Before the Law: Obasanjo and the Aberration of Nigeria's Sexual Taliban
By
Obiwu Iwuanyanwu
About 1887, a man from Ikenne, in Yorubaland of South
Western Nigeria, was convicted and sentenced to death
for committing adultery with the wife of an Ijebu Ode
prince. Without waiting for the consent of the Awujale
(the authorizing superior chieftain) as prescribed by
law, Awolowo, the stubborn president of the governing
Iwarefa executive council of Oshugbo House ordered the
execution of the convict. The affronted Awujale got
Balogun Kuku (general of the army) to dispatch a
punitive expedition, which had the Iledi of Ikenne
completely burnt and the Iwarefa authority abrogated.
Iwarefa Awolowo ran away to Ilishan. Awolowo was the
grandfather of the late Nigerian politician, Obafemi
Awolowo, and a kinsman of the current Nigerian
president, Olusegun Obasanjo. The man whose instant
death he ordered was his own cousin (Awolowo, Awo,
1960: 19-20). We were never told what happened to the
woman with whom the man was said to have committed the
adultery.
During the 1966 Nigerian genocide against the Igbo,
thousands of Igbo women and children were raped and
murdered by rampaging Northern Nigerians all over the
cities and bushes of the North. The Nigerian military
government headed by Jack Yakubu Gowon, and the
Northern Nigerian government under the direction of
Usman Katsina and the Islamic partriarch, Aminu Kano,
spurred on the atrocities. Throughout the consequent
civil war between 1967 and 1970, Nigerian soldiers
abducted, assaulted, raped, and killed thousands of
Igbo women and children. The story was the same
through all the Biafran towns of Eastern Nigeria, from
Anioma across the River Niger under the supervision of
Murtala Mohammed and Captain Ibrahim Taiwo, to Port
Harcourt on the Atlantic coast under the command of
Benjamin Adekunle and Olusegun Obasanjo. Up till today
the Nigerian government has neither accepted
responsibility nor held anyone accountable for the
horrendous acts (Okocha, Blood on the Niger, 1994;
Iloegbunam, Ironside, 1999).
At the end of the civil war on January 14, 1970, a
young Igbo woman of about 22 ran to the safety net of
Obasanjo's entourage, which was on its way to Lagos
for the formal surrender of the Republic of Biafra.
Shockingly, Obasanjo boastfully cites his most
deplorable war crime to the Ohanaeze Youth Council or
Igbo Think Thank as evidence of his love of the Igbo
people just to score cheap political point (Vanguard,
June 2002; Iloegbunam, Vanguard July 9, 2002). It is
rather disturbing that Ghali Umar Na'Abba (speaker of
Nigeria's House of Representatives) and Wumi Akintinde
(former staff of Nigeria's ministry of defense
headquarters) have both called Obasanjo's mental
stability to question (Edemodu, The Guardian, July 7,
2002; Akintinde, Nigeria World, August 30, 2002).
Could it be that Obasanjo just shed human blood on
purely infantilist braggadocio? Obasanjo has never
bothered to find out what the alleged "molestation" or
"assault" was for which he had a junior colleague
brutally wasted. No questions have ever been asked by
the Nigerian authorities under which both Obasanjo and
the soldier served. Obasanjo has never explained what
messianic delusion granted him the power of life and
death over the fallibilities of lesser mortals.
During the 2002 World Population Day celebration,
Obasanjo's minister of women affairs and youth
development, Aisha Isma'il, spoke of her desire to
recommend death sentence for convicted sex offenders
in the Nigerian Children's Bill. According to Isma'il:
"If they have been raping adults not children, well
one can grudgingly understand but not so with
three-year olds, it boils down to our journey from our
immediate past, when laws were not enforced . I say
that such animalistic behavior should not be used as
an excuse . Ours is a praying nation, but sins are
committed everywhere in the country" (Vanguard, July
15, 2002). In a backwater society severely detached
from the emergent DNA scientific tradition, Minister
Isma'il does not say how the Obasanjo government could
prove that the potential victims of Nigeria's
death-chamber are, beyond every shade of doubt, guilty
of the sexual offenses for which they must die.
One may need to ask Isma'il if those to be killed will
include the Nigerian soldiers who committed crimes
against humanity on the orders of Obasanjo in November
1999, by raping women, killing one thousand civilians,
and destroying the town of Odi in the Niger Delta? Ten
of those women have just gone to court to claim
damages for their violation, and the atrocities at Odi
are part of the charges for the current impeachment
proceedings against Obasanjo by the National Assembly.
As in the earlier case of Awolowo, the lawmakers'
spokesman, Farouk Lawan, says that Obasanjo
"authorized the deployment of military troops to Odi
to massacre innocent citizens without recourse to the
National Assembly" (Associated Press, September 4,
2002). More than ten thousand people have been killed
since Obasanjo's second coming to power on May 29,
1999, prompting the World Organization Against Torture
to call on the United Nations and Commonwealth
ministers to investigate his government's role in
Nigeria's ethnic and religious clashes.
Ironically, the same Muslim Aisha Isma'il is at the
head of a Nigerian women's campaign agitating in the
media for the release of Amina Lawal from the clutches
of a stoning death before a cavalier Islamic court of
Northern Nigeria. Obasanjo himself, the executive
president of the most notable black nation in the
world, has continued to equivocate on the serious
issue of freeing an innocent woman from the criminal
laws of rapacious men. Obasanjo, the "popularly
elected" president, has graciously offered to "weep"
for Amina Lawal in the event of her impending death by
stoning. Obasanjo has about sixteen "wives" and over
thirty children, and some of Amina Lawal's judges have
at least four wives each and harems of concubines.
Amina Lawal will be stoned to death for responding to
her maternal instinct and having only one "fatherless"
child to show for her pains. All she will get from
President Obasanjo for whom she cast her electoral
vote for security and happiness under a democratic
government is a slimy bout of useless tears.
Obasanjo has a historical affinity with the villainous
past of South Western Nigeria's sexual Taliban of
Awolowo, Adekunle, and Taiwo. Isma'il and the Islamic
judges have a historical affinity with the villainous
past of Northern Nigeria's sexual Taliban of Aminu
Kano, Gowon, Usman Katsina, and Murtala Mohammed. What
could be the pseudo-logic of the lip service that
Obasanjo and his ministers are paying to the urgent
need to free Amina Lawal from the blood-lusting jaws
of Islamic extremists? That Obasanjo committed murder
when he was an Ogun worshiping primitive soldier, long
before he became a life-affirming "born-again"
civilian president? That they only thought that
alleged sexual offenders deserved summary execution,
while the absolute powers of phallocratic religious
zealots in a kangaroo court are delimited in passing
judgments on adulterous women? How is the crime of
Amina Lawal's assailants different from the crimes of
Adekunle, Awolowo, Gowon, Aminu Kano, Usman Katsina,
Murtala Mohammed, Obasanjo, and Taiwo? How is the god
of Awolowo and Obasanjo different from the god of
Isma'il and Islamic extremists, since their bestial
gods have decreed the brutish death of powerless "sex
offenders" in the hands of the powerful sex police of
rabid religions?
For the first time in the history of modern Nigeria,
some Northern Nigerian Islamic fundamentalist male
judges are following on the infamous pattern of
Obasanjo, the South Western Nigerian "born-again"
Christian male president. They have conspired to
execute an increasing number of vulnerable men and
women all over Northern Nigeria on exhibitionist
charges of rape and adultery. The cases are never
fully investigated and the accused are not allowed
full rights of attorney to defend themselves. Amina
Lawal, a thirty-year old divorced woman whose infant
child is presently sucking at her heaving breasts,
could be their first victim. Could they have already
started picking and piling the stones with which to
crush Amina Lawal's baby girl as soon as she is old
enough to nurse every woman's feeling for which her
poor mother presently sprawls on Katsina's Funtua
death row? They have not bothered to explain who is
responsible for Amina Lawal's pregnancy outside
wedlock for which she is to die a stoning death. What
will happen to the father of the unfortunate child
while its mother is languishing unto death has not
figured in their fanatical equation. Is this Sharia
Act's irrationality not typical of "born-again"
President Obasanjo's vision and practice of democracy?
That was how they had gone to Judah, and said to him,
"'Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of
prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.'
Judah said, 'Bring her out and have her burned to
death!' As she was being brought out, she sent a
message to her father-in-law. 'I am pregnant by the
man who owns these,' she said. And she added, 'See if
you recognize whose seal and cord and staff these
are.' Judah recognized them and said, 'She is more
righteous than I, since I wouldn't give her to my son
Shelah.' And he did not sleep with her again" (Genesis
38: 24-26). Dare Judah own up to prostituting before
Tamar? Dare he submit to the public shame and cringing
suffering of the burning death to which he would in a
flourish put his helpless daughter-in-law? Again, they
went to Jesus and said, "'Teacher, this woman was
caught in the act of adultery. In the Law Moses (and
Mohammed) commanded us to stone such women. Now what
do you say?' . But Jesus bent down and started to
write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on
questioning him, he straightened up and said to them,
'If any one of you is without sin, let him be the
first to throw a stone at her.' Again he stooped down
and wrote on the ground. At this, those who heard
began to go away one at a time, the older ones first,
until only Jesus was left, with the woman still
standing there" (John 8: 3-9).
In the archetypal plot popularized by Shirley
Jackson's 1948 tragic thriller, "The Lottery," a
woman, that ubiquitous representation of the maligned
and marginalized minority, has once again drawn the
winning ticket in a masculine game of death. Thus,
when the American National Organization of Women
exhorts Nigeria that "Rocks are for gardens, not to
hurt women," they need to know that Nigeria has always
been a jungle where the strongest survives. When the
United Nations Development Fund for Women calls on
Nigeria's federal government to save its citizens from
legal abuse, they should know that the Northern
Nigerian Sharia apostles are only the latest in a
debased phallocentric tradition of dominance. When Dan
Isaacs bewails that "Nigeria's federal government .
has done little to directly challenge them or overturn
them" (BBC News, August 29, 2002), the international
community should rightly feel scandalized for their
role in foisting on Nigerians a man whose antecedents
have long been universally known to nourish nothing
but callous decadence.
How else should one read the fact that Obasanjo
disappeared from Johannesburg just before his
appointed meeting on Wednesday, September 4, with
Norwegian prime minister, Kjell Magne Bondevik? Why is
it that after Bondevik squeezed out time from his
crowded program at the world Earth Summit tracking
Obasanjo on the global telephone network, the Nigerian
president could not make a firm commitment deserving
of one head of government to another on freeing Amina
Lawal? (Lundgaard and Tisdall, Aftenposten, September
4, 2002). How is Obasanjo's action different from that
of the late Nigerian dictator, Sani Abacha, who after
reassuring former South African President Nelson
Mandela, proceeded to execute Ken Saro-Wiwa and the
Ogoni eight as Commonwealth leaders were meeting in
Auckland, New Zealand, in 1995? As Obasanjo's army did
in Odi, Abacha's soldiers had despoiled South Eastern
Nigerian Ogoniland, raping women and children, killing
the elderly, and driving the young they could not kill
into exile. As Awolowo had done in Ikene, Abacha
executed the "Ogoni nine" in total disregard of the
thirty-day period of appeal as allowed by law
(Saro-Wiwa, A Month and a Day, 1995; Wiwa, In the
Shadow of a Saint, 2000; Okonta and Douglas, Where
Vultures Feast, 2001).
In short, when young Nigerians, like Tokunbo
Awoshakin, Okezie Chukwumerije, Tonye David-West, and
Faruk Sarkinfada, are forced to abandon their daily
choirs to theorize on the sudden resurrection of the
NOK Culture or Stone Age Modernity in Northern
Nigeria, what they are saying is that the Stone Age
"born again" weeping President Olusegun Obasanjo
belongs in a maximum stonewall jail where he had been
or mental asylum where he should be or anywhere but
the Aso Rock Presidential Villa, Abuja.
Why are the Islamic extremists of Northern Nigeria
following the aberrant career of Obasanjo to pour
their seeds on the Sahara Desert where they shrink and
shrivel and die in hot sands? What is the mystical
handwriting on the ground? Do they think the line in
the sand will wash away with the web of sand dunes? It
sinks in the ground and corrodes the earth. It
permeates and simmers and bids its time. What
Nigeria's sexual Talibans are about to do to Amina
Lawal - what they did to thousands of Igbo women and
children for which the North and their Southern
accomplices have remained cursed - is such that will
wipe out a whole generation. How many stones can they
throw on the frazzled flesh and broken bones of a
fallen woman? And how would they stifle the ringing
strain of her haunting voice that will stick to their
brains and stand in the storm of rage over their heads
and that of their children and children's children
like the unhurried and yet inimitable Northern Star?
Nnamdi Azikiwe, the Ahmadu Bello-acknowledged father
of our dream Nigeria, once cited the immortal verse of
Claude McKay that I paraphrase here. Before the Stone
Age lawlessness of Obasanjo; before the reckless
bloodlust of the Sharia Act; before the eyes of the
watching world, the eyes of Amina Lawal's infant
child, and the eyes of the rest of us; before the then
and now and the future continuous of many more
inventions imaginable and unimaginable of all evil
regimes everywhere; before and behind and beyond the
law of seal and cord and staff, lies the open grave.