PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Amnesty for Boko Haram: Between Sheikh Gumi and Bishop Kukah (I)

ndajika@yahoo.com

Predictably, last month’s call for amnesty for Boko Haram by the Sultan of Sokoto and nominal head of Nigerian Muslims, Alhaji Muhammadu Sa’ad Abubakar, and its initial outright rejection by President Goodluck Jonathan have provoked strong avowals and disavowals. Of all these avowals and disavowals three have stood out because of the prominence of the religious leaders that have made them and the way they seem to have traded places in their disparate positions.

First was Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, son of the renowned late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, and himself a leading light of the Izala sect founded by the father. In its lead story of three Wednesdays ago the up and coming Abuja based Blueprint newspaper exclusively reported him to have dismissed the Sultan’s call as “hypocritical.” This was clearly against the grain of the apparent widespread support in the North and among Muslims for the Sultan’s call.

Boko Haram, said Sheikh Gumi, is an ideology that respects no law, “not even the Qur’an or Hadith or scholarly fatwa.” There is, he said, therefore no basis for dialogue with its adherents, much less granting them any amnesty. “It is,” he avowed, “a creed that must be crushed.”

Two weekends ago Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, issued an Easter message that couldn’t have disagreed more with Sheikh Gumi’s position. To reject amnesty for the sect, he said, was to operate at the same (disagreeable) level with its adherents. The offer itself, he said, may not solve all our problems, “but it will bring us closer to a new dawn.” Those who have rejected the amnesty, he also said, have focussed more on how the issues involved “fit the survivalist instinct of the president and his ruling party.”

The same weekend, Bishop Kukah’s highly respected senior in the Catholic hierarchy, Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, spoke in the same vein in his own Easter message. “The call for amnesty,” he said, “would seem to me quite appropriate and even necessary.” Useful and necessary as the security response has been, he said, it has obviously not been enough on its own.

Overall, the cardinal’s Easter message was more measured and more cautious than the bishop’s but it was the latter’s that received wider media publicity.

This position of the two senior Catholic clergy is obviously at variance with that of the leadership of the Christian Association of Nigeria under Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, and possibly with that of the majority of Nigerian Christians. CAN, as we all know, has been vehemently opposed to any form of accommodation with Boko Haram which it has accused of committing genocide against Christians in the North, with at least tacit support of the country’s Muslim leadership.

The position of the cardinal and the bishop, though consistent with the religious doctrine of forgiveness, clearly exposes them to a charge of appeasement. However, from the consistent manner they have stuck to that position in spite of the fact that the Catholic Church, probably more than any other, has borne the brunt of the alleged Boko Haram mass killings of Christians – alleged, because Boko Haram has apparently since become a franchise used by criminals and possibly rogue elements in the security services alike for their own ends - it is obvious that this is a cross that the two are prepared to bear.

In his dissention from the popular Muslim and Northern support for the Sultan’s call for amnesty for Boko Haram, Sheikh Gumi seems to be in total agreement with the country’s authorities. For example, speaking at a seminar in Lagos last Tuesday on “Enhancing Military-Media Relations towards Improved Security” in support of his Commander-in-Chief’s initial rejection of the Sultan’s call, the rather bellicose army chief, Lt. General Azubuike Ihejirika, said in effect that force must remain the principal, if not the only, weapon for fighting Boko Haram.

“There is no country where terrorism has been curbed,” he said, “that force was not applied. There is none in history...I talk so much about force because that is my own line of business. I am to destroy the terrorists if I am able to find them.” (National Mirror, April 3).

Sheikh Gumi and the authorities may agree on what they believe is the need to crush Boko Haram, but General Ihejirika’s position clearly defines the limit of that agreement. For, whereas both the general and his boss obviously believe they can destroy the sect militarily, the sheikh believes they simply can’t. Their government, he said, lacks the competence and, by killing and terrorising more people than Boko Haram through its Joint Task Force Operations, it also lacks the moral strength to succeed.

His own solution? “A select Muslim high ranking officer, good intelligence, special strike squads (and) genuine cooperation of the civilian population,” he said.

Of the four elements of the sheikh’s formula for the defeat of Boko Haram, most people, I guess, would agree with him on the last three, in so far as they are simple common sense. By the same token, however, hardly would anyone agree with him that “a select Muslim high ranking officer” is necessary for success in the war against Boko Haram.

On the contrary, it is more likely to further divide an already divided military along religious lines and weaken it even more. Indeed with good intelligence and cooperation from the civilian population, it matters little, if at all, what the religious or ethnic affiliation of the field commander - and even of the commander-in-chief - is, so long as both are men of good faith.

The fundamental problem with government’s apparent over-reliance on the use of force in tackling Boko Haram is that it cannot win hearts and minds. General Ihejirika may, as he has said, be in the business of using brute force to solve problems but as he has also acknowledged, albeit with little conviction apparently, brute force alone, or even as the principal weapon, has never solved anybody’s problems. If it did, all terrorists would have since been wiped off the face of the earth given the overwhelming force governments the world over - especially that of America, the world’s self-appointed global police and its only super-power – have deployed, and continue to deploy, against terror organisations.

Every problem requires good intelligence and the cooperation of all and sundry for a viable solution. Above all, every problem requires good faith on the part of all parties involved, but especially on the part of those in authority. None of these three requirements can be secured by relying on brute force only or in the main, especially of the kind deployed in Borno and Yobe states since 2009 following the extrajudicial killings of several leaders, and even many more suspected members, of Boko Haram.

This brute force was similar, perhaps even worse, than that used in the Delta against the region’s militants before they were granted amnesty in June 2009,  more specifically the kind of brute force former president, General Olusegun Obasanjo, inflicted on the Odi community in Bayelsa State, President Jonathan’s home state,  about 12 years ago; a brute force which Justice Lambo Akanbi strongly condemned in his judgement last month and for which he awarded the community 37.6 billion Naira against the Federal Government as compensation.

There may well have been some politics behind the size of compensation the court’s compensation. But politics or no, it is still legitimate to ask, as The Guardian did in its editorial of March 11 about the judgement, “Why would a government unleash violence on its defenceless citizens in the name of maintaining law and order? Why would such a horrendous havoc be wrecked on a community because of a few bad elements as though there is no single innocent and law abiding citizen in the community who deserves government’s protection?”

Breath of fresh air indeed!

When President Goodluck Jonathan promised during his campaign for the 2011 election that his administration would usher in a “breath of fresh air” into the country, I thought it was no more than one of those empty sloganeering politicians over-indulge in during campaigns. Nothing the administration has done - or not done - since then has proved my scepticism wrong. On the contrary, the degree of insecurity from arbitrary use of power by the authorities and the scale of corruption in the land alone have enveloped the land with so much stink you can barely breathe.

Two days ago, the administration enhanced its reputation for doublespeak when it picked on Leadership newspaper over its exclusive story last week about an alleged presidential directive to its operatives to use all means, fair or foul, to frustrate the emergence of All Peoples Congress as a formidable opposition to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party.

After four of the newspaper’s staff honoured a police invitation for questioning, it released two of them in the night but detained the other two reportedly with instructions from “the oga at the top” to keep them incommunicado until they reveal the source of their story and of the documentary proof which they published to back their story.

This is outright Gestapo style out of the book of Hitler’s Germany. Some “breath of fresh air” indeed!