A fight between the dog
and the baboon must be one of those very rare encounters in the Animal
Kingdom. Animals fight over territory, food, mates, and in defence of
their lives, or of the young. It is very hard to foresee the two animals
fighting over any of the above because on most of items, the paths of
the two animals hardly cross.
In Africa and particularly in Hausaland where this near impossible idea
was contrived as a proverb, such a fight can only happen under the
influence of man when in hunting he sets the dog to catch the baboon or
its baby. In that case, that fight would surely be one to witness.
The dog uses its power of speed and strong canine teeth, the baboon his
powerful shoulders, limbs, claws, hands, and under extreme conditions,
his teeth. And this condition is extreme – a fight for his life or that
of his baby. So we better assume that the baboon will deploy his entire
arsenal.
The camera of kare jini biri jini Hausa proverb often pictures a very
fierce and inconclusive fight between two contenders. We can picture the
dog first barking incessantly, with its jaws wide open hoping to scare
the baboon into submission. The well-built baboon, on the other hand, is
not a coward. He would not jump up the trees to escape the attacking
dog; he would not fly. He turns wild too, flexing his muscles, beating
his wide chest and destroying the surrounding shrubs to intimidate the
dog. He jumps at a branch, breaks it and hurls it at the dog, but the
carnivore remains recalcitrantunder the command of his master, barking,
barking … and now ready to charge.
And the fight ensues and continues for several minutes and, perhaps,
hours…
As the proverb depicts, the fierce fight ends inconclusively with both
parties sustaining deeps cuts and innumerable browses. Each contender
was lucky to survive it and returns to its shelter licking its wounds.
The dog gives up hunting for that day, returns home and is granted a
sick leave by its master. The baboon keeps his life and his baby and
remains in his territory or migrates to a safer one. The only conclusion
reached was that the dog learned to avoid the baboon henceforth, while
the baboon learned to include the dog among its dangerous enemies in the
Kingdom.
In the above, I have tried to capture the proper context and scenario of
the proverb. It simply connotes a situation where the fight for
something is fierce, where you give your challenger a good run for his
money, but where despite the ferocity of the contest, its outcome was
not conclusive. In short, when you tell your contender that za a yi kare
jini biri jinni, it simply means the battle will be fierce. In the case
of Buhari, he was promising his supporters from Niger State that 2015
elections will be fierce; or put in another way, the PDP wIll not have
it easy. Simple.
How this simple statement translated into a political missile that says
Buhari is promising a bloodbath come 2015 remains one of those sad
stories in our practice of journalism.
Let us have a re-read of the mistranslation:
"If what happened in 2011 (alleged rigging) should again happen in 2015,
by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon would all be soaked in
blood.”
Does this reflect the proper context and meaning of the Hausa proverb
kare jini biri jinni that we explained above? No. That is because, among
other things, if by the time both the dog and the baboon are soaked in
blood, both would have been dead, a picture which the proverb never
envisaged. It would have been better for the reporter to say, “Come
2015, I promise you, the fight will be fierce.”
Here, I must say that the words of Buhari were misinterpreted, perhaps
deliberately, to entertain the Nigerian public with a sensational story
that will keep the presently near-static mill of public opinion running
once more, or to invent a weapon to knock him down again in the ring of
2015 presidential contest.
But, to be fair to the reporter also, it was a mistranslation that I
think was informed by the history of the General’s consistent call for
mass action since 2003, of CPC’s unguarded campaign utterances in 2011
and how they were widely believed to have inspired the post election
violence that year, and of the strategy of the General’s supporters of
the ANPP especially in Bauchi state in 2007, a la his doctrine of
protect your votes, a kasa, a tsare, a raka.
These were the elements in the background that also informed the
supporting and opposing comments which trailed the publication of that
mistranslated proverb. Nigerians became divided overnight into three
camps.
The first group – Buhari’s opponents – jumped at it saying, “Aha. There
we go again. This notorious and bloodthirsty coup plotter is still
dreaming of a bloodbath.” If Buhari, by his statement, was serving such
opponents with a notice of an impending doom, they did not heed to it.
They did not show any sign of repentance from the sin he is accusing
them of. Instead, they continue to direct their accusing fingers at him.
On the other hand, his supporters, the second group, to me, showed the
most disheartening response. They did not take the pain to verify and
analyse his statement. Not a single one of them came over to say that he
was misrepresented. Have they done so, it would have cooled the
atmosphere and reassured us. They adopted the mistranslation, in situ,
as if it were right, and presented an alibi, saying, “Only election
riggers are be afraid of Buhari’s statement. Would there be a bloodbath
in 2015 as a result of rigging, it is the PDP that should be held
responsible.”
The third group, we the onlookers, are terrified that we will be
disastrously caught in the crossfire, once more, as it happened to
hundreds of Nigerians during the 2011 elections, when, especially in
Southern Kaduna and Bauchi state, the lives of the innocent were lost
and thousands of people displaced to date across Northern Nigeria.
Here was a corper medic, for example, riding an ambulance in Toro,
stopped and hacked to death by the very people he came all the way from
the East to serve after his long and tedious training as a doctor, at a
place where he had nobody to protect him except the mores of
civilization. His sin was simply that he did not belong to the ethnic
group or religion of Buhari, the opposition presidential candidate. The
mob on that fateful day was found wanting in those mores, defective in
conscience. That is how many like him paid the ultimate price across the
state.
And there was a primary school girl in southern Kaduna, witnessing her
primary school teacher hacking her father to death in Zonkwa, Southern
Kaduna, for no crime but that the father belonged to the religion other
than that of the incumbent President, Goodluck Jonathan. She never
thought that the savage gene of the teacher would overcome the etiquette
of civility that her familiarity with him would engender. On that
fateful day, humanity was lost, the feeling of civilization was gone,
and no guarantees were kept. Months after that massacre, the girl would
tell her story to the ears of a deaf and dumb nation that allows the
assassin teacher to walk the streets freely, earning his salary. That is
how hundreds of the like of her father died and thousands of her type
continue to suffer as the politicians behind the crimes remain
unscathed.
To date, nobody is man enough to directly or remotely claim even a
vicarious responsibility for those atrocities. The PDP that is accused
of rigging the election refused to admit that it rigged it in the first
place. Instead, it shifted the blame to Buhari, citing what it called
his “inciting statements” at his campaign rallies. Buhari and his
supporters, on the other hand, returned the blame to PDP, with three
reasons: he was a victim not a partaker in the violence; the dastardly
acts were carried out not by his supporters but by hoodlums who did not
spare him either; and that it was in fact the ruling party that
instigated the violence in the first place by rigging the elections. So
did the trading in blame continued until our father, Justice Ahmed Lemu,
inconclusively closed the chapter.
His panel came up with an ingeniously ambivalent verdict, saying both
Buhari and the PDP are right. It said it is true that Buhari inspired
the violence but it is also true that PDP's rigging machine provoked it.
In effect, the report claimed, there is an egalitarian share of the
blame. Case closed. Court!!!
With that we return to our churches and mosques to pray that may God
have mercy on those departed souls! And may he protect us, the living,
the onlookers, the ordinary citizens, from the evils of power – of its
keepers and seekers alike.
I was caught by the same fever when I read the mistranslation in
English. I wondered how Buhari could make such a statement after his
widely condemned “lynch them” directive of 2011. But when I heard his
actual words in Hausa two days ago, I quickly understood that he said
nothing unusual, for it is proper for politicians to inject hope in
their supporters. Telling a delegation of such supporters that his party
will put up a fierce fight next time is just one of those confidence
preserving measures.
With this, I hope our journalists will in future show a better sense of
responsibility in their reportage. They should use their brains not
their minds. We are tired of hearing Buhari mistranslated by a section
of the media. More importantly, however, our politicians on both sides
of the divide, should refrain from any contemplation of violence or
cheating, or asking their followers to take the law into their own
hands, whatever the situation would be. If they think that winning an
election is a religious duty, then they must not forget that none of our
two dominant religions call to violence as a means of winning power or
as a reaction to defeat. In Islamic tradition, the injustice of forty
years is preferred to the fitna (unrest) of a day.
The government and INEC must do their best to ensure free and fair
elections in 2015. The electoral body has two years ahead to fully
prepare for it and get rid of imperfections. Let there be a clean fight
that ends in a clean winner and a clean loser. If the government is not
ready for this, my dear friend, Professor Attahiru Jega, should throw in
the towel. The defeated in this case - whether baboon or dog - must
accept defeat and allow us live in peace.
If our advice is not accepted, we shall then pray that may our
compassionate God deliver us from the evil of that day, when the dog and
the baboon fiercely slug it out in the court of Nigerian election. We
pray that He restricts their evil to them. And on that day, neither the
dog nor the baboon should not return home clean. We are tired.
Oh Lord, answer our prayer.
Let all peace-loving Nigerians say Amen.