On October 9, Pakistani Taliban shot and wounded a 14-year-old girl, Malala Yousafzai, for campaigning for girls’ education in the formerly notorious Swat Valley in Northwest Pakistan. The shooting, according to reports, has outraged the world and incensed the normally indifferent but violent Pakistani society which has connived at extremism for so long and even yielded supinely to the disruptive and atavistic campaigns of non-secular groups. The Swat Valley, it will be recalled, was invaded and occupied by the Taliban for two years between 2007 and 2009. Under the Taliban, who operate in Pakistan and Afghanistan, girls’ education is violently detested, and girls must go to extreme and dangerous lengths to receive education, sometimes on pain of death. But in spite of being driven out from the region, the Taliban still muster a lot of power to cause the kind of harm to which Malala was subjected early last week.
It is an irony that the education many societies, including Nigeria, take for granted, comes at a terrible price for many others like Malala. Ehsanullah Ehsan, spokesman of the Taliban, was quoted as saying the schoolgirl activist would be targeted again if she survives her current ordeal. There are probably millions like her in Pakistan and Afghanistan who would give an eye and an arm to receive the education that has become considerably cheapened in countries like Nigeria. They go to secret schools by day or by night depending on which option presents the least possible target for the Taliban enforcers. Consequently, they value the little education they receive, and agonise over an uncertain future in which the schisms in their society, which manifests in the struggle between modernism and traditionalism, portend grave danger for female education.
If we recollect that the Taliban movement nearly took hold in Northern Nigeria through the efforts of the Islamic sect, Boko Haram (Western education is sin), it can best be imagined, given the Pakistani experience, how dangerously close we sailed near the wind some six to seven years ago. For Nigeria, the danger is by no means over. But beyond the danger constituted to education by various extremist groups, or the saddening fact that the low quality of Nigerian education has neither made democracy safe nor advanced the cause of tolerance, is the symbolic impact the Malala shooting is having on Pakistan itself. The Asian country has now seemed to wake up horrified to the dangers of continuing to indulge both cultural and religious extremism, and is cobbling together a preliminary consensus against the kind of violence meted out to Malala.
Whether Pakistan can harness the present outrage against the shooting to defeat the cancer of intolerance that has eaten deep into their society is another thing, for extremism has already taken root in that beleaguered country. Abrogating girls’ education is merely a manifestation of the extremism which societies in the region have either gladly embraced or reluctantly succumbed to. Much more importantly, the shooting of Malala is a natural progression from the regimen of extremism enthroned by the Pakistani government. Extremists are insatiable. From one little concession, they have mastered the art of asking for a dozen more, until there are no more concessions to be solicited or given. In the final analysis, extremists always seek the overthrow of an existing order. Pakistan is today suffering the pangs of the abnormality its weak and compromised elite have allowed to fester. Nigeria should learn from Pakistan’s tragedy.
