PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Still On The Media And The Genocide In Jos

I am tempted this morning to reproduce an article I wrote on these pages almost exactly four years ago this week on the subject of “Politicians, press and the indigene/settler question.” One source of the temptation was the reactions my column of last week provoked from readers. At the time of writing this piece I had received 246 texts from the readers of The Nation and another 311 from those of Daily Trust.

Another source of temptation was the challenge from several of my respondents, notably Garba Deen Muhammad, author of the BarkByte column in Sunday Trust, that, beyond talking about the media bias against the so-called Hausa and about Governor Jonah Jang’s hatred for these same Hausa, I should have suggested solutions.

I may yet succumb to this temptation to reproduce the article. This morning, however, I have decided to deal with the readers who said I have no moral right to criticize the Nigerian media, the press in particular, for being generally anti-“Hausa” and anti Muslim because I have never condemned Muslims’ acts of violence against non-Muslims.

The majority of the over 550 texts I received were hostile, some of them spewing pure hatred, not towards me as such because they did not know me as a person, but towards what they apparently believed I represented.

One not-so-hostile reader said I was an “educated illiterate”. Another said I was an “almajiri” columnist. Several others said I was a fool and a terrorist.

For pure venom, however, the text that took the cake was the one that said I was a “BASTARD CONCEIVED from a busted CONDOM” for criticizing Governor David Jonah Jang. Not since one reader cursed me and my progeny in possibly the foulest Hausa imaginable because of my article criticizing the way our First Lady, Turai, was seen to have dabbled in matters of state, have I seen such venom.

Even then I was more amused by it than angry. In my amusement, however, I felt despondent. Despondent because the text typified the way emotion appears to have completely trumped reason in the politics of this country making it virtually impossible to talk ourselves out of the crises of nationhood.

For this I still say the politicians are to blame. But even more to blame are the media and the clergy – both Muslim and Christian – because the one is supposed to be society’s watchdog and the other its conscience. Both have largely failed in carrying out their roles in eliminating violence from our politics.

The other day the Catholic archbishop of Abuja and President of Christian Association of Nigeria, Archbishop John Onaiyekan, issued a terse statement describing the killing of three Youth Corpers during the violence as “evil”. The violence in Jos, he said, had nothing to do with religion, Islam or Christianity. I couldn’t agree more; religion has merely been used to camouflage the fight for power and resources among politicians.

Onaiyekan is a highly respected and highly principled man of God. Precisely because of that I expected him to express the same anger over the cold-blooded murder and maiming of innocent children at an Islamic school during the same riot.

It is, I believe, the lack of even-handedness in reporting and condemning political violence that camouflages as religious violence by both the media and the clergy which is the greatest obstacle against the emergence of democracy in Nigeria.

Many of my respondents said as a journalist I was the least qualified to criticize the media for being instinctively and congenitally anti-“Hausa” and anti-Muslim because I have never condemned Muslim violence against Christians. Nothing could be further from the truth.

True, as a Muslim, I inevitably see things from an Islamic point of view and tend to be more tolerant of wrongs committed by fellow Muslims. This is only natural and human. What would not be natural or human is to turn a blind eye on such wrongs. As a journalist and columnist I have not done so.

Those who say I have obviously have only been selective in reading my reports and articles. Anyone who has read everything I have written would agree that I have been as critical of Muslims – perhaps even more so – as I have been of Christians for their various roles in the political-cum-religious violence in the country.

When, for example, the Danish cartoon riots broke out in Nigeria in February 2006, I said on these pages on March 1 that the Muslim leadership should have condemned it unequivocally. “The killings of Christians and Igbo in several towns in the North starting from Maiduguri, the Borno State Capital, on February 18”, I said, “should have been condemned in the strongest language by every right thinking Nigerian, but especially by the Muslim leadership. Sadly such unequivocal condemnation was left to the secular leadership of the equally secular Arewa Consultative Forum. As its Chairman, Chief Sunday Awoniyi said in a statement the ACF issued on February 20, the killings and burning of churches were “‘most despicable, thoroughly condemnable and totally unacceptable.’”

Again, when some obviously badly brought up students of a secondary school in Gombe State lynched one of their teachers, Mrs. Oluwatoyin Olusesan in mid-March last year for allegedly desecrating the Qur’an, I condemned the act as “inexcusable” on these pages on April 4. “The fact,” I said, “is that Mrs. Olusesan’s murder starkly represents a failure of the Muslim leadership and parenthood to inculcate the virtues of tolerance in the generality of their followers and children.”

“The Qur’an”, I also said, ‘is categorical and unequivocal about the evil of jungle justice. Chapter Six Verse 151 of the holy book says, among other things, ‘Take not life, which God has made sacred, except by way of justice and law’. Mrs. Olusesan’s death was anything but just and lawful.”

The fact, however, is that no religion or ideology or tribe has a monopoly of vice or virtue. Just as there are good and bad Muslims there are also good and bad Christians. Also just as there are good and bad “Hausa” there are also good and bad non-“Hausa”.

However, the way the Nigerian media, which is predominantly Christian owned and controlled, have reported political violence in this country you would think there are no good Muslims or good “Hausa”. You will also think no innocent Muslims oor “Hausa” have ever been killed or their mosques and property destroyed in such violence.

The stock-in-trade of politicians the world over is to exploit and manipulate divisions in society to gain power. Good politicians show restrain in their struggle by respecting constitutional, legal and conventional rules for power struggle. Bad politicians don’t. Nigeria, it seems, has a preponderance of the bad. Which is all the more reason why the media and the clergy must keep faith with their responsibility to tell truth to their readers and to their flock, especially those of them that are political leaders.

One truth the media and the clergy must preach – in so far as truth is the basis of justice which, in turn, is the basis of peace and progress – is that the dichotomy between indigeneship and settlership is false for the simple reason that everyone, in the end, is a settler. In any case, the dichotomy is undesirable and unhelpful because no society which is insular can ever hope to make progress.

On this issue, it is hard to imagine a sharper contrast between the position of PUNCH in the wake of the May 2004 Yelwan Shendam killings in Plateau and that of the defunct Comet, the progenitor of The Nation.

Whereas The Comet (June 21, 2004) tried to rationalize the killings by pandering to the popular belief that in spite of the creation of states, what it called “the settler-class” has continued to load and lord it over the “aborigine,” PUNCH (June 23 2004) took the sensible position that “All Nigerians should be able to feel at home in any part of the country with their political and other rights fully guaranteed.”

The problem, said PUNCH, was that while the Constitution sought to guarantee these rights based on residency it contradicted itself by institutionalizing quota system based on state of origin.

In principle PUNCH was right – up to a point. Depending on how you implement quota, the two, i.e. merit and quota, are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Quota is self-defeating only if it ignores a well-defined minimum standard. It is the widespread neglect by the authorities of such minimum standard in implementing quota that has given the principle a bad name.

Governor Jang, as I tried to show last week, has never hidden his belief that the so-called Hausa settlers in Plateau State, especially those in Jos, his home town, have no right to aspire to anything other than second class citizenship in the state, indeed in his version of the Middle-Belt defined as a Christian enclave.

It is, I repeat, the responsibility of the Christian clergy and of the media, regardless of who owns and controls them, to tell people like Jang that this is simply not acceptable in a world where no tribe or religion can be an island unto itself.