The dominant discourse in our polity today is the baseline of religion as a determinant of the 2023 Presidential election. The political demagogues and ruling elites have weaponised religion and ethnicity to drive their ambition. The crises in the country today of ethno-religious dichotomy, insecurity etc were primed a long time ago but we chose to ignore the signs even as they fed on our fragile unity.
When the Boko Haram insurgents harvested herds of female students in their numbers from Chibok in 2014, we did nothing, except for the “Bring Back our Girls” activists whom the government branded and stigmatised just to isolate them. The movement has since fizzled out while a good number of the girls remain in captivity; married off to those criminals.
They came for Dapchi where Leah Sharibu has remained a martyr of faith; and we did nothing. When they came to the school in Kankara, we did nothing. In their own case, fortune smiled on the students as they were in captivity for a more tolerable period; some of them vowed never to go back to school. There are several other instances of mass kidnap of school children and adults which are not reported, and they remain in captivity.
As time rolled by, the bandits and insurgents raised their game as they launched an audacious and ferocious attack and derailed an Abuja- Kaduna train harvesting people into captivity for huge ransom; that is not to talk about the dehumanising treatment and torture meted out to children, women and the elderly amongst them. Dozens of passengers were killed in that great train attack. They have been receiving ransom from victims’ families and have made demands on the government; and threatened to capture or kidnap Mr President and his cousin in Kaduna State if their demands are not met.
We should not take their threat lightly. They attacked the Kuje Correctional Facility in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and ambushed the elite Presidential Guards, some of the finest warriors within the FCT.
Commuting on our roads is the highest risk anyone can take in Nigeria today in any part of the country. You travel with fear and trepidation because you may fall into the hands of merciless terrorists, bandits, insurgents, armed robbers, ritual killers and unknown gunmen.
I was billed for an official engagement in Zaria, our good old city, hoping to go by road from Abuja. Some of my friends were alarmed, while others felt I had gone bonkers to contemplate such a voyage, which in their mind they likened to a journey-of-no-return. That is how bad it is.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo had the opportunity to arrest the drift into an admixture of religion and politics, which fuelled the insurgency and banditry in the north, when he dismissed then Gov. Sani Yerima’s manipulation of religion for political relevance as political Sharia that will fizzle out.
Yerima chopped off the hand of Mr Jankele for stealing a goat. The bandits were rewarded with free mining of solid minerals and gold. The movement gained traction when religious and political leaders in the north believed the distractions would cut Obasanjo’s influence to size. There was, therefore, little wonder that there was broad-based support for Mallam Yusuf Mohammed, the founder of Boko Haram, now a fully-fledged ruthless mega terrorist organisation.
Now, religion, the received religions are certain to undo the nation in their incendiary temper and intolerance. The threat that religion poses cannot go away if we do not stand up to it; there is no sitting on the fence in this matter. In his rich and very fertile book, “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon said: “Every onlooker is either a coward or a traitor.” This seminal work used to be the basic students’ pamphlet for deep insight into the interpenetration of imperialism and exploitation and underdevelopment of Africa and other third world countries, whether it is in Africa, Asia or Latin America.
Today, we are up against the local compradors and clannish feudalists driven by greed hiding under the cloak of religion and tribe who spew and hoist hatred on us. They have appropriated the country as their estate with a sense of entitlement. Nigerians must take a stand today because if we don’t stand for something now, we will fall for anything and the consequences will be calamitous. Nigerians should move against the old order with this infantile sense of entitlement, of being owners of Nigeria. Nigeria does not belong to any person or group of persons, ethnic or religious. Through bitter ethno-religious campaigns and bad politics, we have lost the chance of Nigerian citizenship and have remained tribesmen, Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba etc.
The Nigerian political class remains the same through and through. Anybody who sees any difference between the two leading political parties, the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), probably needs to have his head examined. Ordinarily, by our political culture and behaviours, the forthcoming general elections in 2023, especially the Presidential election, should be a clear contest between the two leading parties.
However, due to selfish personal reasons, the parties have jettisoned their written and unwritten rules that tend to maintain a geopolitical balancing to avoid domination of one ethnic or religious group in government. Geopolitical power equation and balancing, even though a conventional practice, is very sensitive and divisive when badly managed as we are witnessing today.
This has unwittingly birthed the phenomenal emergence of Peter Obi’s Labour Party, and the movement is huge. We are in dire straits and we should not be under any illusion that after the 2023 Presidential election things are going to improve tremendously overnight. It is probably going to get worse whoever emerges as the winner.
We cannot afford to continue after 2023 in the same state of helplessness, unemployment, insecurity and collapsing infrastructure and economy. We cannot afford to continue to live under siege, paying taxes and ransom to bandits and insurgents. We cannot afford to yield ground and space to unknown gunmen, kidnappers, ritual killers and other criminal elements. We cannot afford to have our children and other citizens live in captivity in the forest where they are harvested for ransom with the government watching helplessly. We cannot continue to relish comic stories of animals and insects devouring humongous sums of money in public tills while teaching staff of universities are not paid salaries.
We cannot afford to grow our economy through propaganda and foreign loans that will choke our children’s children while there is no food on the tables of millions of citizens. Come 2023, I want to be able to travel by road to my village in Delta State and buy plantain and bush meat without fear that I will meet bandits or kidnappers. I want to be able to take off to Kaduna by road on a weekend to say hello to old friends and acquaintances without having to write my Will. This is time for every Nigerian to speak out, now that we have the opportunity, and not sit on the fence. Let us rescue the Nigeria project.
- Kebonkwu writes from Abuja