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Road
to “State of By Abdulrazaque Bello-Barkindo Without
doubt our country is seriously divided on many issues. We are divided on
Sharia, on capital punishment and on the safety and security of our
fellow citizens. Yes, we may have ignored the reality because only our
neighbours have fallen victim to robbers; and not us. But another kind
of thief is now on the prowl. This one, with mere word of mouth, takes
away our hard earned freedom of deciding where to live. We
are divided on that decision as well. When Governor Joshua Dariye rode
his Trojan ego on the road to the “state of emergency”, not many
predicted where it would land him. Like a drunken sailor, Dariye threw
caution to the winds. Having spent more time in Naturally,
what followed was a concert of opinions on the president’s action.
Imposing a state of emergency on the plateau, many argue, is wrong. But
if it is wrong, what is right? Not
a single critic of the president has suggested any sensible alternative
to the president’s panic action. We had on our hands a total collapse
of law and order in a densely populated, multicultural and
multi-religious region and a governor who cared less. While
in the past President Obasanjo had been exhorting the citizenry to be
tolerant of one another and law abiding at all times, we fell into a
ditch where the chief security officer of a state was holding court with
utmost lack of moderation. It is wrong that Muslims are for- and
Christians are against- the president’s action, because it sought to
protect, they say, the interests of only Muslims, but how do they expect
a father to intervene in a fight where five huge brothers of the same
mother are lynching two skinny adopted children, all of the same family?
Without any hinge of remorse, I say that imposing a state of
emergency in plateau was right, to the extent that moderation and
enlightenment had taken flight and given way to extremism even within
the corridors of state power. If
the governor himself had adopted these simple principles of moderation
and enlightenment, we may have been reading a different story in our
media. These are but words, but they carry great weight because they
form the fulcrum of democracy. A moderate person avoids extremes and is
temperate in conduct and expression especially when he occupies an
important political position. An enlightened person is well-informed,
knowledgeable and free from prejudice. Dariye is neither. He
made his bed, he is lying in it! Why should we sympathise with a
governor who aimlessly groups some of his voters along with Al Qaida? It
is a pity that every attempt to inculcate the virtues of tolerance and
moderation in our body politic is not getting anywhere. It is even more
disheartening that not just the madding crowd but an important segment
of our political elite, especially those who derive their powers from a
clumsy hand-in-glove favour with the religious elite now spearhead the
violence and publicly display their intolerance towards others. Unless
such people expunge their prejudices, the goal of attaining unity among
Nigerians will remain a pipe dream. We
have seen in Bauchi how Rev Yakubu Pam was termed an idiot by President
Obasanjo for his intolerance just as the JNI Secretary Abdulazeez Yusuf
made a fool of himself by his utterances; asking Obasanjo if he really
wanted to bring peace to the nation. Short of saying that the two
religious leaders were playing to the gallery, they also consider the
tenets of moderation and enlightenment an antithesis of their religious
doctrines. These are people who should, without any prodding, help the
nation achieve its much desired peace and unity. They might have in
their preaching in the past paid lip-service to peaceful co-existence
but on that day, they publicly showed that they were loose and misguided
extremists. Their flocks were certainly without their herdsmen. And
since they were recognised leaders of some kind, it becomes obvious why
intolerance permeates the rungs and cadres of our society at all levels. The
question is what to do with such evil “men of God?” We must stop
them! Since 1984 no one has dared to curb the excesses of religious
leaders, Christian or Muslim. Their numbers are not only multiplying in
geometric proportion, but their excesses are becoming more heinous.
Worse still, they are being lapped up by successive governments for
reasons that are more un-Godly than evil can be. The result of this is
that just as razaque
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