PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA

Plateau Crisis: the fruit of vengeance as policy

The other day my good friend, Malam Lawal Batagarawa, the presidential aide on non-party affairs, was on the BBC defending President Obasanjo’s record on public safety and security. The popular notion that Nigerians have never felt more insecure in their lives, he said, was wrong because it was based more on image than substance. Because we are now a democracy (Are we, really?), he said, information on crime is readily available and so people imagine that there is more crime than is really the case.

Batagarawa’s position is understandable. As minister of state, first for education and later for defence in Obasanjo’s first term, he lived a fairly cocooned life, protected day and night by armed police and soldiers. Even then not all cocooned public figures escaped criminal assault. Surely Batagarawa must have heard of the case of his colleague, Chief Bola Ige, the attorney general of the federation, who was murdered in cold-blood in his home during the Christmas season of 2001. Surely he must also have heard of the several armed attacks on convoys of governors, ministers, traditional rulers and other public figures.

In any case my friend surely knows that the insecurity in the land has not been due to violent crimes only. If he didn’t, he ought to have known that this insecurity has been caused much more by the ethnic and religious clashes that have proliferated since May 1999. His senior colleague at the ministry of defence, Lt-General T.Y. Danjuma, certainly knew better than to pretend that the public anxiety about insecurity in the land was based more on image than substance. “In the four years of my tenure as Minister of Defence,” he told a reception last October in his honour organised by the Middle Belt Forum following his resignation as minister, “we saw no peace in the Middle Belt. There was war in Taraba and Benue . There was war in Plateau. We became a laughing stock. I am glad now that we have peace. I hope this peace will be sustained.” The general might as well have added that there were ethnic and sectarian wars in just about every corner of the land – in the South-West( Shagamu, Lagos, etc), in the Delta region, in the North-West(Kano, Kaduna), and in the South-East(Anambra).

Alas, Danjuma’s hope for peace in the Middle Belt was short-lived. As we all know, the killings merely subsided for a while only to return with a vengeance, particularly in Plateau. The latest spate of horrific killings, as we all know, led to a rather unedifying verbal spat between the President and the head of the Plateau Chapter of the Christian Association of Nigeria. Worse, the killings also led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the state and the suspension of the State’s governor and legislature on May 18.

Predictably, this development has led to an uproar in the mass media and among civil rights advocates. The Guardian (May 20) described it as “a retrogressive slip and a major set-back for democracy”. The Punch (May 24) said “democracy has been abridged in Plateau state in favour of arbitrary rule.” Vanguard (May 24) called it “a dangerous precedent” and accused the president of rewriting the 1999 constitution. Thisday (May 23), was more cautious in criticizing the president. The state of emergency, it said, may have been inevitable in the circumstance, but to proceed therefrom to suspend the governor and the state legislature and appoint a sole administrator for the state, was “unconstitutional.”

The uproar among civil rights advocates like Chief Gani Fawehinmi, Femi Falana and even conservative lawyers like Chief FRA Williams was even louder. The president, they said, in effect, has, once again, shown he was simply incapable of shedding his dictatorial instinct as a retired general and one-time military ruler.

Of course not every newspaper or every lawyer believed the president was wrong. The editor of the Federal Government owned New Nigerian, Mahmud Jega, agreed the presidential reaction was the most draconian in the president’s five years in office. However, he insisted it was “wholly constitutional” (New Nigerian May 19). Former attorney general of the federation and a one-time judge in the World Court , Prince Bola Ajibola, agreed. “Having read the entire constitution and provision 305, I have no doubt that the president’s action is absolutely constitutional,” he said in The Guardian of May 25. For good measure, he added that any one who had any doubt should go to court.

Alhaji Lateef Adegbite, a highly respected lawyer and the Secretary-General of the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, also supported the president. Rotimi William’s criticism of the president, he said, was based on what a constitution should be and not on what our constitution is. The constitution as it is, he said, gave the president the powers to do what he did.

I have read the relevant sections of the constitution myself but, as a layman, I fail to see how the president can act in the unilateral manner in which he did. To me, however, this is not the most important issue in the Plateau crisis and, by extension, in the huge religious crises threatening to plunge the country into a sectarian conflagration that could make Bosnia look like a child’s play.

Without doubt due process is important. It is a central pillar of constitutionality and legality. But the peace and harmony of society depends less on it than on the good faith of all its people, but particularly the good faith of its leaders, institutional and individual. For all their defects, our constitution and laws contain enough safeguards for a stable and peaceful society. The problem is that our leaders seem to lack the good faith to observe the safeguards and, through their bad examples, they teach the rest of us to behave towards each other in bad faith.

In this respect the biggest share for the terrible state of insecurity in the land must go, first, to the mass media, and then, to the president as a symbol of the political class. However, whereas the media’s role in creating and nurturing the ethnic and sectarian crises that are threatening to engulf the country, is historical, that of the president and the political class is more immediate in its impact. I believe we will never find the solution to these crises if we do not examine these negative roles with a view to discarding them for a more positive role.

To start with the president, it should be obvious to anyone with even half an eye than he returned to power with a huge grudge against a section of this country, namely the so-called Hausa-Fulani: so-called because, in popular parlance, any Northerner who is not a Northern Christian minority is Hausa-Fulani. Obasanjo’s huge grudge was very much evident in his inaugural speech on May 19, 1999 , a speech in which he hardly had any good thing to say about the past leadership of the country.

This grudge became even more evident in his encounter with Major-General Muhammadu Buhari during the third memorial of Major-General Shehu Musa Yar’adua’s death. During the memorial, held on April 7, 1997 , Obasanjo and Buhari strongly disagreed on the meaning of pre-destination as far as it concerned Yar’adua’s death in prison through suspected poisoning. As far as Buhari was concerned, Yar'adua was destined to die at the time and manner he did and therefore it was wrong for anyone to try to make political capital out of it. Oh yes, agreed Obasanjo, Yar'adua may have been pre-destined to die when and how he did, but that would not exonerate the alleged perpetrators of the crime of guilt. They remained guilty as hell and it was the duty of every decent person to persistently expose and punish them.

If the president was determined to pursue and punish those who allegedly killed Yar'adua, is it not logical to conclude that he is not prepared to forgive those who put him in prison along with Yar'adua for complicity in the alleged coup attempt of 1995 against General Sani Abacha, a Hausa-Fulani, so-called?

Obasanjo clearly had the motive of revenge and, as president, he had the means to pursue his grudge. He seems to have pursued that grudge with a zeal that was unbecoming of a self-proclaimed born-again Christian.

The president did not invent the strategy of dividing the North, especially along religious lines, in order to rule Nigeria . However, whereas Chief Obafemi Awolowo who invented it largely failed to achieve his goal, Obasanjo seemed to have used it effectively essentially because unlike Awo, he had the resources of the federal government literally at his beck and call, regardless of the constitutional checks and balances which he has observed mostly in the breach.

The president himself will be the first to disavow the use of religion to deal with his perceived enemies. For example, during his May 29 inauguration speech last year, he said, among other things, “We note, however, with apprehension, that while we celebrate the apparent demise of ethnic politics, there is a tragic appearance of religion in our national politics. It is imperative that we nip this is the bud, because religion mixed with politics in a multi-faith country like ours, portends destruction and devastation of our social fabric and our entire structure”.

Fine words, these, but then all too often his actions to the contrary spoke much louder than such words. These actions are many but three examples will suffice. First, he purged the military and other security forces of a disproportionate number of so-called Hausa-Fulani elements and then restructured the forces in a blatantly one sided manner that thoroughly marginalized the same elements. This policy seems to continue to date.

The argument of many of his aides then was that the so-called Hausa/Fulani alone did not constitute the North and the Christian minority officers he appointed to head the army and air force, for example, were as representative of the North as any. This was correct but that it was merely self-serving was clearly brought out by the fact that the president himself personally made sure Chief Sunday Awoniyi, who is as highly principled as they come, never became the chairman of the ruling PDP. Chief Awoniyi was probably more Christian and minority than General Victor Malu and Air-Marshal Isaac Alfa, and yet no less representative of the North than these two officers and gentlemen, but he was stopped from chairing the PDP partly through a whispering campaign that it was wrong to have a Northern minority Yoruba Christian as chairman of the ruling party when the president himself was Yoruba and Christian. The double standards here was apparently lost on the president’s men, if not on the president himself.

Second, for the first time in the history of this country, a president decided to routinely and regularly inflict his personal worship on the citizens of this country through the network services of the publicly owned Nigeria Television Authority. More amazingly, however, not one of the mass media high priests of secularity of the State ever raised its voice against such blatant abuse of office.

Third, and most importantly, the president, in the words of his highly truculent media spokesman, Mr. Femi Fani-Kayode, “created” a Middle-Belt identity (Vanguard July 21, 2002 ). This claim is, of course, an exaggeration, if not totally false. We all know that the Middle-Belt pre-dated May 29, 1999 , but then the new Middle-Belt of Fani-Kayode is essentially a religious one rather than the mainly geographical one of Dr. J.S. Tarka. We also know that after his nasty experience in 1975, I think, in the hands of his Southern comrades-in-arm, Tarka returned to the larger Northern family and participated actively as a key figure in the government of President Shehu Shagari until his death.

That the president sought to nourish the religious and not the geographical Middle-Belt beyond what was fair and just to all sections of the larger North was in little doubt from the way he became the patron of Christian Middle Belters like Chief Solomon Lar and Air-Commodore Dan Sulaiman, whose stock-in –trade is to preach hatred against the so-called Hausa-Fulani.

In an interesting article on the Plateau crisis in The Guardian of May 30, my good friend, Father Mathew Hassan Kukah, was highly critical of Obasanjo’s declaration of a state of emergency in the state. He was indeed more than critical; he blamed Obasanjo for bringing about the very mutual genocide in the state and beyond which we have witnessed in the last four years.

“Had General Obasanjo declared himself a born-again Christian and gone back to his farm”, said Kukah, “that would have been no problem. But to do so and then proceed to seek political power was bound to create a problem for religion and country, especially within the Muslim population. This is the classical mixing of religion with politics, and it has never, never worked anywhere.”

For Kukah it has not worked in Nigeria because “the Pentecostal community, nationally and internationally, embraced the president as a Christian President, as opposed to a Southern president, which created the Sharia backlash.” The Catholic Church, to which Kukah belongs, has been consistently critical of Obasanjo, especially his last re-election, but I am not sure the Catholics themselves have been any less supportive of the president, right or wrong, as a fellow Christian than the Pentecostals. But this is another matter entirely.

Fr. Kukah went on to say that “From Frederick Chiluba, Jerry Falwell, Fr. Aristides to our dear George Bush, it is clear that attempts to wear the religious toga into the political space is a dangerous pre-occupation for any president and the nation.”

Coming from a priest, and one with a very incisive mind like his, Kukah’s assertion that religion and politics should never mix, sounded rather strange to me. True, the mix of religion and politics can, and has all too often, proved dangerous. This, however, is not because the two are necessarily incompatible. As the Father, himself, acknowledged much earlier in his article in question, citing the example of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu in South Africa , “United in clearly defined objectives and mutual respect Church and State can accomplish much.”

The mix of religion and politics has proved explosive most of the time not because the two are mutually exclusive, but only because many public figures, politicians and clerics alike, try to manipulate them for selfish reasons. As a survey in The Economist of August 6, 1994 titled Islam and the West: The next war, they say, argued, there is nothing inevitable about Samuel Huntington’s clash of civilizations, especially between Islam and the West, simply because one seeks to mix religion with politics while the other seeks to separate them. “The mixing of religion with politics,” said the survey, “may be the last such idea the world will see, or it may prove the force that persuades other people to rediscover a connection between day-to-day life and a moral order.” In other words there is a fifty-fifty chance that the mix of politics and religion could swing either way.

A similar survey by the magazine titled In the name of God-A survey of Islam and the West about nine years later (September 13 2003), reached just about the same conclusion. ”Islam itself”, said the survey, “is not invariably democracy’s enemy. Democracy’s failure to grow in Islam’s Arab core, may have less to do with the faith, and more to do with something much simpler such as the refusal of the men in power to yield or share it”.

America, the survey said , should defend itself against al-Qaeda (as a virulent manifestation of Islamic Fundamentalism).America should also speak up for its own type of democracy, but “It should beware of stepping into somebody’s argument about the true meaning of Islam, and of assuming that democracy must be Islam’s opposite. These are arguments for Muslims to resolve in their own way”.

Unlike Father Kukah, therefore, I have no problem with Obasanjo proclaiming himself a born-again Christian and then proceeding to seek political power. On the contrary that will make me even happier because I would expect his words and deeds to be guided by Christ-like principles and ethics.

Unfortunately this has not been the case with Obasanjo, and even more so, with Kukah’s George Bush, principally, I believe, because each of the two seem to hold a huge grudge, Obasanjo against a section of the country that he believes unfairly jailed him and would have even had him executed, Bush against the welfare state. Both try to camouflage their grudges with appeals to religious fundamentalism, claiming, in effect, that as God’s anointed, they can do no wrong. Not surprisingly, the mismatch between their claims on the one hand, and their intentions and actions on the other, has made their countries, Nigeria in Obasanjo’s case, America, and by extention, the whole world in Bush’s, a very unsafe and insecure world to live in.

If Obasanjo therefore wants to end the mutual genocide that has proliferated in the country since his return to power five years ago, the place to begin is not in the declaration of a state of emergency, whether he has the power to do so or not. The place to begin is right there in his heart, by ending his grudge against any section of this country – and against any individual. As Malam Abubakar Gimba, novelist and former President of Association of Nigerian Authors, said in his open Letter to the President published in several newspapers a few years back, including the Daily Trust of August 27, 2001 , “Those who benefit from divine grace must never refuse same to others. From the fertile grounds of your example, I believe, would sprout the healthy olive plants of predisposition for forgiveness.”

As I said at the beginning of this piece, the president is only second to the mass media as a culprit of the ethnic and sectarian violence that, whatever my good friend, Batagarawa, may say about the state of the nation’s security, has become widespread since May 1999. God willing, next week I shall examine how the press has been the principal culprit in stoking the fires of mutual hatred in our polity.