Northern Muslims, Christians and national conference
By Sam Omatseye
Southern Kaduna is a parable as to whether we can, as a people or peoples, ever live together as one, or exercise civilised pretence. Or whether we can hug, wine and dine. Or whether we will continue to lock horns and make nights of noons.
Not long ago, a seminarian became a metaphor of such a quandary. A band of goons invaded a church, but two bare-handed priests abandoned altar civility and tore the other cheek. They repulsed them. Blood in their eyes, the frustrated bandits burned the St. Raphael’s parish rectory in Fadan Kamantan. Inside was Na’aman Danlami, the seminarian. He had entered as a human, Bible-toting, a prayer specimen, a fury for the Holy Ghost. But he came out as human toast; stiff, roasted, blackened, past praying for.
It is a malevolent reincarnation of T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedra. He was murdered in his safest place. Something did not just startle where he thought he was safest, to quote writer George Lamming. Something unsettled. He expired in fire and smoke.
The story is about the church. But it is about something larger. It is about a region crawling with fear and trembling. It is about ethnic tension, Muslim and Christian, political bickering and brick walls, about bad men walking the night. It is about a quest for equality and plunder of scarce resources. It is about cunning and sectarian murder, about cash and cassocks. Above all, it is not a story of Southern Kaduna alone. It is a story of Nigeria. The bonfire of death and fear in that region triggers the question: Should we ever convene a sovereign national conference, or when or how?
Only recently, the same region exploded in jubilant uproar when Major General C.G. Musa, one of them, was made the top man of the armed forces. They had coalesced their vote against a so-called Muslim-Muslim ticket. The pirouette in spirit came because they now perceive Tinubu as a possible friend. They have voter’s remorse. But then, under this administration they have seen not a few attacks. Now, if it was not the Tinubu administration looking the other way, what was wrong?
My investigation shows that it is as religious as it is not, and ethnic as it is not. Recently, when armed caches were unearthed, who were arrested? They were not Fulani but people bearing Christian names. One of them was named Napoleon John as gunrunner. His partner? Monday Dunia. But those who burned the seminarian were Fulani by eye-witnesses. Recently, though, eight persons were arrested by the army for killings in the place. Six had clear northern, presumably Fulani names. But two of them were William Barnabas and Adamu Joseph. So what’s going on?
This writer learned that the matter is more complicated than it seems. While the Fulani do the onslaughts, who is their spy? Some locals believe that villagers on the take collaborate with the goons and tell them who is in town, what place to pillage and when. This is a matter for the secret service to examine.
According to a source, “some clerics are taking advantage of the mayhem to make capital from both Rome and Saudi Arabia. They elicit donations when churches and mosques get burned and by parading IDPs as being persecuted for their faiths. They also exploit funding from politicians and enthusiastic international donor organisations.” The region has dignified clerics who rise above such vanities, including the well-known Bishop Hassan Kukah.
So, the ill will may not account for all or even the majority of the troubles. But it brings difficulty to the fight against terror, and in identifying the omens among men. Nor is it peculiar to southern Kaduna that persons have taken advantage of the Fulani hordes.
Former Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom made a career out of a hate of haters. He made love from a feast of haters. The herders were evil enough, but he exacted a raison d’etre to thrive on it. With dark extravaganza of public funerals of herdsmen victims, he gave life and even respectability to a career of ineptitude as governor. We have seen this in parts of the north.
The army in recent times has been combing communities for informants and collaborators in Southern Kaduna. That is an effort that should be intensified even as caches are found and arrests made. It is not a day’s job but a long, hard slog.
We have peaceful locals who are Fulani. But who is to know who is for peace and for trouble, even among the Fulani settlers?
It is the same sort of suspicion that has pervaded the country. The Yoruba and Igbo in Lagos, the Itsekiri and Ijaw in Delta, sometimes Itsekiri and Urhobo, the Ibibio and Anang, North and south, the Ikwerre and Igbo. It takes intra-ethnic colour, like the Ife and Modakeke.
But this is expected in today’s world as globalization is creating such tensions. Nations are turning into racial ramparts in Europe and North America. There is even a call to abolish the international protocol on Refugees to allow nations reject migrants swarming their shorelines. It’s what Jesus called “distress of nations and perplexities.”
It raises a question as to whether democracy is enough for the modern era. Or is it a problem of democrats? For instance, barely five decades ago, Christian natives up north craved the Fulani herdsmen and competed to welcome them to their farms. When they were leaving, they threw parties. They accepted their differences, unlike the assertion by French philosopher Montaigne, who wrote, “We all call barbarous, things that are contrary to our habits.”
It is an irony today the bad Fulani and bad locals are the ones allegedly causing friction. They make the news and make the bombs. Their guns discriminate against none. As Napoleon said, “to a cannon, all men are equal.”
In the halcyon days, they never called a national conference. They had what political scientist call a social bargain. They lived with unwritten rules. The British constitution’s beauty lies in the heart, not on the letter. It is the sort of feeling that made Idy Enang, a marketing guru to tell the Ikoyi Club celebrants at the club’s 85th anniversary symposium that he named his daughter Morenike for lack of such translation in his language.
We had a national conference under Jonathan, but it was an extravaganza of grandstanding and vaporous rhetoric. We need what Aristotle called “civic friendship,” as a prelude to free citizenship. Today, we have Christian and Muslim citizens, Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo citizens. We are yet to have Nigerian citizens. The unwritten civic bargains, as we witnessed in the last elections, are mainly ethno-religious. Such a backdrop can only doom a national conference.
We are in an age of charismatic leaders who ride populist hysteria. Our leaders can enthrone a new kind of social contract based on justice, the equity of resources and equity of recognition. It will banish kingpins of tribe and faith and announce a sojourn in citizenship. Lee kwan Yu did it so well that when a Chinese leader visited Singapore, the Chinese natives shunned his appeal to race. It is the way to mark a 63rd birthday.
