In this new technological age, social media has become a crowded, noisy, and chaotic marketplace of meaning. Here, anti-facts parade as truths. Everyone, including Tom, Dick, and Harry, has a megaphone. And with it, they trade in distortions, half-truths, and outright lies. As truth invariably becomes the casualty, careless hands tear apart history while narratives are shaped not by evidence but by unfortunate administrators of echo chambers.

And so, humanity is left with the exhausting task of sieving sense from noise, truth from the spawned lies of digital opportunists and ahistorians. But this shouldn’t be humanity’s burden. Not when people are going to bed hungry. Not when poverty knocks on doors. Not when humanity’s real concern should lie elsewhere in the broken breadlines and in the daily struggles for survival. That is where humanity’s gaze must settle before it loses both memory and meaning to the careless flick of a share button. In an age where virality often trumps veracity, where a single click can birth a thousand falsehoods, the past is constantly at risk of being twisted into convenient fiction. 

E.H. Carr famously warned against the seductive practice of historical cherry-picking, and of lifting events out of context to serve present passions or political ends. He reminded us that history is not a basket of facts from which one plucks at will, but a tapestry woven with complexity, contradiction, and consequence. To ignore his caution is to treat history as a cocktail of biases, each serving the appetite of the moment. And when that happens, when memory is mangled and meaning is manufactured, society loses not only its grip on the truth but its ability to learn, to grow, and to act justly in the present. 

To put it more pointedly, Carr cautioned in his brilliant seminal work, What Is History?, that the historian must resist the temptation to bend the arc of history to personal bias, lest history itself becomes a mirror reflecting only the interpreter’s prejudices. His slender work is a profound exegesis that beckons even the most amateur of historians to approach the past not as a quarry of facts to be mined at will, but as a living continuum to be understood in its full complexity. It is a call for intellectual honesty, reminding us that history is not merely what happened, but what we make of what happened. 

Does Reno Omokri recognise all of this? 

In a recent Facebook post, Reno Omokri made a bold ahistorical claim. He argued that if the north supports Peter Obi for president, they risk the fate of Northern Cameroon after Ahmadou Ahidjo’s resignation in 1982. Hear him: “If Arewa makes the mistake of backing the coalition and giving their Presidential ticket to Peter Obi, exactly what happened to Northern Cameroon after Ahmadou Ahidjo resigned on  November 4, 1982, is what will happen to Northern Nigeria. Go back and study history. The Hausa and Fulani are the most marginalised ethnicities in Cameroon, and Paul Biya kept none of the promises he made to Ahidjo”. The implication of Reno’s ahistorical claim is clear: the North will face political irrelevance if it supports Obi. 

History, properly interrogated, resists simple analogies. And Reno’s reading of history is simplistic, if not utterly misleading. So, I begin with the facts.

Ahmadou Ahidjo was Cameroon’s first president. A Fulani Muslim from the north, he led from independence in 1960 until his resignation on November 4, 1982. He handed power to Paul Biya, a Christian from the south. Two days later, Biya was sworn in as president. At the time, the handover appeared peaceful. But peace was short-lived. Within months, cracks appeared in their political relationship. Ahidjo, who had expected to remain influential behind the scenes, began to criticise Biya’s policies. Biya responded swiftly and decisively. In August 1983, he reorganised the North Province. It was a single, vast political unit under Ahidjo’s influence. Biya divided it into three regions: North, Adamawa, and Far North. This diluted the support around Ahidjo. It was a deliberate political move. Biya also dismissed Ahidjo loyalists from the government. In April 1984, a coup attempt was launched by members of the Republican Guard, loyal to Ahidjo. The coup failed. Biya survived. The aftermath was brutal. Hundreds were executed. More were imprisoned. All supporters of Ahidjo.

The series of events forms the basis of Reno Omokri’s unfortunate interpretation of that specious aspect of Cameroon’s political history. But the interpretation argument falls apart under scrutiny. First, Biya did not marginalise the Hausa-Fulani because of their ethnicity. He targeted political opponents. His purges were aimed at Ahidjo’s loyalists, and not his ethnic bloc. Some of those removed were Fulani, yes. However, they were removed for political reasons, not because of who they were. Second, the north retained relevance in Cameroonian politics. 

While Biya concentrated power in Yaoundé, northern politicians continued to play roles in the ruling party and government. Development disappeared in Cameroon, not in a particular ethnic region whose political leader’s fortune had fallen into bad times. Third, the claim that the Hausa-Fulani are the “most marginalised ethnicities” in Cameroon is not supported by data. The Fulani are a major ethnic group in Cameroon. They dominate the Far North, North, and Adamawa regions. They have significant economic influence, particularly in the agricultural sector. The real marginalisation in Cameroon today is regional, not ethnic. Anglophone regions, for instance, have suffered more state violence and exclusion than the northern Fulani. Consider the case of the Ambazonian separatists, who are actively demanding independence for the Anglophone regions of Cameroon. If, as Reno claims, the Hausa and Fulani are truly marginalised, one would expect them to be leading the charge for secession. That isn’t the case.

So, what actually were the promises Biya made to Ahidjo? Reno Omokri didn’t state them, nor their nature and what they constituted in 1982 when power was transferred from Ahidjo to Biya. Then, was there a betrayal? 

Perhaps, from a political standpoint. Ahidjo may have felt betrayed by Biya’s consolidation of power. But that is a political feud, not an ethnic cleansing. Ahidjo himself had ruled with an iron hand. He suppressed dissent. He centralised power. He ruled as a one-party president until his last day. His assumption that Biya would continue to rule in his shadow was unrealistic. Comparing this to Nigeria is, at best, a misreading of history. 

Nigeria is not Cameroon. Its political culture is more plural, and its federal structure is more pronounced. Nigeria has experienced democratic transitions, military coups, and regional tensions. However, the balance of power in Nigeria is constantly negotiated. It is not shaped by the fall of a single leader. When President Umaru Yar’Adua died in office in 2010, power shifted to a southerner, Goodluck Jonathan, whom Reno served as a Senior Special Assistant in the Documentation and Project Monitoring Directorate of his presidency. The north did not vanish. It regrouped, reorganised, and by 2015, reclaimed power through Muhammadu Buhari.

Reno Omokri’s warning assumes that the north is incapable of political rebirth. That is untrue. The North has shown resilience and political adaptability. It has produced presidents, vice presidents, Senate presidents, and party leaders in every republic since independence. The real danger lies not in power rotating to the south. The danger is in sowing fear, suspicion, and historical revisionism in the way he has done. What Biya did in Cameroon was not an act of ethnic betrayal. It was a power struggle between a former president and his successor. Ahidjo tried to influence from behind the curtain. Biya tore down that curtain. Full stop. 

There are lessons here, but not the ones Reno Omokri contrived. One lesson is that political succession in a postcolonial state is negotiated and reinforced by class survival. Another lesson is that political alliances are based on shared class interests, not geography alone. Reno Omokri’s poor analogy ignores both lessons and the obvious facts: that the north is not monolithic. It contains multiple ethnic groups, languages, and political interests. The Hausa-Fulani are influential, but they are not the only voices to be heard. 

The Middle Belt, for instance, has distinct political leanings. It often swings elections, like it did for President Goodluck Jonathan in 2011, and against him in 2015 when the opposition flipped some states. To suggest that the north will be “marginalised” by Mr Peter Obi, whose support cuts across regions and whose political relevance is national, is to underestimate the diversity of the north itself.

Scaremongering is dangerous. That is what Reno Omokri attempted to do with his social media post. But the future of Nigeria does not lie in fear of the other. It lies in confronting current challenges: insecurity, poverty, unemployment, and the entrepreneurs of hate and bigotry. To drag the ghost of Ahidjo into Nigerian politics is to miss the moment. Paul Biya has remained in power for nearly 43 years. That, if anything, is the real tragedy. Not that he betrayed Ahidjo, but that he stayed too long. 

Nigeria must not follow that path. Our politics must mature. Our leaders must be held accountable. Power must rotate peacefully. Alliances must be based on shared goals, not ethnic fears- the type Reno Omokri propagates. Finally, as I return to E. H. Carr, Reno Omokri needs to be reminded that history teaches us not just what happened, but also how not to interpret it poorly. That, as public intellectuals, we must be honest enough to read history and render it correctly.

Abdul Mahmud is a human rights attorney in Abuja