BY CHRIS GYANG

The second part of the title of this piece is taken from a quotation out of George Orwell’s iconic 1954 allegorical novella, ‘Animal Farm’.

Rendered in full, it reads: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

It captures the very essence of the master-servant relationship that exists in a totalitarian dictatorship which endlessly struggles to portray itself as a system that guarantees social justice and equality for all citizens – regardless of their identity, race, social status, etc.

Today, as Obadiah Mailafia is once again, for the third time, dragged before the Buhari government’s much vilified security system, we cannot but perceive in this unfolding drama the sad intimations of the events so forcefully and poignantly portrayed in Orwell’s masterpiece.

For here is a man, Mailafia, being unjustly persecuted for crying out about the heinous, bloody brutalities being metted out on the people of his Southern Kaduna and other minorities in Nigeria while others who have openly come out to brag about masterminding terrorist acts against Nigerians are not only held up by their own kin as heroes, they are walking, swashbuckling, on the streets of Nigeria as free and responsible citizens.

For the avoidance of doubt, armed Fulani herdsmen, who have been adjudged by credible and renowned world organisations to be among the leading terrorists in world, are still perpetrating heinous waves of killings, despoilation and forceful land grabbing all over Nigeria unabated. All right thinking Nigerians are well aware of this.

But, mark this, at the end of the day, the leaders of these killer herdsmen go on national and international media to justify these obviously unjust and well planned acts of terrorism.

And even as Mailafia is being paraded today as an enemy of Buhari’s Nigeria, not one of those Fulani leaders has even been questioned by the security forces. And even contemplating any of them being brought before any court of law is completely out of the question.

As a matter of fact, Governor el-Rufai of Kaduna State, the poster man of the Buhari-led Federal Government and a die hard proponent of Fulani ethnic supremacy, once boasted that he met and paid off bandits in his state to halt their bloody onslaught against innocent citizens.

But, as matters stand today, that has not worked.

And his brother in Buhari’s own Katsina, Masari, would even go a step further by meeting leaders of the well armed militias terrorising his state and strike a deal with them in the presence of army and other security chiefs.

Again, as matters stand today, that has not worked.

What we’re trying to say here is that, if el-Rufai and Masari, Buhari’s Fulani kinsmen, could tell the world that they personally met and struck deals with terrorists, it therefore means that they know these bloodsuckers who should have been summarily brought to justice!!

Unfortunately, the powers that be would never contemplate bringing their own to justice in this our own equally perverse ‘Animal Farm’ which Buhari and his henchmen perceive to be their personal estate, freely granted them by their forebears.

That’s is why the violence is now spiralling out of control all over Nigeria.

But here’s a Mailafia who, out of patriotic fervour, summoned the courage to tell things as they truly are being maliciously persecuted like a common criminal in Buhari’s gulag.

Of course, this is chiefly because Mailafia, like most of us, belongs to that wretched family which comes from Nigeria’s minorities that must ever remain subservient to the master race championed by President Buhari and the el-Rufais of Nigeria.

It should be noted that, in the power game of today’s Nigeria, Mailafia is classified as belonging to animals that are, as in Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’, not ‘pigs’.

That’s why Buhari and his people are more equal than Mailafia and the rest of us, despite the pretensions of the Nigerian system to the contrary.

Nevertheless, as history has consistently shown mankind, the ‘pigs’ always, ultimately, lose out.

It’s just a matter of time.

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MAILAFIA: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT….