Such is often the delight of editors the world over. Junaid Mohammed had a penchant for giving newspaper editors bombastic headlines. Junaid Mohammed, a Second Republic lawmaker who became a unique fixture in Nigeria’s political discourse, I found the old article and reread it.ĭr. The debate on the insecurity in Nigeria vis-à-vis the menace of criminal elements within Fulani herdsmen triggered a remembrance. I remembered those good old days of jaw-jaw rather than today’s war-war with nostalgia. I miss Wada Nas and his spectacularly bad satire. It was, however, Wada Nas that I subsequently connected with. I remember one Haruna Muhammad was active then. But I recalled that Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was still engaged in public discourse then, before becoming the CBN governor and an Emir. By then, raining attacks on me was more like pouring a bottle of sunrays on an eagle’s feather.

I do not recall the people who responded to my piece. These were the early years of President Obasanjo’s first term. He also became a good friend.Īnd then came, “The trouble with Fulanis.” By the time I wrote that piece, there was nobody left to defend me. I didn’t know that was possible before then. He mentioned my name thrice in every paragraph. A Yoruba professor fired a rejoinder that was three times longer than my original piece. Their central argument was that going to school in Yoruba land did not give me the impetus to claim that I understood the Yoruba people and their troubles. In subsequent weeks, I wrote “The Trouble with Yorubas.” Almost the same people who hailed me the weeks before landed on me with prime and premium abuses. One Igbo professor sent me three epistles in one day, where he lectured me on Nigeria and the place of the Igbo in it. While the Igbo attacked me from all corners of the globe, the rest of Nigeria, Yoruba, Hausa-Fulani (as we used to call them), Urhobo, Ijaw, and others declared that I was the best thing since kulikuli. I started what accidentally became a series with “The Trouble with Igbos.” The bombardment of responses that came in my mailbox shocked me. I did not know that “all generalisations are dangerous, even this one.” But those few weeks changed my perspective on Nigeria forever. Which meant that they read more than the headlines before they fired a barrage of abuses as their responses. At that time, a majority of those connected to the World Wide Web were the elite. I learned everything that I needed to learn about Nigeria within the first few weeks I started writing for Nigeriaworld. “All generalisations are dangerous, even this one.” - Alexandre Dumas

Dr junaid