The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, recently, spoke the minds of well-meaning Nigerians when he declared, at the 2017 Armed Forces Remembrance Day Celebration Service in Abuja, that those committing homicide in the name of religion in the country were insane. He didn’t stop there. He also told his compatriots at the occasion that his boss, President Muhammadu Buhari, had always insisted that Nigerians should not be deceived by people who claim to kill and maim in the name of religion because God can never rejoice at the mindless slaying of His creatures; especially man, who He created in his own image.
On a day when Christians, nationwide, were mourning over 800 of their brethren brutally murdered in Southern Kaduna in the dying weeks of 2016 by marauding Fulani cattle herders and some blood-baying fundamentalists, Osinbajo brought some comfort, even if little, to a hurting nation when he said the military would soon restore sanity in the troubled region. But not a few Nigerians told him, on television, how disappointed they were at the delayed response, by the Buhari Administration, on the cauldron boiling with the blood of the innocent.
More people spewed bile at various worship centres the same Sunday (January 8, 2017). Naturally, the day should have been a time of celebration and offering of gratitude to God Almighty for His blessings and mercies in the dead year, 2016. But it was observed as a day of national mourning in honour of the murdered Christians, drawing the world’s attention to the prevarication by the Federal Government, and the abysmal failure of the Kaduna State Government, to halt what the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN, termed “the on-going ethnic/religious cleansing of Nigerian Christians in general and those of Southern Kaduna in particular…”
Announcing the day of national mourning at a press conference, CAN’s national scribe, Rev. Musa Asake, said the Church in Nigeria had, since 2009, “been subjected to a systemic genocide and persecution” which had yielded thousands of Christian deaths, “and destruction of hundreds of churches, and over 50,000 houses. The current unprecedented onslaught against Christians in Southern Kaduna by the Islamic fundamentalists disguising as the Fulani herdsmen under the watch of Kaduna State Governor, Mallam Nasir El-Rufai and President Buhari has reached an alarming stage.”
Although CAN commended President Muhammadu Buhari for degrading and defeating Boko Haram, it regretted that “his silence over the on-going genocide in the last few weeks speaks volumes over the perceived official endorsement of the dastardly and ungodly acts.”
On the day that Rev. Asake gave his press conference in Abuja, one character threw another shocker on national television when he declared that Fulani herdsmen don’t just attack; they attack to avenge previous assault. Now, if we were to hold the words of this character sacrosanct, it means that all the extreme miseries-the murders, as well as the wanton destruction of properties and farmlands that rampaging cattle herders have been inflicting on law-abiding Nigerians across the country were reprisal attacks; and are, therefore, justified! Similarly, and according to the jaundiced argument of that character, we should also accept that the ransom that Governor Nasir El-Rufai paid to yet-to-be-identified Fulani herdsmen was also a justification of the marauders’ dastardly acts. What a country!
To be fair to El-Rufai, he has maintained he paid the ransom as partial implementation of the recommendations a committee made to his predecessor, the late Patrick Ibrahim Yakowa, on the heads of cattle killed during the 2011 post-election crisis in Southern Kaduna.
One thing remains hazy, though. And that is: there is no evidence yet to show that a single victim has been compensated in any way. Despite the Governor’s stout defence, the totality of his actions on the crisis tends to underscore the allegation of complicity levelled against him by the Southern Kaduna Peoples Union, SOKAPU. The SOKAPU has consistently asked the governor to reveal the identity of the Fulani herdsmen who got the ransom.
Chilling as the killings in Southern Kaduna have been, they mimic the unrelenting attacks in the Middle-Belt and Southern Nigeria, as well as other parts ravaged by A.K. 47-wielding herdsmen. Yet, nothing definitive has been done to halt the carnage. This has, once again, exposed Nigeria to the scorn of the international community which views our nation as a country on a cliff-hanger.
Various reasons have been adduced for these perennial carnage. They range from perceived Hausa/Fulani domination agenda to Islamisation, conquest, inequity and freedom (The Guardian). When added to the other problems threatening to suffocate our country, like the Boko Haram insurgency, militancy in the Niger-Delta, kidnap-for-ransom occurring in virtually all parts of the country, among other crimes and acts of criminality, the rash of religious/ethnic conflicts, as well as the Fulani herdsmen irritants, an explosion seems imminent in Nigeria; if the authorities continue to play Nero. Nero was the unpopular Emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. He reportedly played music while his empire was on fire.
Nobody can controvert the fact that Nigeria is in deep crisis.
Forty-six years after the Biafra war ended, the wounds have not totally healed. We are still dealing with matters that provoked the conflict. Matters that arose from the crisis are still staring us in the face. Adjunct to that, there is virtually no part of Nigeria that is not embroiled with one security issue/agitation or another. Then, the issue of religious disharmony.
Show me a nation that has achieved cohesion and prosperity on the wings of religion, and I will give you an endless list of nations torn into shreds by religious disharmony. As the situation in Southern Kaduna (and Benue, Plateau, Kano and Zamfara before it) has clearly illustrated, religious conflicts can only widen the fault lines in our nation, and, if not tamed on time, drive us to an irreversible cataclysm. Although war of religion, according to the Encyclopaedia of Wars, accounts for only 13 out of 100 of the world’s worst atrocities in the history of mankind, its ruinous effects linger from generation to generation.
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of the United States (1969-1974), and the first ever to resign from office, once asserted that religion was supposed to, in the long term, “change the nature of man and reduce conflict.” But that hope perished long ago because, as Nixon further noted, “the bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.”
Sadly, Nigeria is tottering on that ruinous path. We must urgently reverse that march to perdition. Religious war is a one-way ticket to hell. The wounds don’t heal; the scars never disappear. The path of recovery is long and tortuous. Religious conflict is one path Nigeria cannot afford to tread.
As a first step to stop the drift towards that dangerous direction, men of goodwill must never stop warning against it. Just like Prof. Wole Soyinka did at a book presentation in Abuja, last Thursday. While condemning the senseless killings in Southern Kaduna, he parodied an earlier warning by President Buhari that Nigeria must kill corruption before corruption kills Nigeria; and warned that we must tame religion before it kills our nation.
We do not need to convene another political jamboree in the name of a national conference to resolve the dangerous disequilibrium on display in Southern Kaduna; and other regions. Our most potent weapon is the political will to end the madness once and for all.
For that to happen, President Buhari must remove the kid gloves he has been using to tackle the herdsmen’s menace and deal with it decisively. As canvassed by some commentators, he may need to reverse the apparent lop-sidedness in the composition of his cabinet and the leadership/management of Nigeria’s security agencies to avoid the current situation where the top echelon of those institutions have been accused of turning a blind eye to the pogrom in Southern Kaduna.
We may have to borrow a leaf from Singapore, and do something seemingly insane about the insanity of religion in our land. Singapore, you may recall, was an eminent member of the Third World Club. But, overtime, it freed itself from all the dead weights that shackled it, especially religion and official corruption, and within three decades, got catapulted to the First World community.
For instance, while every citizen maintains the inalienable right of worship in any religion of his/her choice, no one must get appointed or elected into public or political office on the basis of religion. Nigeria’s secularism must be held sacrosanct at all times and in every situation.
There must be a clear demarcation between religion and the state. Government at all levels must disengage from sponsoring religious pilgrimages or programmes. And like Mohammad Alami Musa wrote in The Straits Times on how Singapore’s enhanced secularism aided its growth, no religion-based political party must be allowed in the country’s political process, “and religious leaders who wish to participate in electoral politics must first “remove their religious garb”. Above all, no community or political leader must be allowed to use its/his religious inclination to “dictate (the) affairs of the state, be it in the formulation of public policies, making of decisions or enactment of laws.”
Any leader that shows prejudice or favouritism to any religion or tribe or ethnic group in matters of national security must be shown the red card, through a diligent impeachment process. No bigot must be allowed to move near the nation’s levers of power. Like Soyinka said, we must do whatever it takes to tame religion before it consumes us.
I rest my case. God bless Nigeria.