By Ikechukwu Amaechi

([email protected]; 08055069065)

Nigerians should not forget the real issue in the interminable Southern Kaduna crisis, despite the diversion caused by the invitation of Obadiah Malaifa by the Department of State Services (DSS).

Malaifa, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) deputy governor, was invited based on his allegation that an unnamed Northern governor is the commander of Boko Haram terrorists.

What he said should be of interest to the security agencies. But to be fixated on what he said rather than what stirred his flare-up, which is the carnage in Southern Kaduna, parodies Nero’s fiddling on his violin while Rome burned.

There is an emergency in Southern Kaduna. The bloodbath needs to stop and must stop. Any action that does not address this overarching imperative is trivial, irresponsible and diversionary.

But make no mistake about it. Those who want Nigerians to take their eyes off the ball by dwelling on trivialities know what they are doing. Through unbridled disinformation and obfuscation, they intend to wheedle the unwary and create doubts.

Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai, is at the vanguard of this attempt to bury the truth under the rubble of deceit.

Rather than rising to the occasion and confronting the challenges headlong, he is throwing tantrums, making baseless accusations, defaming his enemies – real and perceived – and rubbing insults into bleeding wounds.

Rather than use the bully pulpit provided by his high office to restore the people’s moral compass, el-Rufai uses empty rhetoric to divide them.

On August 16, he once again mounted his mendacious high horse to claim that some Southern Kaduna leaders – who accused him, rightly, of taking sides in the crisis – are doing so because they want to be “appeased” with “brown envelopes.”

For crying out against injustice, el-Rufai labelled them criminals. For demanding an end to the senseless shedding of the innocent blood of their kith and kin, he said the distraught leaders were idle interlopers.

“I have no time for nonsense. I will not appease criminals. I will not appease idle people who have nothing to do but to raise a spectre of genocide.

“They do that to get money into their bank accounts and get donations from abroad instead of standing up,” el-Rufai hubristically said.

Assuming, without conceding that el-Rufai was honest in his narrative, it still raises the question of when it became a taboo for him to pay off murderers.

Is this not the same el-Rufai who without prompting regaled bewildered Nigerians with tales of his escapade with murderous Fulani herdsmen who he chased to far-flung countries to pay them off with brown envelopes for killing Nigerian citizens and begging them to kill no more because one of their own – a Fulani – was now at the helm of affairs?

His words: “For Southern Kaduna, we didn’t understand what was going on and we decided to set up a committee under Gen. Martin Luther Agwai (rtd) to find out what was going on there. What was established was that the root of the problem has a history starting from the 2011 post-election violence.

“Fulani herdsmen from across Africa bring their cattle down towards the Middle Belt and Southern Nigeria. The moment the rains start around March, April, they start moving them up to go back to their various communities and countries.

“Unfortunately, it was when they were moving up with their cattle across Southern Kaduna that the elections of 2011 took place and the crisis trapped some of them.

“Some of them were from Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal. Fulanis are in 14 African countries and they traverse these countries with the cattle.

“So many of these people were killed, their cattle lost and they organised themselves and came back to revenge.

“So a lot of what was happening in Southern Kaduna was actually from outside Nigeria …

“We took certain steps. We got a group of people that were going round trying to trace some of these people in Cameroon, Niger Republic and so on to tell them that there is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing.”

Have we forgotten this unforced error from a man who tweeted on April 26, 2013 that “Any society that responds to crimes by forgiving and bribing the criminals will inevitably create large contingents of criminal waanabes?”

For crying out loud, this was Nasir el-Rufai on December 3, 2016.

So, what has changed? When did it become less fashionable to hand brown envelopes to murderers in exchange for peace? Could it be because in his opinion the murderers this time are no longer Fulani and, therefore, undeserving of the same largesse he extended to his brethren?

El-Rufai is angry that some Southern Kaduna leaders, including a lawmaker representing Zagon Kataf/Jaba Federal Constituency, Amos Magaji, are pointedly accusing him of taking sides in the crisis.

His response is to counter punch with inane allegations.

“Anyone that is moderate, anyone that is promoting peaceful co-existence between various ethnic groups is considered a sell out,” he said.

“And for a governor like me, who does not appease them because they are used to being appeased, they cause troubles. They organise these killings and then, their leaders are invited by the governor, they wine and dine and they are given brown envelopes. That’s what they have been doing for 20 years.”

“Most of these people have no means of livelihood; they were living off the governments. The governments before us were paying them money every month, they called it peace money. We stopped it. This is why they say I am taking sides.”

Pray! When did el-Rufai become a peacemaker? Is Saul now among the prophets?

Before now, he had also alleged that Christian leaders were behind the killings so they could get overseas funding.

Aren’t these allegations laughable? The governor knows those behind these killings, yet he has not ordered for their arrest and prosecution? So, Southern Kaduna leaders are killing their own people so they could blackmail el-Rufai into paying them blood money?

In 2016, he claimed the crisis started from the 2011 post-election violence, but last Sunday, he changed gear claiming that it has a 40-year history. So, which is which?

In 2016, el-Rufai claimed that “a lot of what was happening in Southern Kaduna was actually from outside Nigeria.” In 2020, it is now Southern Kaduna leaders orchestrating the killing of their own people in order to extort money from him.

El-Rufai thinks he is smart. Maybe! After all, he can rightly argue that if he is not, how could he have occupied all the plum positions in this Fourth Republic?

But the truth is that he is only being smart by half. As long as this carnage persists in Kaduna State while he sits on his palm doing nothing, the joke will be on him.

It is easy to preach peace as he seems to be doing, but how can a people accommodate those who come in the dead of the night to kill and maim? How can el-Rufai claim to be doing his best when nobody is arrested for these butcheries?

The villains operate without any restraint, despite the so-called glut of security operatives and vanish into thin air; only for the victims to be harassed, abused and maligned by those whose responsibility it is to protect them.

El-Rufai should continue to have his day in the sun for as long as it lasts but he should remember that moral compass defines leadership.

A leader should have empathy, knowing full well that words can summon a people’s better angels or awaken their worst instincts.

El-Rufai’s words do not summon the better angels of Kaduna, nay, other Nigerians. They awaken the worst instincts.

He should be worried that under his watch, Kaduna State has become the epicentre of this national tragedy of incessant, unconscionable bloodletting and he cannot explain it away by playing, as Americans would say, whack-a-mole politics with his decisions.

And in the event that he persists on this ill-advised trajectory, Nigerians must make a conscious decision to call him out now with the intention to ultimately hold him to account at the fullness of time.     

Sonnie Ekwowusi writes that are our strength lies in our common humanity

He says his first name means “man of peace”. His surname means “servant of the most powerful God”. He comes down severely on the rulers of darkness who are sponsoring the genocide against the Christians in Southern Kaduna. He is eloquent as much as he is vociferous. He is courageous. He calls things by their names. He says he is ready to lay down his life to save his people. Like prophet Obadiah, one of the prophets of the Old Testament, he exhorts the people to trust in the power of God and justice of God, and not in the fleeting and precarious power of tyrannical rulers. Southern Kaduna is the kingdom of God not the kingdom of the devil.

Justice is coming, nemesis is coming, he announces. He is unruffled. “I am not making this up. I have a PhD from Oxford. I am not a sensationalist, I am an economist and a central banker; by nature we are not given to sensation. Let me make it clear: I am a humanist; I am a man of peace. Even my name, Mailafia, means a man of peace. From the bottom of my heart, I love our country dearly and I abhor all the killings and violence which the innocent people of this country have been subjected to. I pray that Nigeria will never experience another civil war. The most elementary duty of government is to protect its citizens. When a government fails to protect its citizens, to protect little children that is a serious matter. Any innocent boy or girl that is killed is my own child. I love Nigeria. Like Mandela, let me say if need be, I am prepared to give my life for Nigeria”, he said last week.

In case you are still aghast wondering whom I am referring to, he is the former Deputy-Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Dr. Obadiah Mailafia. Last week his voice rang out like a lone voice in the wilderness in condemnation of the sponsored genocide against the Southern Kaduna Christians. Hear from Obadiah, “…they told us that one of the Northern governors was the commander of Boko Haram in Nigeria. Boko Haram and the bandits are one and the same. They have a sophisticated network. During this lockdown their planes were moving up and down as if there was no lockdown. They were moving ammunition, moving money, and distributing them across different parts of the country. “They are already in the South, in the rain forests of the South. They are everywhere. They told us that when they finish these rural killings, they will move to phase two. Phase two is that they will go into urban cities, going from house to house killing prominent people.”

This is weighty. It serves no useful purpose to dismiss it with a wave of the hand as if the blood being shed is not the blood of human beings. Of course, it is the blood of our fellow human beings: It is the blood of our brothers and sisters, members of the same human family. Look, the killing of our fellow human beings ought to stir in us the revulsion to hate our human existence. If I may ask you one question: How would feel if you are told that some religious-fanatic-murderers had forcefully gained entrance into your parents’ house, seized your parents and your sibling including your three-year old baby-sister and hacked all of them to death, and, thereafter set fire on the entire house? Obviously the tragic news will likely make you go insane.

Well, this is the tragedy that occurs in Southern Kaduna almost on a daily basis – families are wiped out just like that. It is a tragedy that is known to the whole world. In fact the fundamental reason why the U.S. has placed Nigeria on her Special Watch List, her travel ban list and visa restriction list is mainly traceable to the Southern Kaduna genocide. We don’t need a Dr. Obadiah to tell us what we already know about the Southern Kaduna genocide. But let’s assume for a moment that Obadiah is a rhapsodic rabble-rouser who is mischievously inciting the people against the government as the DSS would want us to believe; just google “Nigerian Soldiers and Fulani herdsmen/Boko Haram killings” and you will read the complaints of some Nigerian soldiers to the effect that the war against Boko Haram is failing in Nigeria because the war is being sabotaged by some people at the top.

If the Nigerian soldiers in the frontline are telling us that, who are we lesser mortals to doubt them? In fact some soldiers fighting Boko Haram in the North-East have expressed their anger against President Buhari over his release of over 1, 400 “repentant Boko Haram” terrorists. The soldiers could not understand why their killers are being offered amnesty. In February 2020, the Borno State Commissioner for Information, Babakura Jato, frayed up in anger upon discovering that the so-called “repentant Boko Haram” terrorists were not repentant at all because they had gone back to join their killer-colleagues in the killing fields. He also said that a lot of soldiers are not happy about this ugly development. According to one Nigerian soldier, “We were at the Maimalari barracks when some of these Boko Haram people were released.

The authorities are releasing them, but Boko Haram are killing soldiers that they capture. This does not make sense to us at all. We continue to sweep across the bushes to flush these people out, and then the government will release them. Does that not amount to wasted efforts?” Another soldier said, “You wonder why Boko Haram members are on the increase? When we arrest them and bring them here, some top people would come and start negotiating their release. But, I will tell you some of these so-called suspects are returning to the bush and they were never repentant.” The objective of Boko Haram, said Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, is to enthrone an Islamic dominance in Nigeria. Bishop Kukah persuasively argues that there is no difference anymore between the government and Boko Haram except that the latter uses bombs to achieve its objective.

You see, no man, no woman of good conscience can keep quiet over the Southern Kaduna killings. No street can remain silent amid the stillness of death everywhere in Southern Kaduna. In some of the lines of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem entitled; “We Wear the Mask”, we may be wearing the masks covering the grins and lies. With torn and bleeding hearts we may be smiling but we may not know peace until the blood of the murdered innocent children of Southern Kaduna is avenged. What do murderers gain by spilling the blood of innocent children? Nothing! Absolutely nothing!! What do the living gain by keeping quiet in times of religious persecution and religious genocide? Nothing! Absolutely nothing !!. And if they do at all gain anything it is the hottest places in hell as Dante teaches in his Inferno. Since civilization is not an attribute of religious fanaticism or religious killing or curl of hair or curve of the lip or human accent we should re-scrutinize our heritage with sharper eyes than before in order to win our civilization.

Though tribes and tongues may differ; though some self-serving politicians may ride on the crest of religious fanaticism to murder our parents and sibling and set our houses ablaze, our strength lies in our common humanity. It is our only weapon with which we hope to conquer fundamental wrong, fundamental error, fundamental injustice in order to arrive at fundamental truth. If the government wants her name removed from the U.S. Special Watch list, U.S. travel ban list and the U.S. visa restriction list then she should stop the Southern Kaduna genocide forthwith.

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