Deserting the commonplace, some people's everyday, scholarly high seriousness for just a few seconds, fact is, instead of crying we could all do with some relaxation, some off the cuff little bit of fun, and that's my own rather trite definition of tribalism and racism :
Some People don't want some Other People to be happy, to have some fun.
Some people want to have a monopoly on happiness a monopoly on heaven and a monopoly on paradise and that's why - according to them - if you want to enter through the pearly gates you've got to be a Christian for the former ( Christ has already died for your sins) and you've got to be a good Muslim for the latter ( Allah will forgive anything but not shirk / polytheism -which means that - and this is still controversial among the ulema, that a shahid suicide bomber doesn't go to hell but is rewarded with immediate access to the 72 holy virgins that will be waiting for him (only him) and you've got to be something else , preferably a Hindu or a Buddhist if you wanna attain to the highest bliss known as nirvana.
As the bard moaned, mourning George Jackson ,
"Some of us are prisoners
The rest of us are guards "
Indeed, some of us are prisoners, and some of us are mere vermin, whilst the rest of us are gods, full fledged police constables, Bariba barbaric bad grammar correctors and full time sanitary language inspectors, journalist keyboard jihadists and other extreme examples of hubris , putting paid to the pretentious old notion that all men are equal with the more evidentially practical new one : some men are more equal than others, as some arrogant son of a Sierra Leone somebody or other is reported to have said , "We are the we and those who come after us are the weevils "
So here I am, entertaining some second thoughts about the headline subject matter, and as always as we all know, not that he is a besserwisser, not exactly, but Kperogi is always right, always in the right, never wrong or in the wrong , especially, grammatically writing and maybe like Man Friday speaking (Her Majesty's English) correctly, like the BBC special correspondent Damian Grammaticas, and that's the whole point - just as Barack Obama and he was also wholly right when he said,"I inhaled frequently - that was the whole point"., or for even more terminable precision the title of that Wole Soyinka Reith Lecture : " I am right, you are dead "
In Kperogi's case (friendly fire) the point he made or is making in his self-congratulatory "Revolt of 'repentant' Boko Haram terrorists proves my point" is either obviously or most probably a point that has been widely made ad infinitum- ad nauseam by terrorism experts and other sceptics the world over, that you can't reform or rehabilitate a real, committed, bone-hard terrorist - not one who is prepared to blow himself up and go to heaven - and if that was the case, if that were possible or preferable then Obama & the US State Department would have tried their hand at e.g. reforming and re-habilitating and reintegrating USAma bin Ladin or converting him to Buddhism, Jainism, Judaism or Christianity, instead of burying him at sea, so that terrorists and his disciples the would-be terrorists are denied the opportunity of making his burial site a place of pilgrimage, just as without remorse, some of the unrepentant so called remnants do at the grave of Baruch Goldstein , which they have converted to a place of pilgrimage to pay homage to him...
Boko Haram carnage so horrific, it's the usual topic of conversation every time the topic "Nigeria" turns up in conversation; it may even be at someone's birthday party last year, and the unflattering reaction to the every mention of Nigeria is "Boko Haram – how dreadful" , preceded or followed by "corruption - it's the curse of the nation " or " it's the system, isn't it?" This has been the case for years, and more recently in Sweden and the rest of Europe, not to mention Brexit Britain where caution and reservations about unfettered immigration is the order of the day, mention Nigeria or inadvertently Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan or Africa's most populous nation Nigeria crops up in conversation and the fear is about " World Not Ready for 240 Million Migrants If Nigeria Implodes, UN Warns" – understandably e.g. the Sweden Democrats hallucinating the refugee invasion of their country beyond " tolerable quota levels", the fear of becoming a minority in their own country which presently can only boast of a population of ten million people…
So, we are all looking forward to the post -Boko Haram and the post-corruption era and those who pray, hope that day will come soon.
We know so little about the structure or the pedagogy behind the deprogramming and de-radicalisation of the Boko Haram people. However, assuming that they are all Muslims, we are to assume that the repentance that their fellow Muslim Kperogi is talking about or has in mind should have to be Islamic in nature...
It's fine and dandy quoting what the pundits in the UK and the USA say about the feasible possibilities of metamorphosing their own home grown terrorists, but again the fact is that the Nigerian terror landscape is radically different from say, the landscape in the UK, the USA, Iraq or the scenario with Israel and the Palestinians. This means that a different approach should be more productive. In the case of Boko Haram, wily-nilly, through bloodshed & terror they believe that according to Allah's will -fisabilillah – they will create their Caliphate , some kind of " The Islamic Republic of Nigeria" to be governed by Sharia Law and as far as we can imagine, Bishop Kukah and dear Pastor Adeboye will have none of it, even if the latter is hitherto silent on the matter, it's certain that they are not masochists and they don't want to become dhimmis...
The current Boko Haram prisoners, those captured so far all Muslims, may be many, but is a mass Nigerian style deprogramming, mass Nigerian style de-radicalisation process, even taking into consideration Nigeria's special cultural and other features, is that the best way forward for the ex-terrorists and for Nigeria? What's the carrot for them if not the possibilities of a meaningful education and the prospects of some employment, to begin with?
If the de-radicalisation and reintegration into their home communities is fated to not work, then, what is the alternative? Send all the captured Boko Haram fighters to Guantanamo, lock them all up and keep them there, out of harm's way, forever?
So, here we are at the end of the day, with more questions than answers and a little of the old besserwisser, " I told you it wouldn't work, I told you so so , but you weren't listening to me, were you? "
--On Monday, 22 November 2021 at 07:45:33 UTC+1 Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:https://sundiatapost.com/revolt-of-repentant-boko-haram-terrorists-proves-my-point-by-farooq-kperogi/
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.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/798b23f3-4dbb-4b05-8a73-6219b19b4501n%40googlegroups.com.
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.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/usaafricadialogue/CAB1u_NC0637y__yk-O-E28TR5dFgRZ0X1L2m28Bq5ibRr9w3_Q%40mail.gmail.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment