Lagos — While Christians world-wide were celebrating the Easter festivities marking the death and resurrection of the Christian Messiah last Monday, a group in Niger State here in Nigeria was receiving a raw deal from their fellow country men.

As the celebrating Christians in Minna, the Niger State capital and nearby Gwada town, were engaged in customary Easter Galilee picnic by marching round the towns with songs and drumming, some youths emerged and began armed attacks on them.

Reports say many where injured, properties were destroyed and churches were set ablaze. In Gwada, three churches were razed. The pattern was repeated in Minna where the Baptist church was targeted.

The attackers, who were identified as Muslim fundamentalists, were on a mission to disrupt the Easter Monday festivals in the state.

As mentioned earlier, these attacks have become all too familiar in their origination and objectives designed to intimidate and extirpate contending non religious and economic view-points.

The attribution of these purely anti-social activities to Muslim fundamentalists is particularly unfortunate in that it detracts from the purely criminal essence of the attacks on fellow Nigerians who, theoretically, should enjoy the same constitutional rights of freedom from persecution as their attackers.

What makes these attacks on Christians in states of the north more ominous is the loud silence of the religious and traditional leaders in the region in not condemning them. The inability or unwillingness of state and federal authorities to arrest, prosecute and convict the known perpetrators and their sponsors is also baffling.

As we argued on these pages at the beginning of the year when the spiritual head of Nigerian Muslims, His Eminence, Sultan Said Abubakar implored fellow traditional and religious leaders in the North to do more to curb the quasi ethno-religious mayhems in their domains, it is inconceivable that attacks like those in Jos, Bauchi, Gombe and now Niger State, would take place without the knowledge, not to talk of lack of support of the opinion and religious leaders.

Unfortunately, Sultan Abubakar's appeals and his several fence-mending efforts across the federation appear not to have had any effect on the criminals who kill, maim, burn and loot in the name of God.

Governments at state and federal levels must begin to view these periodic attacks carried out under the cloak of religion or ethnicity for what they really are, which is, attack on Nigerians' human and fundamental rights that are actionable.

It is time to begin to clamp down on these extremists who fight their economic and political wars through the proxies of religion and ethnicity.

Those who wish to destabilise the country under any cover must be unmasked and brought to book.

It is not enough, as with the recent Niger State example, for the authorities to announce a series of arrests and a promise to arraign them in proper courts of law. What is needed is swift, public prosecution and punishment where necessary. Nigeria's efforts to re-brand the country and her people will fail and she will not be in any position to attract foreign investments when, with bestial regularity, Nigerians are reported to have killed themselves and burnt down their properties under the pretext of religious, ethnic or political differences.

Until and unless those who murder Nigerians with impunity under the cover of religion or ethnicity and their sponsors are publicly brought to book, the spate of periodic killings will continue.