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PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA
The Media And The Genocide In Jos
Most Nigerian media, the newspapers in particular, may have chosen to report it as anything but genocide against the so-called settler community of Jos, the capital of Plateau State, but that was plainly what the authorities in the state set out to achieve last Friday in the wake of the protests that greeted the local government elections in the State the day before.
The State's governor, retired Air Commodore David Jonah Jang, had always harboured deep hatred for the Hausa/Fulani who are predominantly Muslim. Jang is not alone among Northern minority Christian leaders who harbour such hatred arising from what they regard as a historical wrong done their forefathers by a colonial system that supported feudal rule in the North.
For Jang, this historical wrong took a personal dimension when he was retired in August 1990. This only seemed to have deepened his hatred towards the "hegemonists."
This much was obvious from a long interview he gave The Comet, since rested. The interview was published in its edition of November 12, 2000. Asked by the newspaper early in the interview if he had forgiven those who sacked him, he answered in the affirmative. However, everything he said thereafter betrayed a heart and mind full of venom and vengeance towards those he held responsible.
He was, he said, retired without any justification. "IBB (military president, General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida)," he said, "kicked me out of the service before his regime came to an end and I don’t know why I was kicked out till today and I have met him a few times after that and he has never told me why I was kicked out."
Jang was only one of 21 officers that were "kicked out" at the time, the majority of them Hausa/Fulani Muslims. Yet he seemed to have regarded this as a continuation of the historical wrong done his fore-fathers because they were different from those in authority in tongue and faith.
"Culturally, and all ways of our life", he said, "there is nothing common between us and our friends in the far-North". Then in what was clearly a gross misrepresentation of History, he claimed that Tin from Jos was used to develop Nigeria, presumably to the detriment of its indigenes to which he belongs.
"Tin, from Plateau State", he said, "was …used for running Nigeria as a whole…Yet somebody has the guts to tell me Sardauna trained me. Could he not have trained me?" Jang conveniently forgot to mention those who laboured to mine the tins. Of course he also forgot to mention the many other natural and agricultural commodities that were used to develop Nigeria.
It was the modern day discrimination against his people, he said, which has fuelled the determination of the minority elites like him to carve an identity for those in the Middle-Belt region different from that of the so-called far North.
This, he said, was why the Middle-Belt Forum had, among other things, erected sign posts with the inscription “This is the Middle-Belt region” all over the geographical zone it regarded as Middle-Belt. "We want," he said, "to consciensentise our own people to understand that they had their own identity separate from the North."
For Jang, the defining character of this identity was religion, specifically Christianity. Asked by The Comet if he accepted the Middle-Belt as coterminous with the North-Central Zone, he said no. "We have already stated what areas we consider the Middle-Belt which are Southern Kebbi, Southern Kaduna, Southern Borno, Southern Bauchi, Southern Gombe, Adamawa, Taraba, Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa, Kogi, the Federal Capital Territory, Kwara and Niger." These areas are either predominantly Christian or have significant Christian population.
The latest manifestation of his hatred for the Hausa Muslim emerged only last month when a delegation led by Lt-General T.Y. Danjuma met the Northern Governors Forum to submit the report of a successful seminar organised by Leadership on how to move the North forward out of its ingrained poverty and backwardness. The team was given 25 minutes to brief the Forum. Former civilian governor of Kano State, Alhaji Abubakar Rimi, was to brief it on human resource development and education, while Dr. Audu Ogbe, a former PDP chairman and a large scale farmer, was to give a briefing on agriculture, the region's mainstay. Finally, Malam Abba Kyari, former managing director of the United Bank for Africa, was to brief the Forum on micro-banking.
Before they could start, Jang launched a tirade against the team on why no one would want to invest in the North as long as people go about burning churches. Predictably the team was taken aback. Danjuma had to literally shut him up for waiving a hatchet that most people in the region have been trying hard to bury.
Back in 1986 when Jang was the military governor of Benue State, he had a show-down with the State's civil servants. He had unilaterally slashed their allowances, pleading lack of funds. The civil servants threatened to go on strike if he did not rescind the cuts. The press reported him as describing himself as a locomotive that was ready to "crush any obstacles" in his path if they carried out their threat.
They did, but inexplicably, Jang beat a retreat by rescinding the cuts. Twenty two years on last Friday, the locomotive Jang, now out of uniform and in mufti as the governor of his native Plateau State, felt no compunction in crushing what he saw as obstacles between him and his open agenda of riding the Middle-Belt in general, Plateau and its capital, Jos, in particular, of its so-called settler elements.
The opportunity was, of course, the local government elections of last Thursday. All indications were that the ruling PDP was heading for a landslide defeat in Jos North Local Government to the opposition ANPP when the State Electoral Commission shifted the venue of collating the results out of the Secretariat to a location outside Jos. It did so twice before it finally announced that PDP had won on Friday morning.
Predictably, the ANPP protested. This provided Jang the opportunity he had always wanted to deal with the so-called settler community. As had been the case in previous riots in 2001 and 2004, the authorities claimed that the opposition had imported armed thugs from neighbouring states and from as far away as Niger Republic and Chad.
So far, they have not provided evidence to support their claims. Yet, as usual, the majority of the Nigerian media, in whose eyes the Hausa/Fulani are always the villains of the piece, have sheepishly echoed these claims.
Thisday on Sunday, (November 30, 2008), for example, said it "gathered that security operatives yesterday intercepted about 500 men armed with weapons on their way to Jos. Thisday could not however, verify the figure." Thisday's insinuation was obvious; it believed the settler-community did import armed thugs, only it couldn’t verify how many they were.
Tribune was worse. Without any equivocation it claimed the so-called settler community were the aggressors. Its edition of December 1 carried the banner headline "Plateau poll crisis latest: People still trapped in Churches." Then it followed with two riders, one about the Christian Association of Nigeria calling for a 3-day prayer and fasting, the other about the Action Congress calling for cancellation of the election.
The newspaper quoted the chairman of the Plateau State Chapter of CAN, Archbishop Ignatius Kaigama, as saying Churches and Christian property were attacked and that the attacks themselves were "carefully planned and executed." No where in its entire report was there any word about the other side of the story.
Yet the newspaper itself, like almost all the other newspapers carried pictures of the charred remains of over 1000 vehicles at a second-hand car depot burnt along Zaria Road on the outskirts of the town. Not surprisingly, most newspapers chose not to identify the owner.
The owner, Alhaji Haruna Musa Adamu, was lucky he escaped alive. Several children in at least two Islamiya schools in the town were not so lucky; they were burnt alive. Most newspapers did not think this outrage was worth a mention.
By the time the dust settled on Sunday, the dead among the Hausa had reached over 400, according to the Red Cross and some of the global media like the BBC, the VOA and Deutche Welle. By Tuesday you would still search in vain in our newspapers for the scale of killings in Jos that was carried on in the name of religion and tribe.
Clearly, what has informed the editorial judgement of most of these newspapers is their prejudice against the "Hausa". The reports were also clearly informed by the assumption that the so-called settler community have no right to aspire to political leadership outside their ancestral homes. This explains why there were no reports about the local government elections themselves.
Yet, only last month, following President-elect Barak Obama's victory in America's presidential elections, these same newspapers were pontificating about the beauty of how a first generation American can run for the country's presidency.
In the words of Tribune on November 4, the very day of America's presidential election, "The fact that a first generation American, who is the son of a Kenyan father and an American woman is running for the American presidency – the most powerful office in the world – is a great credit to the American system."
Yet in the eyes of Tribune and others like it that carried on about how wonderful America is as a democracy, there was nothing wrong with massacring people for no worse crime than wanting to chose who they believe should be the chairman of a local government where they are in the majority.
Nigeria is of course, not America. In any case it has taken America more than two centuries for a half-black to become its president. Even then that does not mean the end of racism in the country.
However, even though Nigeria is not America, we cannot hope to end the ethnic and religious bigotry that has bedevilled our politics if our media persist in telling only one side of a story.
In May 1992 when the Zangon Kataf ethno-religious riots broke out following the earlier one in February, most of the media portrayed it as a one-sided pre-meditated genocide against Christians in Kaduna. Among the newsmagazines, Citizen which I managed, stood out almost alone in reporting both sides of the story. In our edition of May 25, we gave a graphic account of how it all started in Zangon-Kataf on a Friday and how it spilled over into Kaduna the following Sunday. We reported how a “well armed Kataf army” set upon the “Hausa” community in Kataf on Friday and how the following Sunday “a young Hausa mob and their allies armed ... with knives, clubs, cutlasses and Dane guns ... began to hunt down “Katafawas”, in Kaduna and Zaria, among other places.
We interviewed community and religious leaders of both sides and quoted them extensively in our report. Yet the Lagos based Media Review, which is a media watchdog, singled us out for attack as telling only one side of the story. We could as well have titled our cover story “Zangon-Kataf crisis: The Hausa view point”, said the magazine.
Our crime, as I said in my reaction to its editor-in-chief, my good friend, Lanre Idowu, seemed to be that we refused to join others in telling only the Christian side of the story.
Nothing appears to have changed since then.
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