FRIDAY DISCOURSE BY DR

FRIDAY DISCOURSE BY DR. ALIYU TILDE

Discourse (103)

Peace on the Plateau

The zeal of a governor, the foresight of a senator and the outburst of a journalist have collectively persuaded me to revisit the crisis in Jos. I have chosen to call my response Peace on the Plateau, hoping that its content will contribute to the ongoing search for a lasting peace in a state that describes itself as ‘home of peace and tourism.’

In his effort to consolidate the peace achieved in the aftermath of the crisis, the Governor of Plateau State, Chief Joshua Dariye, has come out with a number of measures intended to curb what the Honourable Speaker of the State House of Assembly called “excesses in places of worship.” The new measures include a ban on use of loudspeakers in the conduct of worship in the majority of mosques and churches; a ban on blockade of traffic during worship hours; a ban on the use of public roads for the purpose of worship; and so on.

The decision of government was perhaps informed by the fact that the mayhem last month started with an incident in which a Christian woman attempted to force her way through a Friday congregation of Muslims, an episode we earlier narrated two weeks ago. The issue of Friday congregation has for sometime bothered the Christian clergy in Jos, because the gatherings are massive and the mosques are many, such that once it is the hour of prayer, at least for 45 minutes, the major roads in Muslim dominated areas of the town remain blocked. This, undoubtedly, will cause a lot of inconvenience and, where intolerance pervades, it could lead to dissatisfaction and protests.

But before going further, let us quickly add that Christians too share the habit of blocking roads that lead to their churches. For example, a segment of Ahmadu Bello Way is barricaded by a church almost throughout the day on Sunday, beginning as early as 9.00am; the same with another at Dilimi Street which is closed to traffic between 9.00am and 2.00pm on the same day. The annoying thing is that there is no crowd or even enough vehicles to warrant such barricades near the churches. One is therefore forced to wonder why they should exist and whether the government is not correct in banning such practices.

I will also add that the practice of barricading roads during prayer hours is practiced even in villages along highways in many places in the country. At Pambegua for example, the Jos - Kaduna Road is blocked between 1:30pm and 2.00pm. Not only for the purposes of worship, township roads in Nigeria could even be blocked for personal ceremonies, especially marriage. It appears that we do not give roads their significance of convenience or urgency.

I do not mind, therefore, if government attempts to wisely step in to make them open to traffic: wisely because wisdom demands that decisions and orders of government be made practicable and fair on the people it will affect; it also demands that, in crisis situations, such orders are calculated to encourage peace rather than aggravate the situation.

I welcome the effort of government to curb the proliferation of places of worship that would attract thousands of people at a time. Wherever they will be sited, regard must be given to the convenience of other citizens, road users and those living in their neighbourhood including businesses. Government regulation is necessary to achieve this. This is the standard practice in Islam and, in fact, a precondition for the validity of Friday congregational prayer in such mosques. Today, three factors have led to the proliferation of such places of worship: democracy that enshrines freedom of worship, the lack of unified Muslim leadership in the town and the commercialisation of churches. The wealthy are therefore at liberty to build mosques and churches for their convenience and interests, rather than public interest. Why should a Friday mosque, for example, be constructed in the neighbourhood of alcohol and women of free virtue?

For sometime also, loudspeakers have played a destructive role in religion, except on few occasions when they are necessary, like calling the faithful to prayer and the conduct of the prayer itself. But beyond this, they are grossly misapplied, again contrary to the teachings of Islam, and that is the source of dissatisfaction, from Muslims and non-Muslims alike. I wonder why someone would play a cassette of the recitation of the Quran on a loudspeaker any time of the day or night, especially on Fridays. This is irresponsible because he has turned the sacred book into a public nuisance. If he plays it at 4.00am, he is certain to disturb sleep, which is a natural right of every one living in the neighbourhood of the mosque. This is tyrannical. If he plays it during the daytime, hardly would anyone listen to it because people are busy conducting their businesses. The Quran is meant to be listened to attentively whenever it is heard, leaving anything else including chat, business, eating, walking and so on. It is therefore not in the interest of Islam, but something too demanding on Muslims, for anyone to play it through a loudspeakers.

To relay a preaching, live or recorded, beyond the vicinity of the mosque or church is not only tyrannical but also invitation to trouble. That is because speeches are suitable in most cases only to occasions they were first made. Words on a loudspeaker are most likely to be carried by waves to undesired ears that will misinterpret them and cause disaffection. This is particularly true of playing recorded preaching in places other than their original venues. Something could have been said, suitable to the audience in the original venue where a cultural homogeneity exists, but harmful to peaceful coexistence when played publicly amidst people of different faiths.

Islam, has suffered from the tyranny of electronics in this country more than any other religion. They have facilitated the spread of dissenting messages and opinions in the misunderstanding between Muslim sects for the last twenty-five years. The public airing of a preaching on shariah in an ECWA church by a reverend from Katsina nearly caused a misunderstanding in my village earlier this year.

I will therefore call on religious leaders and governments to jointly come up with means that will check the proliferation of mosques and churches and regulate the use of public address systems in them. I do not know about the conditions for setting up a church, but I know there are many in Islam that need to be met before a mosque will be permitted to hold a valid Friday congregation. What government needs to do, in the absence of an Emir in Jos, is to request Muslims to form a council of scholars that will attend to such matters whenever the need arises. And how often does it!

The need for consultation with such a council is evident from other components, which constitutes a blunder, of the governor’s announcement. In his zeal to consolidate peace in the state, His Excellency banned praying on roads at the time of Friday congregations as well as usage of loudspeakers for adhan (call to prayer). This is wrong and redundant. Of all his orders, these ones were, for good reason though, the most resented. People vowed to disobey the order and pray on the roads. As for me, there was no need for any vow because it is practically impossible for any law enforcement agent to execute the order of the governor. This is the result of unilateral decision. If he had consulted the Muslim community that will be directly affected by his decree, the governor would have saved himself the embarrassment of shooting his foot.

I am against the barricading of roads for hours or for the whole day by some churches on Sunday, and for an hour or less by some mosques on Friday afternoon in the metropolis. However, where there is an inevitable outflow of the congregation, like what happens all over the world at Friday congregations, it dwarfs the reasoning of any authority and portrays its ignorance of the differences in the cultures of its people, or its intolerance of them, to forbid them just the twenty minutes required to execute the most important divine ritual of their week. The outflow is not intentional, but a necessity engendered by population growth, urbanization, centralization of the prayer and its compulsory status in Islam.

The alternative, as some Christians suggest, is for Muslims to find a large area in the outskirts of the city for their Friday congregation like what they do during the Eid festivals. The suggestion is unwise because it implies that every Friday will bring untold hardship to the entire population of Jos metropolis. Apart from expenditure, it means that at least for two hours all the major roads will be suffocated by traffic as Muslims drive to and from the ‘Friday ground’. Their businesses, which they share with non-Muslims either as buyers or sellers, will also close for at least two hours. This does not make any economic or social sense. It is an extravagance in time management which government should not indulge in because it will reduce the productivity of the state.

The only solution is for inhabitants of the city and their government to tolerate, as does the rest of the world, the brief occupation of the affected main roads for the moment of prayer. The Muslims on their part should not barricade roads for a whole hour except for the time intended for the sermon and the prayer. At any rate, the government has seen the impossibility of this measure last Friday. It has no option but to bend over backwards for the sake of peace.

But the state government will be fooling itself if it thinks that banning road barricades and limiting the number of mosques in the town to please its Christian population will solve the intolerance and dissent that pushed it to violence last month. The answer lies in tackling the underlying economic and political problems of which the intolerance was only a symptom, as we said two weeks ago.

First, the leadership of Plateau State, like that of any other state in Nigeria, must realize the enormous responsibilities that rest on its shoulder. There is a need for concrete ideas and projects that will provide jobs for hundreds of thousands of its unemployed. This must be based on farming, mining and trade. I have little confidence in government programs; experience shows that they end up as conduits of looting by their inventors and managers. Therefore, youths today must be told that the era of white-collar jobs for all in Nigeria is over. People, like our ancestors, must learn to rely on their initiative and engage in grassroots jobs. However it is the responsibility organisations, community leaders and opinion shapers to articulate this position and inculcate it into the brains of youths.

Self-employment is thus the primary answer. Secondary to it is the effort of government in attracting investors into the state especially in mining and processing of agricultural products. This responsibility of government is made more difficult now than ever with the unfortunate crisis that took place last month. The careful selection of properties of the so-called settlers for destruction has left an impression that unless an investor belongs to a certain class of ethnic groups or a certain religion, his investments, no matter how long they have been on the ground, will just be converted to rubbles within a few hours. His life too is not safe. We have seen it happen to shops, to transport vehicles, to buildings and to life. It will take a lot of public relations for the government to convince investors that the problem is not entrenched.

Government must also be seen to play its traditional role in building and maintaining infrastructure and investor confidence throughout the state. Beginning from Jos town itself, one is dismayed to notice the complete absence of dividends of democracy that are today enjoyed in many states. Only a fool will blame ‘settlers’ or any Hausa-Fulani for this. Where were the resources of the state since it was created 34 yrs ago? People should learn to ask questions. Whenever you jump into any of the hundreds of potholes in the township roads of Jos, blame the state or local government, not the federal government or someone that is equally suffering from the same cruelty of a corrupt officialdom. Ask what is happening to the subvention that it receives monthly, like any other state, from 1967 to date.

A more daring task for the government is on the political front. There is an urgent need for a campaign against the culture of using some people as scapegoats to explain the evident economic backwardness of the so-called indigenes. People need to be told the truth that effort is what earns wealth, not the rights enjoyed exclusively by indigenes; and to sustain wealth, a lot of prudence in expenditure is required. Indigenes therefore need to wake up and understand that, throughout the state, there is no Hausa-Fulani in any position of authority capable of drawing them back. Rather, they must examine their habits.

There is also a need, for the purpose of justice that will ensure peace and order for a definition of who is an indigene and what right should he enjoy in exclusion of other Nigerian citizens living in the state. As it is now, some people have qualified themselves as ‘indigenes’, and branded others as ‘citizens’, or ‘settlers’ - to use a more exclusionary term. And it appears that there is a consistent effort by the state bureaucracy to promote this taxonomy and nomenclature, for political reasons.

This is why I welcome the effort of Senator Ibrahim Mantu to get the National Assembly to legislate on the issue of indigeneship. Unless this is done, some people will continue to segregate against others on the basis of genetics and religion.

Let us be told what event, if time is the determinant, defines indigeneship in this country: is it the Big Bang of the scientist, the Descend of Adam; the Flood of Noah, the conquest of Lugard in 1903, the independence of Nigeria in 1960 or the creation of the state in 1967? If migration is used as a yardstick, do we also consider the Birom – the chief tribe in Jos and its environs – citizens, and not indigenes, since I once heard one of their chiefs claiming that they migrated from the Sokoto Rima valley and not from heaven, unlike the Oduduwas? If race and culture are the index, for a resident of the Bauchi Plateau – as it is known in geography – what colour of skin does he wear, what language should he speak, or what religion should he profess, to qualify as an indigene of the state?

This definition, challenging as it is, will be the greatest contribution to the settlement of the political crisis facing the state. In finding one, as we said two weeks ago in Fire on the Plateau, the state has a lot to learn from other states of the federation, especially from its immediate northern neighbour, Bauchi, that shares a similar history of mining and settlers. Mantu and the governor should therefore put heads together.

Lastly, I must be frank to say that I was grossly disappointed with the writing of a regular contributor in the Daily Trust, Mr. Nick Dazang, when he wrote his piece titled The Jos Crisis on 20^th September 2001. The columnist allowed ethnic sentiments to overshadow his reason so much so that he took side blatantly and promoted chauvinism instead of reconciliation. I do not give a hoot to whatever he claims about the ancestry of his kinsmen – though ancestry has become a convenient refuge for many today – but the following words quoted from his article stinks before the judgement of every peace loving person of the state.

“The import of the foregoing is that if any section of the Jos community is marginalized, it is the indigenous community which is made up of the Berom, Anagutas and Afizeres. These are veritable owners of Jos town from prehistory itself.”

One would ask whether anything like Jos was known to Prehistory. Agreed it is not a Hausa name, but how come that out of the twelve rulers of Jos, ten have been Hausa-Fulani? Why is the chieftaincy of Jos, when given in the 1940s officially titled ‘Chief of Berom’, not of Jos? Why are these tribes today living only in the distant periphery of the city? How come also, that most of its mining villages are bearing Hausa names? Anyway, it is worthless picking on this point and others made by the Mr. Dazang. Unfortunately this is the only premise he could use to justify the mayhem that took place, implicitly started by his kinsmen:

“Which is why the appointment of the co-ordinator of the Poverty Eradication Programme from a community other than the indigenous ones, aroused the ire of the people and is one of the fundamental causes of the conflagration that took place last week. Religion and the episode at the Mosque which could have been benignly ignored was merely a thin and convenient veneer and a weak hook on which to hand an excuse to go on a killing spree. Compounding this, the gentleman who was appointed was a highly controversial figure and a man of doubtless pedigree. Previous attempts to foist him by a military governor as the sole administrator of a local government in Jos did not only fail resoundingly, it was fiercely resisted by the indigenous people of Jos. The gentleman’s recent appointment does not therefore only smack of naivety and insensitivity, it is an unmitigated insult on the people of Jos. And those who inspired the appointment are not only culpable in the mayhem that followed, they are veritable agents provocateur of this crisis.”

Space will not allow us to re-present the remaining part of his article, but the conclusion is worth noting: “The price of all liberties and our proud ancestry must be eternal vigilance… we must stand up, collectively, to those who attempt to try our will or confound our resolve to live peacefully and to prosper our state.”

Well, whatever that means, even His Excellency, the Governor of Plateau State, will agree with me that this outburst is not the right stuff needed at the moment in his state. He will prefer to agree with us that only industriousness in economy, love in relationship, equity in justice, and tolerance in creed are the baggage acceptable on the train that will lead the state to peace and prosperity. The propagation of laziness, hate, prejudice and bigotry, one the other hand, are recipes for backwardness, poverty and instability. That is my message to the all the peace loving people of Plateau State today.