Leadership (Abuja)
John Akpan
3 January 2009
column
It is a brand new year, all right, but the vestiges of our tragic failures to keep Nigeria truly one, are still here, because the painful scars of such failures are everywhere, even as we begin a new journey of hope and expectation in the new year.
The scars are not hard to find. At the close of 2008, it was the turn of Jos to go up in flames... It did, (the maddest in recent times). And now, we are back in the familiar funkhole of lamentations, investigations, and loud proclamations.
The last mayhem in Jos couldn't have been a mistake, or an unpredictable social seizure. We've had such scenes around many other major cities in Nigeria, but the point has always been what to do, the day after. For Jos, the unfolding post-madness developments there have been intriguing and engaging. We can somewhat summarise the situation in this form: The tiff between Governor Jang and President Yar'Adua will do nothing to help in the social understanding of why some people kill, or become willing to die in the name of the Lord. Hundreds of Nigerians died for reasons of such warped understanding of their religion between November 28 and 30, 2008. Since then, high-wired politics has set in. And following this, we have had some public media reports of Gov. Jang allegedly defying President Yar'Adua, President Yar'Adua, snubbing Gov. Jang, and both empanelling different committees to study the causes of the charred bones, cars and houses, etc, to write and submit their reports on what happened, and how it probably will not recur.
I am particularly interested in the manner of power configuration and projection, between President Yar'Adua and Gov. Jang in the aftermath of the Jos carnage. There are three different committees to work on the Jos crisis, but two stand out, because of their embedded intent and social implications. First is the Yar'Adua panel, headed by Major-Gen. Emmanuel Abisoye. The second is the Jang panel, headed by Justice Bola Ajibola. You can easily read off the obvious socio-political currents of this development. Here is a pure civilian president, going for a soldier - headed investigation panel, to undertake findings into an alleged socio-political crisis, and a pure air force general, going for a civilian - headed panel to investigate a crisis which, some alleged, certain people in uniform may have helped in one way or another to spread. It also appears that while the president may hope for snappy, precise military solutions or recommendations, the governor may have preferred a more careful and deliberate, legal arbitrational approach, and there is equally an intra and inter-regional colouration in the set-up, to this search for the solution. We would need no further explanation on the last score.
The outline characterisation of these two panels, as set up by President Yar'Adua and Gov. Jang, may not necessarily hold much water. It's indeed, my own imagination. The other panel, by the way, is military, constituted by Air Marshal Paul Dike; and to add to the mix, Gov. Jang has reportedly sued President Yar'Adua. In all, we must be bothered about these various levels of official reaction to the Jos killings. How will all these work to ensure that Nigerians don't kill their compatriots over religious differences again?
Let us say that Gov. Jang's response to President Yar'Adua's action would ordinarily look like the case of democracy at work. But it is not necessarily so, because the message members of the public would get may not be the type that would reconcile, unite, encourage and lead them into seeing the folly of their acts. The danger, therefore, is that President Yar'Adua's move could be claimed and supported by a section of the Jos, or indeed, the entire Plateau society, while Gov. Jang could also gather supporters of his action into another camp. Such a situation would not make for reconciliation and peace.
Some of us who knew much about the social atmosphere of Jos, Kaduna, Kano, etc, for years, are now sadder over the poisoned atmosphere of these places. Also to be decried is the total recklessness of the way some public affairs commentators interpret and present the Jos madness. Some have been so acidly sectional, and we should admit that such is certainly not the way to build peace in a volatile environment like ours. But I also think that the temperament of the Plateau State's political leadership should be held responsible, because the governor himself sometimes does sound distant, combative, and even needlessly arrogant - peacemakers and promoters ought to be humble and collected. In specifics, therefore, we can isolate three chief factors that probably made the Jos North social environment conducive for the mindless killings to happen.
The first is the deadening weight of a combination of religious ignorance and poverty. This has considerably weighed down on the socio-economic atmosphere, making 'enemies' out of fellow poor Nigerians. The second factor would be the internal practices of candidate-imposition within the PDP power chambers. Look around all those theatres of political violence, it hasn't always been easy to run any crisis-free elections, because of the disruptive activities of political godfathers, party patrons and grandees.
The third factor is the shameful notion of settler mentality in our federal republic. What happened in the Jos North council area, was the combination of these combustible factors, and we must condemn it, but we also need to do much more. This government has to govern in ways that will, in practical terms, empower the people, through social provisioning and public education. National Assembly members should be reminded that what they currently claim to be doing in the enclosures of their chambers, will eventually come terribly short of everything, if they fail to let Nigerians know what changes they themselves will desire in their constitution. For religion, I believe that God is self-sufficient, all-knowing and most powerful, and therefore, it's crazy for anybody to want to kill for God; and completely insane to want to die for the same reason, because, as taught, the knowledge of God should bring righteousness, salvation and eternal life. Happy New Year.
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