CITIZENSHIP DOES NOT ERASE HISTORY, DR ARDO

CITIZENSHIP DOES NOT ERASE HISTORY, DR ARDO:
A Response To “Land, Citizenship and The Dangerous
Politics Of Ethnic Ownership”

By V. T. Tortsugh, Esq.

I have read, with considerable interest and no small measure of concern, Dr Umar Ardo’s rebuttal of the Middle Belt Forum’s statement on the Federal Government’s cattle-ranching policy. It is a well-constructed piece, learned in tone and confident in its constitutional citations. But it is built on a foundation that does not hold: the idea that a community’s legitimate anxiety about land, security, and process can be dismissed as “Stone Age” thinking simply because it is voiced by people who have watched their farmlands overrun for a generation.

Let me say plainly what Dr Ardo does not: nobody serious in the Middle Belt is arguing that Fulani citizens should be stripped of their constitutional right to live, farm, or trade anywhere in Nigeria. That right is not in dispute. What is in dispute is far narrower, far more concrete, and far more urgent than Dr Ardo allows: who decides how land is taken, who is consulted before it is taken, who is compensated when it is taken, and who protects the people left behind when the taking goes wrong.

1. A convenient inflation of the argument
Dr Ardo spends the bulk of his essay demolishing a claim nobody in the MBF statement actually made — that the Middle Belt belongs “exclusively” to particular ethnic groups. This is the oldest trick in advocacy: restate your opponent’s position in its most extreme form, then defeat that form. But even Dr Ardo concedes, almost in passing at paragraph 6, that “beneath the MBF’s ethnocentric rhetoric lies a legitimate concern” about arbitrary land acquisition. That concession is the whole case. Once you admit the underlying grievance is legitimate, calling the messenger’s language “ethnocentric” does not make the grievance disappear — it simply changes the subject.

2. Citizenship is not a substitute for due process
Yes, Section 41 guarantees freedom of movement. Yes, Section 42 forbids discrimination. I am a legal practitioner; I do not need reminding of the Constitution I have sworn to uphold. But the same Constitution that protects the mover’s right to relocate also protects the landowner’s right not to be dispossessed without due process, fair hearing, and compensation. Section 44 exists for a reason. When ranches are sited on community land through federal fiat, with no meaningful consultation of the people who have farmed that land for generations, the injury is not cured by reciting Section 41 back at the injured party. Citizenship cuts both ways. It protects the settler and the indigene in equal measure — and Dr Ardo’s essay is strangely silent on the indigene half of that equation.

3. Individualising crime should not mean erasing pattern
I agree, without reservation, that criminal guilt must never be visited on an entire ethnic group. As a criminal defence advocate, I have spent this year alone defending clients against exactly the kind of collective suspicion Dr Ardo warns against, and I take that principle seriously. But there is a difference between condemning an ethnicity and describing an evidentiary pattern. When farming communities across Benue, Taraba, and Plateau report recurring attacks along known grazing corridors, at predictable seasons, often preceding or following disputes over specific parcels of land, that is not ethnic prejudice — it is an observation crying out for investigation, protection, and prosecution of the actual perpetrators. Dr Ardo’s framework would have us treat every such report as bigotry rather than evidence. That does not protect innocent Fulani herders; it protects impunity for the guilty ones, whoever they are.

4. Wase deserves an answer, not a shrug
Dr Ardo raises Wase only to wave it away with the observation that “if local farmers oppose land allocation, their concerns must be heard.” That sentence does no work. The people of Wase are not asking to be heard in the abstract; they are asking why land was allocated over their documented objection in the first place, and by whom, and under what legal authority. A rebuttal that treats a live, specific grievance as an occasion for a general statement about process is not engaging with the grievance at all.

5. The rhetoric he condemns is the rhetoric he uses
There is something to be said, gently, about tone. Dr Ardo accuses the MBF of “Stone Age” politics, of language “extracted from a Stone Age manuscript,” while presenting himself as the calm voice of constitutional reason. A genuine appeal to constitutional neutrality does not need to insult the intelligence of an entire region to make its point. If ethnic-coded language is dangerous in a communique, it does not become safe when it is dressed in academic prose.

6. Nigeria’s own law already recognises what Dr Ardo denies
Finally, and perhaps most tellingly, Dr Ardo’s “pure citizenship, not ethnicity” argument sits uneasily beside Nigeria’s own constitutional architecture. Federal character, states of origin, indigene certificates, and quota admissions are not inventions of the Middle Belt Forum — they are instruments of the Nigerian state itself, built precisely because this country has never operated on citizenship alone, stripped of place and community. One cannot invoke the Constitution to erase the indigene-settler distinction in one breath while that same Constitution, through its federal character principles, keeps that distinction very much alive in the next.
What I actually stand for.

I am not writing to defend ethnic exclusivity — no responsible lawyer could, and I do not. I am writing because the people of Benue, Taraba, and the wider Middle Belt deserve a policy conversation conducted on the facts before them, not a lecture on citizenship that skips past the facts entirely. Let the Federal Government show its legal basis for acquisition. Let it show consultation. Let it show fair compensation. Let security agencies prosecute the criminals responsible for violence, regardless of their ethnicity, with the same vigour Dr Ardo rightly demands. And let the ranching policy, if it is as sound as he believes, survive scrutiny on those terms — not on the strength of an essay that answers a strawman instead of the argument actually made.
Nigeria does indeed belong to all its citizens. That is precisely why no citizen’s land should be taken from them without the process the Constitution promises.

V. T. Tortsugh, Esq.
Legal Practitioner & Human Rights Advocate