Everyone has become frozen in a sea of fear. If you are Muslim, you fear what Christians will say; and if you are Christian, you fear what Muslims will say. And even worse, both fear that their coreligionists will think they have let them and their faith down. But if we really want solve our problems, we should be mature and objective enough to apportion blame where it properly belongs without fear of anything. When news of the Jos crisis filtered out, one could have said what John Pilger said of Palestine during the recent Israeli offensive: "A genocide is engulfing the people of Gaza while a silence engulfs its bystanders." In private, all leaders complain bitterly; but in public they try to outdo each other in being politically correct.

And those who choose to speak out say only the wrong things. We deplore statements by politicians who are more interested in posturing and playing to the gallery to capture votes and look like champions of a triumphal majority than in representing the legitimate interests of all of their constituents. Even if the statements credited to Senator Gyang Dalyop Datong were no so self-serving and insensitive, the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be worried that it counts among its supposedly distinguished membership politicians of such narrow-minded tunnel vision. It goes without saying that this or any other democracy has no chance or right of survival if, in its attempts to ensure the wishes of the majority prevail, it forgets to ensure that the legitimate rights of the minority are represented well and protected by law and in fact.

The call by the Bauchi State House of Assembly for the expulsion of indigenes of Plateau State from their state must be condemned. In its implications, it is almost as irresponsible as the call for the actualization of Biafra by MASSOB. Though their contexts are dissimilar and the frustration of Bauchi assemblymen understandable in the circumstance, that resolution ought never to be condoned. By falling to his level, every Bauchi assemblyman has become a little Jang, an ethnic cleanser without a gun--only a little bit more civilized than the Plateau State governor. If it is not all media posturing.

The media may itself have been guilty of trivializing the issue of the crisis and deflecting blame by harping on the issue of dead National Youths Service Corpers. And with their accounts of and comments on the Jos crisis, some writers, including the so-called distinguished columnists, may only have disgraced themselves and the profession of journalism, at least in the eyes of the survivors of this pogrom and all others who are aware of what has been going on in Jos.

First, the lives of NYSC guys are no more valuable than others that are being lost. Second, their death is mourned; but it is all presented in a way that suggests that their service is indispensable, and may not therefore next be available to a North that stands in greater need of it than the other sections of the country. Third, it is all depicted as though it is the Hausa-Fulani who are killing them; which, if true, that it is indeed the Hausa-Fulani who are killing Yoruba corpers, then the fight couldn't have been over land ownership, as the Berom have been saying.

And it should indeed be more for crimes such as genocide and not just for the thievery of public funds alone that we must hasten to remove the constitutional immunity that has put perpetrators of crime beyond the reach of the law. Those guilty of genocide must be tried and punished with immediacy and with exemplary dispatch.

Unless this is done quickly, it is to be feared that we will witness the unraveling of the Nigerian Knot, the great untying of all the national ties that bind--exposing the meaninglessness of the very issue of nationhood, demonstrating the uselessness of land tenure system and ownership, and striking at the very heart of democracy--one indigene, one vote; one settler, no vote--all of them sacrificed at the altar and hallowed ground of ethnic cleansers on which representativeness has been made to fall helpless and prostrate before the issue of indigeneship. Therefore, right after genocide is punished, the nation should boldly tackle the obnoxious issue of indigene-settler syndrome throughout the country, and especially in Jos where Jang is unlikely to do anything about it.

Wherever he was, Jang had always proved unable to separate his position as governor from his extreme bigotry as an anti-Islamic Christian; or, is it really only and merely an anti-Hausa-Fulani Berom? Unable to stand the name of Muhammad, for instance, he was reported to have changed the name of General Murtala Mohammed College to Ramat College, Yola; not knowing that Ramat, the new name he chose happened to have been derived from one of the foremost attributes of Allah.

He also once stopped the annual conference of the National Association of Teachers of Arabic and Islamic Studies, NATA'IS, from taking place in Yola. Obviously, Jang is unaware that in the forefront for the promotion and propagation of Arabic language have been many prominent Christian Arab intellectuals; and its literature, especially its poetry, has been one of the most studied in the world, and the most translated by Christian Oriental scholar-missionaries. At the time he disallowed permission for the NATA'IS conference, Islamic Studies was a subject taught in all the secondary schools of Gongola State.

Nobody spoke to him then; and nobody is speaking to him now. But does the current silence from Plateau elders suggest that what Jang is doing or not doing enjoys their support? While the Sultan, for instance, has taken great pains to make himself available for the resolution of some of this region's social crises; and some, in fact, believe he may have been over-exposing himself, the same cannot be said of other traditional rulers. There are many who do not consider His Highness Chief Buba Gyang, Gbong Gwom Jos, entirely blameless in the November 2008 crisis and, by extension, the current one.

Why this deathly silence? Is it the silence of disbelief or the silence of consent? Plateau State is home to more than 50 retired generals, who, by definition, should know genocide when they see one. And where are the other elders? Who really silenced Dalo Da D.B. Zang such that even before his death his abiding goodwill was no longer available for reconciliation on the Plateau? Though today we are left with no alternative, we still find it difficult to accept that the people of Da Zang have nothing better, nothing more civilized and nothing more honourable to do than sitting down to plan how to kill their neighbours--men, women, children and infants--with impunity and in cold blood.

The final evidence that this is genocide is the fact that up to this moment Jang has not shown the slightest remorse. Not only has he not shown remorse, he is reported to have been quite elated behind closed-doors. If the reported bask-slapping reception he has accorded some of the leaders of the killings is anything to go by, the nation has not seen the last of the Jos crisis. Something worse is said to be in the pipeline.

Because of the difficulty and time consumption of one-by-one elimination, and the possibility of more than equal reprisals by Muslims, especially in Jos Township and the probability that Plateau State may not get another malleable and ready-to-become-complicit commissioner of police, according to what that Dadinkowa community leader told me of what he himself had heard of Jang's next plans from those who he said had met him as the crisis was coming to an end, the next one will make the current one a dress rehearsal. For maximum casualties, Jang's hordes are said to be contemplating bombing Friday congregational prayers in session--and they have been assured of support at the highest quarters.

Besides the danger of this igniting a most uncontrollable country-wide pandemonium, bombing Friday prayers will most assuredly lead to the birth of Nigeria's first crop of suicide bombers and perhaps something even worse, which will set the country onto the path of unwinnable and unstoppable Christian-Muslim conflict. This is a development that must be stopped at all costs; and for those who could prevail on Jang, this is the right time to do so, before he engulfs the nation in an inferno in which the Berom will almost certainly become history. This is not something we would like to see happen; but it is something that we will most probably see happening whether we like it or not--unless the right thing is done fast.