The Nigerian nation as hostage
By
Being still on the boil, every comment on the riots in parts of the north must be cautious. I profess antipathy for the blaspheming of any religion. I am as outraged at the profanation of Islamic tenets as I am of the desecration of Christian, Buddhist, Zen or Confucian beliefs. I hold to be beneath contempt those who cart off objects of traditional African worship for filthy lucre. Yet, my angst for those who offend the sacred marks a distinction between willfulness and sheer mistake. In either case, I repudiate as sanction the killing of anybody.
Far be it from me to dictate to Moslims the sanctions excitable by their umbrage. Isn’t it the case that their responses to infractions of their faith are imperishably inscribed in the Holy Koran? In a bid to douse the embers of hatred, the Sultan Muhammadu Maccido reminded Muslims that they were “now in the sacred month of Ramadan, which is to be observed with peace and dedication to worship." He cited verse 216 of Suratu Baqrat in the Koran thus: "When they ask you about fighting in the sacred month, say therein that it is a great transgression." Now, under what Islamic injunctions has the wanton destruction of the lives and properties of innocent human beings been carried out?
I read as many American and European reports of the riots as I found. To the last one, the riots were attributed to the offending piece in ThisDay and the protest against staging the Miss World pageant in Nigeria. This appears plausible but it happens to be wrong and will forever remain wrong. When Martin Scorsese, the American film director, released The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988, the last thing that crossed the mind of those offended by the blasphemous film was that he should be lynched. No one believed that his temerity should elicit burning and killing and looting. There was also Andreas Serrano, the artist who submerged a crucifix in urine and titled it Piss Christ. Even Chris Ofili, a Nigerian-born artist, drew the Madonna and titled it The Holy Virgin Mary. Yet it was a pornographic work partly rendered with elephant dung. People never thought that Serrano and Ofili should be beheaded or that private homes and places of worship of innocent people should be torched as a result of their sacrilegious predilections.
There is no suggestion that Nigerian Moslems should follow examples of Christian reaction to blasphemy. All that is asked is to follow the dictates of their religion in tackling these matters. The question merits repetition: Does Islam decree public insurrection and wholesale devastation of the lives and goods of innocent people as sanction for one person’s blasphemy?
If the answer is no, as it certainly is, it means that the riots that started in Kaduna are unconnected to religion. It means that the Nigerian nation’s consolidation as a hostage of charlatanic anti-democratic forces is proceeding apace. This consolidation, whose ultimate consequences are unprintable, remains in effect because of the objective political configurations in which the country continues to limp. When Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was published in 1988, it went quietly into the international market and remained there for many months, even commanding reviews in the Iranian press. It was only when the late Ayatollah Khomeini pronounced a fatwa on the author that opposition to it took on a life of its own. Even so, Khomeini did not order Britain, where Rushie resided, burnt down or its citizens plundered and pillaged. Regarding his fatwa, many Islamic experts also interpreted Rushdie’s book as blasphemous but stopped short of supporting the punishment because the proper process for its pronouncement had not been followed.
Yet, and at a base level, the hairsplitting on the fine points of Islamic jurisprudence made little impact. A London publisher about to launch the book changed plans when a properly aimed projectile landed on the center of his baldhead. In Pakistan, the book elicited widespread riots and the loss of countless lives. It led Benazir Bhutto, then the Pakistani Prime Minister, to make a nationwide broadcast. Those inciting or participating in riots over The Satanic Verses, she said, were propelled political reason, for the book was neither published in Pakistan nor on sale in the country. Further, Rushdie may have been born a Pakistani but had previously taken up British citizenship.
The point here is that conditions in Pakistan made it possible for charlatanic anti-democrats to jump on the publication of Rushdie’s book to foment crisis for Miss Bhutto. How could a lady sit at the helm of affairs in an Islamic country? Pakistan has never claimed to be more Islamic than Saudi Arabia. Yet, there were no riots in Saudi Arabia over Rushdie’s controversial book and there were no riots over it in all other Islamic countries. Even in Khomeini’s Iran, not a soul and not a hut was lost to The Satanic Verses. So, why have whole portions of the north gone up in blood and fire? The answer is that anonymous terrorists in diametric opposition to the established order were handed a tool to pursue their divisive and disruptive agenda.
It underlines another failure on the part of the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo. Not because the onset of the mayhem was not detected and contained. The government never detects the onset of national calamities and never contains them. Obasanjo’s signal failure is in his latter day antipathy to the idea of a national conference. This is the cardinal difference between Nigeria and genuine democracies. America, for instance, is one huge dialogue. But the Nigerian president adamantly and obdurately foreclosed any deliberation on the national question. Yet his foreign junkets, which have cost a third of his first term in office, are ostensibly for dialogue with foreign interests and powers. What do you make of a father who conducts conversations with everyone but members of his own family?
The picture is stark. Obasanjo claimed that sharia would fizzle out. It escalated. A poor peasant was amputated for petty theft and Obasanjo advised him to challenge his dreadful fate in court! Moral infraction was criminalised. Two women were sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. It occurred to no one to ask for sanctions against the men that impregnated them. Obasanjo has greeted all this with a deafening silence. The sharia itself has demonstrated an uncanny partiality to the poor. Not one rich man or woman, and not one politician has been asked in front of a sharia judge to give an account of his or her stewardship. This dualisation of the impact of sharia (and the legal system’s contradistinction to both the constitution and the nation’s laws) seems not to be of concern to Aso Rock.
The picture is stark. Charlatanic anti-democrats are on the prowl, ready to pounce on anything for the generation of disorder. The nation is in thrall. But if nationals of the country sat around a table, they would determine the best way to live together. Where is rationale in those opposed to a national conference? How did a country achieve peace and prosperity merely by stating that Islam means peace and that Jesus Christ is the Prince of peace? Chief Obasanjo does not appear to be bothered by any of this. His singular concern at the moment is reelection. But unless rigging turns out next year to be a magic wand, the man’s quest will only speed up the sealing of the country’s doom because all it will achieve is the unwitting return of power to those who claim that it belongs to them as a divine right. It was because he properly read the movement of political transition that Vice President Atiku Abubakar boasted the other day that the north decides and will continue to decide the direction of Nigeria.
It is proper to call for the ditching of the liability that Obasanjo has since become. Baba Iyabo needs to return to his Ota farm. It is proper to abandon ethnic considerations and place in power someone who will be bold enough to gather our peoples together for a roundtable. Time is running out. The entire north contributes less than 5 percent to the wealth that keeps the clock of the Nigerian nation ticking. It makes unwarranted the fomentation of incessant upheavals by the terrorist fringe of this less than 5 percent. Abuja was not constructed with proceeds from groundnut and soybean cultivation. Yet, Obasanjo’s brand of politics has left Nigeria with a scandalous and untenable fait accompli in which terrorists and their manipulators dictate what goes and what goes not in the nation’s capital.
Nov 2002