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The Plateau Christian Elders Forum, a Rejoinder By Umar Bello
In the wake of the carnage perpetrated in Jos and environs, the Plateau State Christian Elders Consultative Forum, true to type, has cast away its cassock and donned that of sheer ethnicity to organize a press conference in Abuja with the sole purpose of accusing the GOC 3rd Armored Division, Jos, Major General Saleh Maina with his ‘all-Muslim’ Patrol team of genocide and ‘the well acclaimed Islamic Jihadist Channel’, the Aljazira TV Channel of partiality. A section of the Nigerian press gleefully foregrounds these outrageous claims, while at the same time blanks out the Kuru Karama genocide.
The contents of the press release and the clear intentions of the conference, to all discerning minds, betray a guilt crisis or at least an attempt to offer trumped up crime symmetry against the Hausa and Fulani to balance the heinous crimes they know they have committed. In essence, the hidden moral expected to be believed here is: It is not only us who have perpetrated genocide but also the Hausa and Fulani. The timing of the conference coming just after the Kuru-Karama genocide where women, babies and children were butchered with the tacit approval of the governor who has shown both in action and words that the Hausa and Fulani are game was not accidental but deliberate, to diminish their savagery to the world theatre through making the genocide appear mutual.
The conference again came when the whole world has come to realize how a police commissioner sitting on his butts not venturing to investigate a reported fray was given a script to announce to the world regarding the genesis of the crisis as a pretext to organize one of the most heinous genocides against women and children in Nigeria. The accusation against Maina is here to impute a constructed equilibrium of their persistent use of the police and other security apparatus in that state to kill the people and destroy their wealth to the Hausa and Fulani. Hear them: “We hereby call on our respected Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan, the National Assembly and the UN to investigate Major General Maina and let him face charges of genocide in an international court of justice” Easy to say, but this tepid lie cannot counterpoise the fact that Jang and his henchmen have bluntly maintained the Hitleric view that they are on a mission for ethnic promotion or at least they are fighting what they regard as ‘internal colonialism’, and we all have seen the result of this struggle, just for this late crisis, in Kuru Karama, in Du (right in front of Jang’s house) and inside Jos.
They continued: “Only yesterday, 23rd January, 2010, a young boy was gunned in front of his house by members of this all muslim army patrol team” The world may not be aware of a boy killed probably by stray bullet, but it is quite aware of how some police and ethnic militia, armed to the teeth, descended on a village killing all the people they could lay their hands on including babies below the age of one as reported by Andrew Simmons of the Aljazira. This fact was corroborated by Corinne Dufka of the Human Rights Watch. And I don’t think this shameless clergy that went to Abuja to stand the truth on its head are more Christian than either Dufka or Simmons.
The killing persistently going on in Plateau has been programmed by the Plateau political elite who feel that their relevance thrives on such racist intolerance and the genocidaires (Birom et al) have been desensitized to the fact that they are on a ‘noble’ mission. Their victims (the Hausa and Fulani) have not only been grossly discredited, but they have been reified (thought of as things or animals) to be killed, destroyed and discarded. Little wonder that the Hutus in Rwanda tagged their enemies, the Tutsi, ‘cockroaches’ that need to be ‘fumigated’ and Hitler saw the Jews as ‘sub human’ deserving total annihilation.
But at the heart of any genocide or a genocidaire is a personality anxiety, a feeling of inferiority or insecurity or that of awe or of his bertenoire race. As far as the Birom are concerned, the Hausa and Fulani represent all the lofty ideals they ache for, yet are unable to attain: prosperity, entrepreneurship and communal integration. Where individual drive should be pursued, they feel that ethnic expansionism and municipal benefits are all the shortcuts they need to worldly achievement. Thus, success is measured by the stamp of Birom heritage or an indigene certificate and what manna it can shower from the Plateau heaven. When Nyerere talks about the whites going to the moon while the Africans are still going back to the villages, it is like he had the Jang’s Biroms in mind. In these days of globalization and ethnic shedding, in these days when the world has become a melting pot, and in these days when people struggle to make something worthwhile for their lives through hard work and industry, we still have people who feel that their success is tethered to the benefits accruable to being indigenes of a locality or a state or the amount of ‘settlers’ they push out! There is no society in the whole world that has developed through exclusivity and without receptivity of the different strata of the human race .
In conclusion, the reality remains that ethnic narcissism has no boundaries, and when the chips are down it goes down and down to its logical conclusion, selfishness (each to his family or each to himself). If the Hausa Fulani today are no more a factor in Plateau, the Biroms will suddenly remember how ‘phenomenally different’ they are from the Afizeres or the Anagutas or the Bogghoms etc. This reality has already been echoed by Jang who has made it clear that Plateau, consisting of more than forty ethnic groups, belongs to the Birom. The theatre of distrust and clannishness needs no more momentum and could be endless. The game will again begin and begin again, until the reality we all appear not to notice stares us starkly and belatedly in the face so long as genocidaires like Jang stay in power. |