I just took some time to carefully read the press release. I am very sorry for this situation. To live with such insecurity in one's country is terrible. The way the information was presented, however, makes me wonder about how this issue is complex but it was reduced simply to the presence of Buhari in office. It seems to be assumed that his being president made it possible because he is their patron. I know Toyin has posted many news items about this. Many people in this forum in the past have made insightful contributions about the nature of the problem.
With regard to such communal killings and fights, a lot of it had taken place in Nigeria in the past. I remember attending one annual meeting of the Association of Third World Studies, and one senior colleague who is a Nigerian and from Benue State and a high ranking military officer in the U.S., made a presentation about how some military officers under the regime of President Obasanjo went and killed many Tiv people in a community. I still remember how in his presentation he analyzed the song written by one traditional music composer and singer in the community. I remember how touching and painful it was for me to listen to his analysis. I felt the song writer felt they were like "orphans" in Nigeria or totally not seen as citizens. I know how such feeling of helpless is having grown up such communities and paid much attention to the struggles of the poorest of the poor, i.e., people who are treated like "non-persons."
There is no doubt that this situation indicates what I will call institutional or state failure. But the government failure is at different levels, federal, state,and local governments. I will add, even community failure. The fact that "Nigerians" as human beings even without government cannot see the dignity of others irrespective of ethnic,religious, class or regional differences is a much serious failure that accounts for this. If the black man cannot see the humanity of another black man, what is the moral grounds of criticizing a white person who is from far away? Charity begins at home. Killing others is not a sustainable strategy for living. I recognize the role of government but a situation where without government playing some role, people as a community cannot self-regulate their affairs just indicates something like "Hobbesian state of nature," and how the nation has failed. It is as if, the people were all along living under dictatorship and never had some autonomy to understand the value of life on their own without someone regulating them. Such stories make me feel terribly bad.
As others have long ago said, this problem is a problem of development failure, state failure, institutional failure and the failure of community leadership. Given the fertility rate in Nigeria, it is obvious that when population is rapidly increasing with scarcity of resources, this would constitute a major challenge resulting in conflict, if left alone. Often communal and political fights in Nigeria are at their core, a kind of strategic positioning in the competition for scarce resource and in some cases, ways of getting advantage in labor market competition. Beyond that, when you have large number of cattle herders and fifty years after independence, with increased population and demand for land,someone still assumes such traditional mode of livelihood will be a viable way of life as it is, without creating conflict, one is setting the country up for trouble.
I understand the argument that was made in the press release that is kind of rooted in the romanticist concept of citizenship and nationhood being something shared between present and future generations, but we can think better than that. Some Nigerians have been living in the U.S. for over 30 years now. Even if their communities have lands, that was not a strong romanticist heritage to keep them there. Some live in Nigeria but they have prospered in other parts of the country without relying on their ethnic homeland. I see nothing wrong with that. Some are even buried away from their homeland. They only return to their ethnic homeland from time to time. Their children were probably born in another part of the country or world and will live their and die. I met many people like that in Jos last year. My point in bringing this up is to stress the fact that personally, all I need to know is that the persons killed are human beings with dignity and they deserve to live and be cared for, whether it is their intention to benefit from the land or not and whether their future generation decide to restrict their future to the land or not. My father's ancestral home is in Yobe but my commitment to humanity is not rooted in some narrow sense of ancestral origin. Anthropologically, that sense of person-hood is recognized but only a step in the long process of human evolution. Lawrence Kohlberg's theory of moral development will classify such thinking as level two, where people sense of morality or justice is defined by the demands of their group instead of a broader and universal concept of human dignity. And I still believe that with good leadership in Nigeria, many will one day live and return to visit their hometowns but not necessarily having such a direct connection with land. How many people in the U.S. rely on ethnic homeland for survival? With great human capital, hopefully Africa will change and if one is qualified and is in demand, his or her future does not need to be tied to his or her ethnic homeland. The real issue for me is the human dignity of those people as human beings, period.
If we do not address human development and fertility problems in Nigeria, this kind of clash will continue. Indeed, more types of clashes will even emerge because there is a whole generation that is suffering owing to state and national failure across Africa to plan for the youth. The term that is used to describe such people is "WAITHOOD GENERATION." They have attended college, got Master's degree but still have no job and cannot get married or treat themselves as adults with full civic responsibilities. They are still waiting. This is a time bomb. Such people can use and capitalize on any primordial relationship to survive even if they are not really oriented to such kind of behavior. Some Nigerians on this forum are older than me, and so they may have a better insight, but my feeling in the Nigeria I grew up when I was young compared to one that is existing now, is that even though we had problems before but this kind of lack of respect for human life in the name of ethnicity, religion etc, did not exist to this degree as I witnessed it.
I have no way of assessing Buhari's direct involvement in this massacre as the release tries to claim, but I know that the problem is more complicated than Buhari because we have had such communal clashes in the past under different regimes e.g., Jonathan. There was one serious one in Nasarawa state. We must as much pay attention to social, economic and demographic forces as underlying causes and explanations for such conflicts just as we pay attention to human involvement and failure. What kind of national development in a country would fail to anticipate all these long ago? I was in Nigeria for a short time but I can just feel the demographic pressure and how it will lead to conflict in the future.
Furthermore, we should note that not all Fulani people are involved in this situation or that like this kind of conflict. In the long run, I will assume that the Fulanis involved will not feel secure too because in today's world, the instruments of violence are equally available to other people if they are pushed to the wall; in any case, people have the right of self-defense. But that is not the kind of country we want our people to live in. Why the governments and community leaders cannot get their heads together and get to the bottom of this problem truly bothers me and often makes me sometimes doubt the capacity of Nigerian people to solve their problems.
Samuel
On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 11:56 PM, 'Zacharys' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
This release on the Agatu killings may interest someone.
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Zacharys Anger Gundu
Department of Archaeology
Ahmadu Bello University,
Zaria.
Sent from my iPad
--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
No comments:
Post a Comment