by ADAMU
Everyone has become frozen in a sea of fear. If you are Muslim, you fear what Christians will say; and if you are Christian, you fear what Muslims will say. And even worse, both fear that their coreligionists will think they have let them and their faith down. But if we really want solve our problems, we should be mature and objective enough to apportion blame where it properly belongs without fear of anything. When news of the Jos crisis filtered out, one could have said what John Pilger said of Palestine during the recent Israeli offensive: “A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders.” In private, all leaders complain bitterly; but in public they try to outdo each other in being politically correct.
And those who choose to speak out say only the wrong things. We deplore statements by politicians who are more interested in posturing and playing to the gallery to capture votes and look like champions of a triumphal majority than in representing the legitimate interests of all of their constituents. Even if the statements credited to Senator Gyang Dalyop Datong were no so self-serving and insensitive, the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be worried that it counts among its supposedly distinguished membership politicians of such narrow-minded tunnel vision. It goes without saying that this or any other democracy has no chance or right of survival if, in its attempts to ensure the wishes of the majority prevail, it forgets to ensure that the legitimate rights of the minority are represented well and protected by law and in fact.
The call by the Bauchi State House of Assembly for the expulsion of indigenes of Plateau State from their state must be condemned. In its implications, it is almost as irresponsible as the call for the actualization of Biafra by MASSOB. Though their contexts are dissimilar and the frustration of Bauchi assemblymen understandable in the circumstance, that resolution ought never to be condoned. By falling to his level, every Bauchi assemblyman has become a little Jang, an ethnic cleanser without a gun—only a little bit more civilized than the Plateau State governor. If it is not all media posturing.
The media may itself have been guilty of trivializing the issue of the crisis and deflecting blame by harping on the issue of dead National Youths Service Corpers. And with their accounts of and comments on the Jos crisis, some writers, including the so-called distinguished columnists, may only have disgraced themselves and the profession of journalism, at least in the eyes of the survivors of this pogrom and all others who are aware of what has been going on in Jos.
First, the lives of NYSC guys are no more valuable than others that are being lost. Second, their death is mourned; but it is all presented in a way that suggests that their service is indispensable, and may not therefore next be available to a North that stands in greater need of it than the other sections of the country. Third, it is all depicted as though it is the Hausa-Fulani who are killing them; which, if true, that it is indeed the Hausa-Fulani who are killing Yoruba corpers, then the fight couldn’t have been over land ownership, as the Berom have been saying.
And it should indeed be more for crimes such as genocide and not just for the thievery of public funds alone that we must hasten to remove the constitutional immunity that has put perpetrators of crime beyond the reach of the law. Those guilty of genocide must be tried and punished with immediacy and with exemplary dispatch.
Unless this is done quickly, it is to be feared that we will witness the unraveling of the Nigerian Knot, the great untying of all the national ties that bind—exposing the meaninglessness of the very issue of nationhood, demonstrating the uselessness of land tenure system and ownership, and striking at the very heart of democracy—one indigene, one vote; one settler, no vote—all of them sacrificed at the altar and hallowed ground of ethnic cleansers on which representativeness has been made to fall helpless and prostrate before the issue of indigeneship. Therefore, right after genocide is punished, the nation should boldly tackle the obnoxious issue of indigene-settler syndrome throughout the country, and especially in Jos where Jang is unlikely to do anything about it.
Wherever he was, Jang had always proved unable to separate his position as governor from his extreme bigotry as an anti-Islamic Christian; or, is it really only and merely an anti-Hausa-Fulani Berom? Unable to stand the name of Muhammad, for instance, he was reported to have changed the name of General Murtala Mohammed College to Ramat College, Yola; not knowing that Ramat, the new name he chose happened to have been derived from one of the foremost attributes of Allah.
He also once stopped the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers of Arabic and Islamic Studies, NATA’IS, from taking place in Yola. Obviously, Jang is unaware that in the forefront for the promotion and propagation of Arabic language have been many prominent Christian Arab intellectuals; and its literature, especially its poetry, has been one of the most studied in the world, and the most translated by Christian Oriental scholar-missionaries. At the time he disallowed permission for the NATA’IS conference, Islamic Studies was a subject taught in all the secondary schools of Gongola State.
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