PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Jos Christmas Eve Bombings: A Dangerous Novelty

ndajika@yahoo.com

The Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Azubuike Ihejirike, called it an act of terrorism. The Governor of Plateau State, Da Jonah Jang, called it a “black Christmas.” As expressions of outrage at the bombs that went off in several overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, Christian neighbourhoods in Jos, the state capital, on Christmas eve, these words of the army chief and the governor couldn’t have been more restrained. For, few things could be more barbaric than killing innocent people by whatever means during a season of peace and goodwill like Christmas.

As things turned out 32 people died from the bombings and 74 more were injured, according to official figures. These, for all you know, may be understatements.

As if these bombings were not terrible enough, Churches and congregations in far away Borno State were attacked on Christmas day itself and several Christians, including a pastor, were killed, allegedly, by the now infamous Boko Haram sect. Understandably these less dramatic and rather limited attacks have received less media attention than the Jos bombings.  

Since then there has been the predictable reprisal killings and destruction of property in Jos. Both The Nation and Daily Sun yesterday quoted the Deputy Director of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Mr. Daniel Balarabe Gambo, as putting the figures of the dead and injured at 80 and 189 respectively.

These killings and destruction went on in spite of a passionate appeal by the governor against revenge killings and in spite of the presence of well armed officers and men of the Special Task Force (STF) that have been deployed since the 2008 mayhem to maintain peace in the troubled state.

“My fellow citizens,” the governor had said in a media broadcast following the Christmas eve bombings, “this, no doubt, is a black Christmas for us on the Plateau when we should be celebrating peace. The aim of the mastermind is to pit Christians against Muslims and spark off another round of violence that will eventually culminate in the scuttling of the on-going electioneering campaign...We the peace-loving citizens, however, must rise in unison as one people and say no to violence and bloodshed.”

The governor’s speech was clearly a pleasant and welcome departure from his reactions to previous breakouts of violence in the state. At those times he sounded more as a governor for a section of the state rather than the governor for all its citizens. Alas, his appeal fell on deaf ears. Either those who went on the revenge killings didn’t believe the governor meant his words about keeping the peace or they were simply too angry at the barbarity of the Christmas eve bombings to listen to anyone.

Either way chances that permanent peace will break out on the Plateau even in the distant future, never mind anytime soon, has receded even further.

Meantime Nigerians are sure to be inundated with all sorts of theories about who and what are behind the bombings and the revenge killings. One theory by the army chief, General Ihejirika, is the failure of intelligence. “The (STF) operation,” he said while speaking to the press in Port Harcourt on Christmas day, “was launched to stem the ethno-religious crises but the use of bombs is the new dimension to it. This is why I said we need to enhance intelligence operations.”

This position was echoed by the spokesman of the STF, Captain Charles Nweocha. “We,” a News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) dispatch quoted him as saying, “have always advised that people should report any strange movement around them but no one is doing that. There is a gap and we must work together to bridge it.”

Another theory is that is it essentially power politics. The Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Muhammadu Abubakar, apparently subscribes to this theory. “I think,” he said in a Boxing Day interview with the press at Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos, “we should blame the political class for getting us to this stage because it was not like this before.”

The Sultan may have exaggerated a bit; military regimes have had their own fair share of ethno-religious violence, most notably the Igbo pogrom of 1966 which led to a three-year civil war in 1967. Even then, except for the civil war, the Sultan is essentially right to say there has been more of such violence under men in mufti than under men in uniform. According to the then Minister of Defence, Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, in a speech at a workshop on conflict management at the Nigerian Defence Academy, Kaduna, in 2005, between the big Ijaw/Itsekiri conflict in Warri in 1999 and the Jos “indigene/settler” killings in 2004, Nigeria had witnessed 47 ethno-religious conflicts. A more thorough Professor Jonah Elaigwu, who runs a think tank on conflict management in Jos – no irony intended – listed 140 such conflicts in his paper at the same workshop.

Of course failure of intelligence and power hungry politics are not the only theories often advanced as explanation for the depth and scope of ethno-religious conflicts we have witnessed since 1999. There is the conventional theory of poverty and unemployment which has, no doubt, provided the political class with cannon fodder to feed their ambitions.

Of all these, and possibly other, explanations, however, none is as valid as our power hungry politics. Poverty and unemployment may provide politicians with ready, and often willing, tools to fight their wars, but the twin are more of remote, albeit deeper, causes than intelligence failure and the blind ambitions of our politicians.

Intelligence failure, on its part, is a weaker explanation for political violence in the country than the blind ambitions of our politicians. Truth be told, where there has been intelligence failure it has been less for lack of information than due to the desire of politicians in power to ignore or misuse available information for their own end – with, of course, a times active and a times reluctant connivance of the intelligence outfits.

The most glaring example of such misuse of intelligence was the crude attempt by President Goodluck Jonathan, no less, to pin the Independence Day bombing in Abuja by the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) on his political opponents. The attempt failed woefully.

Now there is a distinct possibility that the Jos Christmas eve bombings will be seized upon as yet another opportunity to blame political opponents for violent conflicts rather than see it as an opportunity to seek for permanent peace in the troubled state.

Governor Jang may have meant his appeal to victims of the bombings to eschew reprisals but some of the people around him seemed to have already made up their minds about who the culprits are. There is the danger that these people may be framed as scapegoats.

For example, in a full page advert in Thisday of December 27 signed by one, Yahaya Akans, on behalf of  Movement for the Survival of Plateau People (MOSSOP), an organisation suspected of having links with the state authorities, sought to blame Jang’s opponents across the state’s ethnic and religious divides of responsibility for the bombs. The advert directly blamed the declaration by Mrs. Pauline Tallen, Jang’s estranged deputy governor, of her intention to contest next year’s governorship election against her erstwhile boss, for the bombings.

Even more telling than this advert was a statement issued by the General Overseer of Evangelical Bible Outreach International, Prophet Isa El-Buba, reputed to be Jang’s Rasputin. El-Buba, according to yesterday’s Nation, alleged that the bombings were planned by “Islamic extremists” to cause mayhem in the heart of the Middle Belt so that the North “will catch fire” and, presumably, scuttle next year’s general election.

“We Christian leaders,” he said, “have sounded the alarm to heads of security agencies in Jos about the plan by some Islamic extremists to destroy Jos and nothing was done on those reports. Look at what is happening now.”

Yesterday’s edition of Thisday seems to have provided El-Buba with all the evidence he needed to corroborate his case. “A previously unknown group, Jama’atul ahlus Sunnah Lidda’awati wal Jihad,” the newspaper said, “claimed responsibility for the Christmas bomb blast in Jos.” The claim, Thisday said, was posted on its website http:mansoorah.net.

However, a visit to the site and subsequent investigation by a friend with a fairly advanced knowledge of computer programming showed that the site was created in the early hours of yesterday. Even more instructive was the fact that it contained nothing other than the claim for the bombing, something which justifies Thisday’s caveat that the organisation may be none existent.

“There was no independent confirmation if the group actually exists as it is also suspected that a (sic) agent provocateur could be at work with the claims,” Thisday said.

It might well be that an extremist Islamic group was responsible for the Jos bombings even though it is stretching credulity more than a bit for E-Buba to insinuate that the so-called settlers want to destroy a place they have made their home for more than a century. But if the president himself was desperate enough not so long ago to try and pin the Abuja October 1 MEND bombings on his political opponents just to secure his office, it is hardly foolish to suspect that those in authority at the centre may be the ones playing a highly dangerous game of dividing the North to rule Nigeria.