Tag: bullets

DEATH is another fable that shouldn’t be said aloud, in the house of Idrisu. It rages in unspoken words. Rukaya, the surviving child of the family, has learnt to speak of it quietly, in a whisper. If you move close enough, you could hear the authoritative pellets and barbed arrows, poisoned spears and pointed swords, as they hurtled through the air, to hack down her family and defenseless neighbours.

Stoically, the 53-year-old rehashed the scenes in which her parents and younger brother were bludgeoned to death by the rampaging hordes of Zangon-Kataf, Kaduna State, in May 1992. In a voice laden with grief and the feral nuance of a bereaved survivor, Idrisu recalled that the violence was triggered over a “childish” dispute over ownership and control rights to a local market between the native Atyap farming community and their Hausa neighbours, a settler community.

“I was grinding locust beans for my mother at the backyard when I heard a shrill cry from within our house. Fearfully, I rushed inside to meet a gang of armed youths, mostly teenagers, marching through our corridor. They caught me and hit me repeatedly with blood-stained clubs. They dragged me into our living room where I saw my father gasping for breath over the lifeless bodies of my mother and younger brother.

“I screamed and tried to rush to his aid but I was held back and made to watch as one innocent-looking boy laughed maniacally and dealt a final blow to the back of his head with a digger (backhoe).

“I heard the crunching sound of his skull breaking and I watched helplessly as my father choked to death, on his own blood. They promised not to subject me to such painful execution. They promised to be lenient with me,” disclosed Idrisu.

But if the 53-year-old learnt anything from her experience, it was that leniency could at times be worse than death. The assailants raped her repeatedly urging her to be thankful. “They said I was going to enjoy myself to death. When my screams became unbearable to them, the sixth boy to take turn on me stuffed my mouth with his dirty boxers. It was then that I began to feel dead. I became very dizzy and everything turned black. I feigned unconsciousness,” she said.

Yet the hyperactive teenager “continued doing it until he was satisfied,” said Idrisu. Then he got off her and took after his gang as they engaged in hot pursuit of some other victims. Idrisu, shaken and awfully worn, removed the boxers from her mouth staring at the spilled guts of her mother and the innards of her father’s skull.

The grotesqueness of the sight and the rancid smell wafting from her genitals made her very nauseous, she claimed. Thus she vomited twice all over their carpet. “I felt sick to the stomach. Those boys were very smelly. Days after I was rescued and relocated to Makurdi to live with my uncle (her late mother’s younger brother), I could still perceive the terrible stench wafting from their mouths, armpits and genitals. I can still smell them now,” said Idrisu, adding that she had been having persistent nightmares ever since.

But despite the magnitude of her loss and the recurrent nightmares, Idrisu couldn’t stay away from Zangon-Kataf. “It’s the only home that I have come to know. My uncle’s wife thinks it was foolish of me to have returned here but she wouldn’t understand. I cannot leave my father’s house to be inhabited and destroyed by strangers. It’s all that I have left to remind me of my family and the love we once shared,” she said.

A vintage glass shelf stands over the spot of her family’s execution like a shield positioned to wipe out unpleasant memories of her past. But Idrisu claimed that it was never her intention to use the shelf as a screen. “I have moved on. That shelf stands there because there is no other place that I could put it in the house. As you can see, I have rented out most of the rooms in the house. Life goes on,” she said.

But life drags like a rickety wheel to Tanko Maijeida. The septuagenarian is caught in the violent web of his past. Although no shot from the buried wars can kill him now, a bullet from resurrected skirmishes killed his son. Consequently, Tanko Majeida welcomes every new dawn like a setting sun.

“There is really nothing left to live for,” said the native of Jema’a, Kaduna. Maijeida lost Mahmud, his only son, to the rampaging hordes of Bulbulla, Jos. Woefully, he recounted the scene in which his son was shot to death in the sectarian crisis that pitted the Berom and Jasawa tribes in the state against each other in the twilight of 2008.

According to him, Mahmud was hacked to death by people who were supposed to be his friends and co-apprentices at the furniture company where he worked.

“It’s so sad that our people have learnt to think with the machete and speak with bullets. My son had nothing to do with their fight. He wasn’t Berom and he wasn’t Jasawa. And he resided in a part of town heavily populated by the Yoruba and Igbo. Yet they killed him. They pushed him out to the warlords who attacked the house of a client in which he was working.

“Eye witnesses said that his co-apprentices, after pointing him to his assailants, joined in beating him. Then they held him as he was shot in the neck…My late wife died giving birth to his only sister. She is all I have left. I have no son to carry on my lineage,” lamented Maijeida, choking back tears.

Despite his irreparable loss, Maijeida believes in the capacity of the average Nigerian to be good. “As there are bad people, we also have good people. There are still some very kind Nigerians in this country. I was rescued by a Berom family on the day my son was hacked to death by members of the same tribe. I wish they had killed me instead,” he lamented.

Not ethnic enough

And while Milda Ogoka’s grief may seem milder, it is of a more insidious nature, she claimed. The native of Abia State lamented her inability to progress professionally due to her employer’s knack for placing ethnic interests above merit.

“He is Igbo and yet he discriminates against fellow Igbo. He prefers to employ and promote people from his native Anambra to plum positions. And he is brazenly supported by his wife who is also from Anambra. I have spent 13 years working for them and even though I was in line to become the next General Manager, Southwest Operations, after the former one resigned, our chairman ordered the Administrative Manager to rescind the management’s initial recommendation to appoint me to the position. To pacify me, he increased my salary and gave me an official car. It’s so unfair. I would have resigned but the new GM pleaded with me to stay. She is my friend and she admitted that she knew I had been wronged. She arrived four years after I started working at the company and she got employed by my recommendation. Yet she was given my spot because she hails from the chairman’s hometown,” said Ogoka.

A similar sore festers within the cadres of a southwest civil service (currently under investigation) where non-Yoruba are allegedly denied the opportunity of progressing beyond a certain grade level.

“If you are not Yoruba, you cannot become a director or permanent secretary in the state. It is wrong. Promotion should be handed out by merit. Your ethnicity shouldn’t be criteria for rewarding your efficiency,” stated Ifeoma Ahaegbuna, a victim and staff of the affected ministry.

But in a swift response, a senior staff of the establishment stated that Ahaegbuna’s claim is unfounded.

“Nobody does that here. Not in any state in the southwest. It is what they do to our people in the state civil services in southeast Nigeria. Many Yoruba come back dejected after being robbed of their due positions and rewards because they are not Igbo. There was a case of a woman who remained assistant head teacher till she retired even though her Igbo contemporaries and subordinates got promoted and became head teachers. She did the promotion exams and passed, yet she was never invited for oral interview. She eventually resigned and came back home against the counsel of her Igbo husband,” he said.

Tribal love and other stereotypes

The manifestations of the ethnic scourge permeate every aspect of life across the country. Even the hallowed and much romanticised confines of love and marriage aren’t impermeable to its blight. Consider the case of Bisi Shogbade, a lecturer and widower; his fiancée’s parents have been against his proposal to wed their daughter right from the moment he disclosed his intentions.

“Even though her father hails from Anyagbai, Kogi State, and her mother, a native of Benin, Edo State, are both products of inter-ethnic marriage, they vehemently refused to let me wed her. They claimed they would never let their daughter wed a Yoruba man,” lamented the native of Osogbo, Osun State. And to his chagrin, his fiancee of seven years succumbed to her parents’ wish.

“I met and pleaded with her mum but she was adamant. And their daughter followed suit claiming she could not go into a marriage her parents wouldn’t bless with consent,” said Shogbade.

Ethnic chauvinism has so far been responsible for the wanton stereotypes of Nigerian tribes. Each tribe is associated with vices and anomalies peculiar to them.

Beyond the sanctity of love and wedlock, and the cutthroat world of business, ethnicity has become a common feature and bargaining chip in local politics. This, Abiodun Akande, a sociologist and historian, attributes to the fact that Nigeria’s national identity has been at odds since the colonial era, with the appeal of more exclusive ethnic identity as fostered by the country’s colonialists.

Birth of prejudice

Akande is probably not too far from the truth; in pre-independence Nigeria, party politics and formation assumed an ethnic colouration, even as it metamorphosed into the post-independent First Republic.  The Action Group developed from the political wing of the cultural association of the Yoruba educated elite, the Egbe Omo Oduduwa; the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons (NCNC) was closely allied with the Igbo State union and played a significant role in the internal affairs of the party, while the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) was founded by the Fulani aristocracy. In the smaller ethnic groups, a local political party was often indistinguishable from the cultural association. And more significantly, the division of the country into three regions for administrative convenience by the Richards Constitution of 1946 led to the development of strong regional feeling.

The consequence of this was that by 1953, the major political parties in Nigeria – NCNC, AG and NPC, were associated with the major ethnic groups and the three regions, Western, Eastern and the Northern regions. To further crystallize the tripartite ethnic cleavages, the party leaderships were structured accordingly: the Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, led the NPC of the North; Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe held the ace for the Igbos’ NCNC, while Chief Obafemi Awolowo led the AG in the Yoruba southwest – each leader representing his regional divide.

It was, however, the absence of well organised, strong, visionary and purposeful cross national political parties with organisational depth that led in part to the collapse of the First Republic, according to Ademola Azeez, Department of Political Science, University of Ilorin (UNILORIN).

According to Emmanuel Udogu, a Professor of International, Comparative and African Politics, it is safe to contend that many individuals might not consider it insulting to be referred to as ethno-nationalists, “Because the concept generally implies the love for one’s ethnic group. Yet there is often a hidden problem stemming from the psychological and primordial attachment to one’s ethnic group in a pluralistic society. The situation in a polity such as Nigeria becomes more problematic when the politics of who gets what, when and how, gravitates toward ethnic clashes and antagonisms.”

You don’t sell your father’s house to buy a land

The political equation no doubt becomes more confounding and discordant in democratic and pluralistic societies like Nigeria where an overwhelming sense of communal solidarity tends to intensify ethnic preference, so much so that in the struggle for power, to promise less for one’s group in the spirit of harmony and impartiality, was tantamount to betraying ethnic interests.

Little wonder then that another influential minister in the country’s Second Republic, allegedly expressed, proverbially, his concern about the inauguration of a national conference by the late Sani Abacha’s military administration. He reportedly said: “No man becomes a hero by selling his father’s house to buy a land.”

What the minister implied, was that Abacha, a northerner, was by the scope of the national conference he inaugurated, selling off northern interests without surety of what he would get in return. Although the assertion was later refuted, the moral within is applicable to many ethnic groups and their disposition to both grassroots and national politics.

Nigerians won’t forget easily the ugly resurgence of desperate tribal agitation in the wake of President Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat at the March 28, 2015 presidential elections. Jonathan lost his seat to incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Just recently, Nnamdi Kanu, leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), led a very bitter and hostile campaign for the Southeast’s secession from the Nigerian state in vehement protest against the leadership of President Buhari. Kanu, in flagrant violation of his bail terms, constituted a hostile Biafra Secret Service and made pronouncements classifiable as hate speech.

Activities of Kanu’s IPOB led to the Nigeria Army’s inauguration of Operation Python Dance in his southeastern base of operation. Kanu’s whereabouts remain shrouded in mystery, while security agencies are still hunting for him. His IPOB group has also been classified as a terrorist group by the Nigerian state.

A never-ending bloodbath

Religious polarisation and ethnic bigotry feed upon one another to spark bloody clashes across the federation.

Boko Haram a.k.a Jamā’at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-Da’wah wa’l-Jihād (Group of the People of Sunnah for Preaching and Jihad), an Islamic extremist terrorist group based in Northeast Nigeria and active in Chad, Niger and Northern Cameroon,  has  killed tens of thousands and displaced 2.3 million from their homes since its advent in 2009. It was currently ranked as the world’s deadliest terror group by the Global Terrorism Index of 2015.

And very few people would forget the massacre of 2, 000 people about 16 years ago in communal clashes sparked by introduction of Shari’a (Islamic law) in Kaduna State. Two years, later, violence triggered in part by a controversy surrounding plans to hold the Miss World beauty contest in Northern Nigeria claimed about 250 lives.

Despite the massive loss of lives and property in past conflicts, acts of violence recurred in the troubled zone. On April 18, 2011, for instance, hell was let loose in Southern Kaduna, particularly in Zonkwa, following the post-election crisis that erupted in many states in the North.

Residents fled from Zonkwa, Kafanchan and other trouble spots during the post-election violence. During the fracas, fleeing youths hid in pit latrines and wells but the unlucky ones were gunned down, slaughtered, burnt alive or dumped in wells. Although most women and children were spared, they were subjected to humiliation.

Out of the 38, 976 displaced persons, over 90 percent are women and children, according to the statistics obtained from the Nigerian Red Cross.

In addition to providing a new set of triggers for violent conflict, the increasing tendency for communal tensions to be expressed in religious terms has drawn groups into violent conflict that have no interest in the deeper underlying causes of ethnic and religious violence across Nigeria.

“Ignorance of the followers of our different faiths and manipulation of religion for personal gains by the political class with the help of clerics from both religions has made it difficult for Nigerians to enjoy harmonious coexistence,” according to Rev. Joseph Hayab, Northern Coordinator, Global Peace Foundation of Nigeria (GPFN) and former Special Adviser on Religious Affairs (Christian Matters), Kaduna State.

“To guarantee religious freedom and peace, we must fight ignorance and replace it with good knowledge. We must not allow our religious leaders and groups to instigate us against one another by bringing unhealthy debates and competition into every issue of national discuss,” he said.

Burying the ethnic divide

Dr. Rahman Lawal, the Head of Mission, Nadwat, an Islamic religious group, argued that, “From time immemorial, religious sects had harmonious relationship amongst one another; even the minorities were not sidelined or intimidated.  It’s modern day politicians that broke the bond of brotherly existence and mutual respect amongst the various religious faiths, through their Machiavellian approach of polarisation via ethnic bigotry and hegemony.”

Lawal advised that the Nigerian press, “As Fourth Estate of the realm should foster interfaith, ethnic harmony and tolerance by producing balanced and unbiased reports. Hate must not be fed by the government and the press.”

Rahman and Hayab were participants in a recent Interfaith Leadership and Human Rights project, under the International Visitors Leadership Programme (IVLP) sponsored by the United States Department of State. The duo with eight other Nigerian clerics and a journalist met with colleagues in the US over a three-week period to deliberate on measures of achieving religious freedom and tolerance amid diverse populations and secular government.

Rev. Cyprian Imandeh, Catholic Priest, Archdiocese of Abuja (FCT), however, argued: “Justice is what we need. A system that has respect for rule and order can guarantee peaceful coexistence amongst all regard less of religious affiliation. Once there is justice we can all arrive at our goal.”

Head, Legal Department of the Christian Home for the Needy (CHN), Helen Agbonkonkon, argued: “Section 38 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (1999) clearly guarantees freedom of thought, conscience and religion but in practice, such freedom is only an illusion. Religious freedom and peace can only be guaranteed in Nigeria, if and only if there is a platform for equality, tolerance and acceptance. There must be concerted effort by all and sundry to work for it. We can borrow the American concept of describing freedom of religion as inalienable right which no state or government can control,” she said.

Pastor Wale Afelumo of the Inspiration Life Community Church, Abuja, said: “Until we see our differences as a strength and not as a threat, peace will elude us. We must welcome one another as equal contributors and brothers. I end with Martin Luther King Jr’s words…’If we do not learn to live together as brothers, then we will perish together as fools.”

Angela Madueke, Pastor of Enugu-based Excellent People Intercessory Ministry noted that, “Nigeria is a country blessed with rich cultural and language diversities. It’s unthinkable to assume that all these people should worship God the same way.” She stated that, “for religious freedom and peace to exist, freedom of worship must be succinctly observed and everybody should be treated with dignity and respect they deserve. The golden rule, “live and let live” should be enshrined into the body politics of the nation and tolerance must be a watchword,” she said.

Sheikh Taofeeq Ibrahim, National Missioner, Peace and Conflict Resolution, Islamic Movement of Nigeria (ILMAN), stated that, “Religious freedom and peace can only be guaranteed in Nigeria if corruption can be given a spiritual vaccine. Also, there should be a bill that will distance religion activities from the politics of the nation.

This is because the manipulation of religion by some powerful individuals who hide under the guise of religion to pursue selfish interests remains a major bane to peace, ethnic and religious tolerance in the country.”

Udogu, however, suggested the writing of a new constitution capable of resolving the country’s resource control and ethno-religious and political conflicts. He advocated the composition of a truly representative governance system and constitutional framework with federal character. It is the only way to detribalise governance and politics in the ethnic mosaic that is Nigeria, he said.

On another note, Umar Habila Dadem Danfulani of the University of Jos (UNIJOS), stated that the use of military force and emergency powers cannot permanently resolve the problem posed by sectarian violence given its historical, ethnic, elitist, class and religious character.

The Nigerian citizenry must be mobilised towards engaging and embracing the political reality of multiculturalism and on the basis of this recognition, address the challenge of multicultural citizenship.