand for Senator Jack Tilley-Gyado, who hails from the governor’s immediate clan of Mbadede, to be accorded the privileged status of “Father of the Governor”, Alia is said to have declared at a gathering that his father was long dead and gone, as such he has no earthly father.
Such is the stoic adherence of the Benue State Governor to his professed ethos that he is not known to have anywhere referred to his own Paramount traditional ruler, HRM Professor James Ortese Ayatse, the Tor Tiv, as “My Father”.
However, in far away Sokoto State a few days back, Governor Alia renounced his Spartan claim to ecclesiastical superiority over mortal men, to bend at the knee and bow before a mere mortal man, the Sultan of Sokoto, HRM Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, whom he hailed as “My Daddy”.
This adoption of the head of the Muslim Caliphate by a Catholic priest as his “Daddy” is even all the more intriguing when considered against the backdrop of its timing and the occasion for it.
At a time that killings of innocent people and destruction of homes and farms by Fulani herdsmen in Benue has assumed a frightening upsurge, followed by an unprecedented influx of the herders and hundreds of thousands of their cattle into the state, Governor Alia couldn’t have chosen a worse timing for his ‘coronation’ as a “Son of the Caliphate”.
Also it is a notorious fact that the Sokoto Community Guards Corps being launched was merely an aping of the elaborately structured and professionally trained Benue Livestock Guards and Benue Community Volunteer Guards which were institutionalized by the immediate past administration of Samuel Ortom and which are still in existence.
Sadly, since assumption of power, Governor Alia has technically rendered, particularly, the Livestock Guards inoperative by a stoppage of their wages and operational allowances, and only last month suspended the Guards Commander over allegations which one of the governor’s Security Advisers put as stockpiling of arms.
It is instructive that the Benue State House of Assembly only last month at plenary queried why the Livestock Guards and the Community Volunteer Guards were no longer carrying out their lawful duties of checking the influx of herdsmen and their cattle into the state and arresting violators of the Prohibition of Open Grazing and Ranches Establishment Law which is still in force in the state.
It was, therefore, the height of absurdity hearing Governor Alia say before the whole world that he was in Sokoto and learning about such an initiative so he may go back home and implement same.
Such fawning and subservient posturing of the Benue State Governor in Sokoto surely must have gladdened the hearts of his hosts who are part of the constituency of the Fulani herdsmen ravaging Benue, but it heightens the worries of his people back home, and it raises a nagging question:
On whose side is the Son of the Caliphate standing?
On the side of the children of the Caliphate, the herdsmen, in their insistence on disobeying the ban on open grazing in Benue State, or on the side of the law which he swore on oath to uphold, which demands that the herders openly violating the ban must leave the state?
James Ishó writes from Abuja
12/3/2024.
