The situation is very serious. Further polarization between Muslim and
Christian, between North and South. A probable protracted state of
emergency, with soldiers and military police in the streets,
everywhere, instead of in their barracks, where they belong. Nigeria
is on the precipice of being destabilized even before the next
presidential election and the most recent posting I read from another
Nigerian forum suggests that we are about to witness a coup d'état.
Where would we be then? We'd be in sh-t creek.
To quote the posting fully :
"Sudden eruption of violence,
meaningless threats like Atiku and IBB's,
bombings in the name of Allah in the North,
and bombings for Satan in the South,
police extra judicial killings,
Soldiers lining up innocent citizens and executing them in broad
daylight.
............and to top it all, a deluded populace with brother Tope
Fasua leading the pack........
All of the above, my peoples, I call "PRELUDE TO A COUP".
It's good that you (Farooq) speak up. The voice of reason should be
listened to. Of course it would be even better if your insights could
filter across to where your words could have more of an effect – on
the ground, in Nigeria. Perhaps you could offer your advice and
recommendations to the Nigerian Authorities. If you were to teach say
on Nigerian national TV and get across the contents of this your
posting - it should be having an impact on people's lives. But to
merely state them on an elite forum doesn't go far enough.
On 23rd of October 2009, I had lunch with the station Master of the
Freedom Radio station of Kano, Muryar Jamaa, during the European
Development Days conference in Stockholm. He was the sole Nigerian
representative at that conference. That's a radio station that should
interview you.
http://www.freedomradionig.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1&limit=4&limitstart=8
I was fortunate and he gave me some other insights and quite a
different perspective on the Boko Haram.This shows how differently we
may see things from a distance:
I reported about that meeting, here:
http://groups.google.com/group/usaafricadialogue/browse_thread/thread/66bdc1708c691985/60ead68d9e3696ed?lnk=gst&q=#60ead68d9e3696ed
This time, just like the last time, everyone's disgusted about this
cycle of violence, of revenge and counter-revenge. The cycle is likely
to continue unless the government and its security agencies do their
duty and get serious about tackling the problem and protecting the
lives of all Nigerian citizens. It's not bloody likely that after the
ritual platitudes and all the disgust has been expressed or spread by
the Nigerian & international media , "the nation will be anesthetized
into a false sense of security and normalcy, the culprits will never
be ferreted out much less punished, and everybody will go to sleep:"
Radical literalism put on hold:
http://www.africanexaminer.com/manroorah0102
The half dozen other Nigerian forums that I belong to have been
discussing this issue and we've been there before, several times.
There are so many causes of this bloodshed: Jos has its own particular
problems (the immigrants to Jos vs. the indigenes etc) The Boko Haram
and how to de-radicalise them is another set of problems that has to
be addressed. High-handed brutal military action of the type that
massacred so many members of Boko Haram including its leader, so
ruthlessly, in Maiduguri is not the solution. On that occasion there
were not even any prisoners of war taken to be put on trial. The
leader could have been put on trial instead of being slaughtered. The
Boko Haram ideology could have been put on trial - and perhaps
defeated – by giving some reasons for the necessity of a Western
education, although, in my view, it should not be treasonable offence
if one does not want to go for a secular/ Western education. Nor do I
believe that the solution is for such a religious group to be
exterminated. That's called genocide. The recent Boko Haram actions
are probably counter-measures, revenge, for that earlier police
military massacre.
In the 80s the Maitatsine Sect was operating in the Borno, Gongola
area and had many supporters. I thought that that sect faded away, and
was surprised to read this a few days ago – and take note about the
helpless "locals who have to join 'religious community' "out of
necessity":
http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=200088
On Jan 2, 2:54 am, "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkper...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> Saturday, January 1, 2011
> Jos bombings: Can we for once be truthful?
> *By Farooq A. Kperogi*
>
> A monstrous mass murder of innocent souls has occurred in Jos
> again<http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/articles/newsflash/multiple-xmas-...>
> and
> we are, as always, being insulted with unimaginative, flyblown, and
> soporific platitudes by our political, media, and clerical elites. Almost
> every prominent Nigerian who has commented on this heartless, high-tech mass
> slaughter has mouthed one of three predictably ready-made bromides: oh, this
> is all about politics, not religion; it's a failure of security and
> leadership; and it's the consequence of poverty.
>
> This is the safe, standard, prepackaged rhetorical frippery that our elites
> effortlessly regurgitate whenever violent communal convulsions erupt in any
> part of the country. But this is getting insufferably trite. If the
> hypocrisy or intellectual laziness that actuates these thoughtless,
> simplistic sound bites didn't have far-reaching consequences for our
> continued existence as a nation and, in fact, our very survival as a people,
> one would simply yawn in silence and ignore them.
>
> But it so often happens that after these hypocritical, clichéd phrases are
> uttered, the nation will be anesthetized into a false sense of security and
> normalcy, the culprits will never be ferreted out much less punished, and
> everybody will go to sleep—until the next upheaval recrudesces and jolts us
> all out of our pigheaded complacence.
>
> <http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_cIW44Bimg1A/TR9elwK1sXI/AAAAAAAAAyI/MZlXjqz...>
> A
> scene from the bombings in Jos
>
> And then the predictably mind-numbing, mealy-mouthed banalities will be
> invoked again by the elites to explain away what happened, and so on and so
> forth. This rhetorical formula is safe because it absolves people in
> political and cultural authority from the triple burdens of thinking,
> confronting uncomfortable truths, and taking action. That's why politicians
> are often ironically the first to blame "politicians" for the episodic fits
> violence that now habitually punctuate our national life. Well, "politician"
> is a floating signifier that encapsulates everybody in politics, and what
> refers to everybody, as they say, refers to nobody. Case closed.
> To be sure, political manipulation, inept security and leadership, and
> poverty are all deeply implicated in the perpetual cycle of violence and
> recriminations that have become fixtures in our socio-political landscape.
> But a murderous pervasion of religious doctrines and violent, unthinking
> ethnic particularism are even greater culprits. People who are brainwashed
> into believing that those who don't share their faith deserve to be
> murdered, or people who are so wedded to their ethnicity that they lack the
> capacity to tolerate others, are just as dangerous and as culpable—if not
> more so— as the politicians who "manipulate" them.
>
> Poverty, in and of itself, does not predispose people to violence. There
> are much poorer countries in Africa than Nigeria that are remarkably
> peaceful. Take, for an example, Benin Republic, our western neighbor. Or
> Senegal, an over-90-percent Muslim country that elected a Roman Catholic as
> its first president. And, of course, security lapses become an issue only in
> societies that have a predisposition to senseless, unprovoked violence, such
> as ours.
>
> Now, a group which calls itself Jama'atu Ahlus Sunnah Lid Da'awati Wal Jihad
> hasclaimed responsibility for the deadly
> bombs<http://www.saharareporters.com/news-page/video-jama%E2%80%99atu-ahlus...>
> in
> Jos. It also claims to have perpetrated its savage murder of innocents, some
> of whom may in fact be Muslims, on behalf of Muslims and Islam. But the
> preponderance of reactions to this unsettling revelation among our Muslim
> leaders and commentators, including security
> agencies<http://dailytrust.dailytrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=ar...>,
> has been to impulsively dismiss the group's claim even when they have no
> contrary evidence—much like Goodluck Jonathan and his minions unthinkingly
> exculpated the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) of
> responsibility for the October 1 terrorist attacks even when the group
> actually claimed responsibility for the attacks. Same attitude, different
> personalities. That is the Nigerian story.
>
> One uncomfortable fact that our elites in northern Nigerian have been shy to
> confront meaningfully and fearlessly is that we do have a worryingly
> enervating crisis of noxious religious literalism. By religious literalism I
> mean lazy, literal, and de-contextualized reading of religious texts, which
> current Central Bank governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi almost singlehandedly
> fought for several years in newspaper articles when he was an ordinary
> banker. I've heard so much thoroughgoing hate and blatant call to murder by
> local, often ignored, religious clerics in the name of sermonizing. These
> are unmentionable sermons that will curdle the blood of any sane person and
> cause them to wonder if they share the same humanity as these ignorant,
> homicidal clerics. Boko Haram's leader's video justifying and claiming
> responsibility for the Jos
> bombings<http://www.saharareporters.com/news-page/video-jama%E2%80%99atu-ahlus...>
> is
> an eerie echo of these hateful sermons.
>
> But I know these sermons to be atrociously grotesque perversions of Islam's
> core teachings because I am the son of a Muslim scholar who knows as much
> about Islam as any educated Muslim should. My 80-something-year-old dad
> taught me to read and write in Arabic before I even learned to read in the
> Roman alphabet. And my dad's dad was a Christian. So were many of his
> brothers and sisters--in a predominantly Muslim community. Yet we lived in
> peace. My dad always took care to remind us, like all broadminded Muslim
> scholars do or should, that the references to "unbelievers" in the Qur'an
> are not to Christians or Jews; they are to seventh-century Arabian idolaters
> who launched unprovoked attacks against the emergent Islamic religion.
>
> Christians and Jews are properly called "*ahlul kitaab*" (translated as
> "people of the book") in the Qur'an. Although the relationship between early
> Muslims in the 7thcentury and Christians was not without problems, it was,
> for the most part, marked by tolerance as evidenced in several Qur'anic
> verses.
>
> Examples: "Surely those who believe, and those who are Jews, and the
> Christians, and the Sabians -- whoever believes in God and the Last Day and
> does good, they shall have their reward from their Lord. And there will be
> no fear for them, nor shall they grieve" (2:62, 5:69, and many other similar
> verses); "[A]nd nearest among them in love to the believers will you find
> those who say, 'We are Christians,' because amongst these are men devoted to
> learning and men who have renounced the world, and they are not arrogant"
> (5:82).
>
> In the second verse, you can almost mentally picture the Nigerian Reverend
> Hassan Matthew Kukah and many (Catholic) priests.
>
> But ignorant, hate-filled, and hidebound religious literalists have stripped
> adherents of other Abrahamic faiths of their status as "people of the book"
> and have dressed them in the borrowed robes of "unbelievers." And they are
> straining hard to make gullible people believe that all the scriptural
> verses about retaliatory aggression against "unbelievers" in the Qur'an
> refer to Christians and Jews.
>
> Unfortunately, these hitherto fringe perverts of the message of the Qur'an
> are beginning to enjoy a position of dominance in northern Nigeria's
> religious discourse, and many sane, thinking people are afraid to contradict
> them, lest they be tagged as "hypocrites" or "sympathizers of unbelievers"
> and then murdered.
>
> I know I speak for millions of silent Nigerian Muslims when I say that these
> blood-thirsty, homicidal beasts who murdered innocent men, women, and
> children in the name of Islam don't represent us. But until enough Muslim
> leaders and commentators come out to openly denounce these people and the
> ideology of hate that animates them, they will continue to hijack and
> appropriate the mainstream, and we will all pay dearly for this--literally
> and symbolically.
>
> But, first, the perpetrators must be made to face the consequences of their
> murders. Unfortunately, Goodluck Jonathan has robbed himself of the moral
> capital to bring these murderers to justice because he also publicly
> shielded his own MEND
> kinsmen<http://farooqkperogi.blogspot.com/2010/10/mendacious-president.html>from
> the consequences of their own savage terrorism against Nigeria.
>
> The question is: can we afford to go on like this, especially now that we
> are entering a really dangerous phase of mutual annihilation through bombs?
> Certainly, our elites' habitual, knee-jerk, platitudinous reactions to
> communal violence will hasten our collective ruination. But we need to
> always remember that the consequences of a violent break-up of Nigeria won't
> be pretty for everybody.
>
> Tolerance, understanding, and the acceptance of our diversity are the only
> values that can sustain us a nation.
>
> 1 Park Place South
> Suite 817C
> Atlanta, GA, USA.
> 30303
> Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
> Blog:www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
>
> "The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either
> proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
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