PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Boko Haram, Azazi, America And The Rest Of Us

ndajika@yahoo.com

As is to be expected, my two-part column on fuel subsidy removal (FSR) which ended last week attracted mixed reactions, a substantial number of them hostile. Most of the hostile respondents said I should have concerned myself more with Boko Haram (BH) than with fuel subsidy removal because of the threat the Islamic sect’s activities have posed to the security of Nigerians, indeed to the very existence of the country itself.

No doubt FSR poses no immediate and present danger to Nigerians and to Nigeria in a way that Boko Haram does. However, the underlying issues of FSR – poor governance, incompetence, inefficiency, inequity, the lot – pose a much greater danger to Nigerians and to their country than BH in the long run. Indeed it has almost become a cliché to say these underlying issues are the root causes of BH.

 And to the extent that BH poses a clear and present danger to Nigerians and to Nigeria, eliminating that danger must count among our top priorities, for, as Lord Maynard Keynes, the late renowned Economist, once said, in the long run we are all dead.

To eliminate the danger BH poses to Nigerians and to their country, the first requirement is that those in charge of the country’s security must be people whose antecedents make them trustworthy to the plurality of Nigerians irrespective of their tribe or religion. The second requirement is that Journalism as the profession which mirrors society must make sure the mirror it holds is as perfect as is humanly possible.

These, of course, are not the only requirements. But to me they are arguably the most important. And on both counts those in charge of the two institutions have been dismal failures.

To start with my profession, Journalism, in 2001 I tried on two occasions to draw public attention to the bias against Muslims of most of the country’s media, first in January and then in October. That would not be the first time I tried but these two were some of the most glaring examples of the general anti-Muslim bias of Nigeria’s media.

The first occasion was in response to an excellent piece by my friend, Dr. Emman Usman Shehu, wrote in his column in the now rested Post-Express (December 21, 2000) on what he described as “The Dilemma of Northern Christians.” The dilemma, he said, arose because the Northern Christians who voted for President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 because they felt as a Christian, especially a self-proclaimed born-again, he will protect their interest, felt betrayed by his apparent do-nothing policy on the “political sharia” several predominantly Muslim states in the North introduced shortly after he assumed power in 1999.

The dilemma of the Northern Christians, he said, lied in the fact even though they felt betrayed by Obasanjo, they seemed to have no alternative to voting for him again as the presidential elections of 2003 approached.

Shehu’s dilemma, I said, on these pages (January 10, 2001) was similar to that of one, Barrister Abdulaziz Ogbui, an Igbo Muslim, who wrote about what he said was the terrible plight of the Muslim minority in Igboland in an article, “Ohaneze and Igbo Muslims” in The Comet (November 23, 2000), also since rested.

When the supreme Igbo cultural association organised events, he said, it often called for Church services but never talked about prayers in mosques. “They contemptuously ignore the minority Muslims or pretend they do not exist,” he said.

Muslim Igbos are hardly substantial in size. Certainly they are nowhere as large as Northern Christians. But even in parts of the country where the indigenous Muslim population is large as in Edo State or where they are almost head to head with the Christian population as in the West, they often suffer no less discrimination than the Muslim Igbo.

The difference between the religious minorities in the two regions, I said, was that whereas the one in the North can depend on the Nigerian media to “bark” in their support “at the drop of the hat,” to use Ogbui’s words, the one in the South can hardly depend on anyone to come to their defence.

To buttress my point, I gave the example of how at least three newspapers, Punch, Tribune and Vanguard, reported, quite rightly in my view, the plight of an Igbo beer seller who was subjected to lashes of the cane for allegedly selling his stuff by some residents who decided to take the law into their hands in his neighbourhood in Kano City. Punch and Tribune actually lead with the story, casting the usual sensational headlines.

At about the same time a delegation of indigenous Muslim population of Edo State, who are a majority in three of its 18 local governments, on a courtesy call on the governor of the state, Chief Lucky Igbinedion, on Sallah day, petitioned him about the deliberate omission of Islamic Religious Knowledge in the curriculum of public schools in the state. He ignored their petition. Yet not one of the newspapers that played up the plight of one individual in Kano State saw it fit to report the human right concerns of hundreds of thousands of indigenes of Edo.

The second time I tried to draw attention of media bias against Muslims was in my article of October 31, 2001, again on these pages. This time I simply pointed out the fact that even though the historic wars among the minority tribes in the Middle-Belt, giving the specific example of those between Tivs and Jukuns, have claimed more lives and limbs than those ostensibly between Muslims and Christians in the region, the latter has received a disproportionate attention of the Nigerian media.

The reason, I argued, was simple; the historic wars among the minority tribes in the region whose majority are Christians, did not fit your typical Nigerian Journalist’s stereo-type of the majority Muslim Northerner loading it over his Christian poor cousin, a stereotype which, needless to say, is an echo of the global media anti-Muslim bias.

The point of all this is that until the Nigerian media begin to report ostensibly religious and ethnic conflicts with some measure of objectivity, we will be a long, long way away from solving the threat posed to the Nigerian entity by BH and similar groups.

All of which takes me to the more serious anti-Muslim bias of those in charge of the security of the country for the obvious reason that they are the ones entrusted with the instruments of State violence.

The epitome of this group right now is the National Security Adviser of the president, the four-star general, Andrew Owoye Azazi. As the president’s adviser on national security, Azazi has never bothered to hide his anti-Muslim bias. One clear evidence of this was his assertion in July last year that “Terrorism is a new phenomenon in Nigeria.”

Anyone who has lived in Nigeria since Isaac Adaka Borro presaged the lately departed Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu’s Biafra by trying to curve out a Niger Delta Republic by force of arms, knows that Azazi is not speaking the truth. In any case if the unprecedented bombing by the Movement for the Emancipation of Delta (MEND) of Nigeria’s capital on the very day the country was celebrating the Golden Jubilee of its independence on October 1, 2010, a bombing which claimed several lives, or even the less dramatic one of the bombing of Atlas Cove in Lagos which also claimed lives, are not acts of terror, then we do really need to redefine the word.

There are, of course, those who argue that there is a difference between Niger Delta militants and Boko Haram because the one was pursuing legitimate socio-economic grievances while the other has been pursuing extreme, if not unrealizable, religious goals. The simple answer to this argument is that few ends, if any, do justify any means.

At any rate it has since become as clear as daylight that those who claim to be fighting for the emancipation of their people have merely used it as a cover to acquire and sustain their lavish lifestyles.

Azazi, however, has not only made the incredible claim that Boko Haram introduced terrorism in Nigeria. He has gone on to invite America to solve the BH problem in spite the dismal record of the world’s only superpower as its self-chosen global cop; everywhere they’ve been they’ve left behind only strife  pain and anguish.

Boko Haram, Azazi said, in what clearly amounted to turning logic on its head, poses more threat to America than it does to Nigeria. America therefore, he said, needs Nigeria more than Nigeria needs it to fight terror.

Except for blind prejudice, I do not see why our president’s national security adviser will be more concerned about the safety of people in foreign lands than the security of his own people. And until those who advise the president, not just on security, but also on other issues, purge themselves of their prejudices and of their self-interests, we will never solve the problems of our country.