Discourse 101: Fire on the Plateau

Friday Discourse (101)
Fire on the Plateau
It is two weeks since the fighting broke out on the Jos, the Plateau State capital, between Muslims and Christians. Last Saturday I was able to drive through the town up to Bukuru and see for myself the signs of carnage that took place in the erstwhile peaceful city. I have earlier heard a lot from survivors who narrowly escaped the sharp edge of a wounding knife, a piecing arrow or a devastating bullet. It was horror, all through, similar to that experienced in Kaduna last year. Lives have been lost, which our primitive state of statistics will not permit an exact account of, and also, of course, property worth millions of naira.
For the lives lost, there is little we can do. They have returned to God. As for property, those that are destined to own them could regenerate it, with great toil and persistence though. What is really difficult to restore is the trust that took over a hundred years to rebuild among the peoples who inhabited the tin city and its surrounding villages. Many are living today as refugees, after their husbands and breadwinners have been mercilessly killed before their eyes, especially those who once lived in villages surrounding Jos. Do not blame them if they vow never return to Plateau State; the government there should also not be stunned if it fails in its effort to change their conviction. The truth is that there is a biting economic consequence that the state has to pay.
In our discussion today, we shall briefly examine the roots of the crisis, as seen through my eyes – someone to whom Jos has been his commercial center – and the consequences we believed will follow, painful and demanding as they would be.
Roots
Unlike others before it, the last crisis in Jos had a clear and undisputed start. It is easy to narrate that it started with a transgression by a woman who wanted to pass through a Friday congregation. After being denied, she ‘miraculously’ returned, within some few minutes, with an army of youths carrying machetes, bows and arrows. Now, hardly would anyone dispute the fact that this was premeditated to yield a major crisis. Such planners must now be resting in delight, seeing that they have hit their target and knowing, from the result of previous investigations into several similar crisis that took place in the last fourteen years, they will not be punished.
What is, however, difficult to see and accept is the fact that for any resident of the town, including its governor, the crisis did not come as a surprise, for many reasons. Amidst the Kaduna crisis last year, I attended a conference in Abuja where on a dinner table an Igbo lawyer living in Kaduna but raised in Jos, a human right activist for that matter, was confidently saying that the Muslims in Jos will not dare start any crisis there because they are few, they will be finished completely.
Such was the feeling of misguided Christians around. The Muslims in Plateau, since the creation of Nassarawa State, know very well that they are a minority. They were taught that not only by their few numbers but also by the behavior of their partners who never missed any chance, either as private individuals or government functionaries, to remind them that the land does not belong to them. Indigeneship is more contentious in Plateau State than in any other state in the federation. Many are denied scholarship award and appointment; though Jos may be the only home they and their fathers know. Federal appointments have particularly become very contentious. We recall with sadness the raid by some ‘indigenes’ on the office and house of Dr. Lamorde, the former director of National Veterinary Research Institute, in Vom. Well, a Yoruba has since replaced him, to the pleasure of the aggrieved indigenes. Part of the immediate reasons behind the last week’s fight was an appointment of a Mukhtar Mohammed as coordinator of poverty alleviation program in the Jos North Local Government area.
All these are manifestations of laziness that has ravaged the psyche of our elite, not in Plateau alone but all over the country. To satisfy their greed, they need a position in government that will earn them loot. To win that position, they are ready to employ every evil the devil would suggest against their competitors. Unfortunately, the tools which the devil finds most successful are religion and ethnicity.
Nobody is claiming that everybody living in Plateau State should be considered an indigene and thus entitled to hold or run for a public office, regardless of what the constitution would provide, for we hardly find Hausas regarded as indigenes in Enugu or Ondo State. What we mean is that people with long stay, perhaps for 70 to 100 years and above deserve to be considered indigenes by any yardstick of civilization, particularly in the North that has so far been exemplary in accommodating others. We have a case of a person with Yoruba origin who became a governor of Sokoto state. A renowned economist from Kano who is also a Yoruba and currently serving this administration was never reminded that he is a non-indigene. At the different times the federal government appoints him and others like him into influential position, no one ever cried out that he is Yoruba by origin. One of the foremost political figures in Kano politics and many influential people in the city are Jukun but no one bothers.
My attention was once brought to a Yoruba girl that enrolled in our girl’s school at Kafin Madaki. I interviewed her and found out that her father was among the early Yoruba settlers in our village. I stopped her ejection and allowed her to continue with her studies. We have many of them who have schooled with us and have been serving in the state, to our utmost delight. If we want sanity to prevail, there is a need for such type of people in Plateau State to be treated equally as anyone who might claim to have settled on its mountain since the Big Bang. To say that all Hausa-Fulani are citizens of Plateau state but not its indigenes is repugnant to the ethics of civilization.
The equation is not balanced especially for us. Consider the cattle Fulani that were expelled from the mountains and villages surrounding Jos and those from distant villages like Barikin Ladi, Kura, Makaho, Riyom and the rest. Many of them left Toro Local Government about a hundred years ago. These are people who are not interested in any scholarship or federal appointment but fields for grazing. They do not give a hoot as to whoever is made a coordinator of poverty alleviation program. They are not even abreast of the changing political atmosphere that will finally dictate where their graves would finally be located. They live comfortably at peace with their neighbours.
However, recently, there have been signs of increasing hostility against them. Thus, when this crisis came up, they were the worst hit. The very people with whom they were born together, played together, spoke the language of one another and became friends for decades were the very ones who led the rampage that would burn their houses and expel them at the middle of the night. Many cannot be traced now. Though we must quickly add that not all the natives showed this degree of callousness, for some were reasonable enough to allow such Fulani a safe exit.
On the other hand, we have the Jarawa tribesmen who enjoy a dual citizenship since their transfer to Plateau State in mid-seventies. Many attend our schools in Bauchi state and work in our offices only to cross over to Jos, whenever it serves their interest, to be appointed into public offices, including cabinet appointments. Later they will return to Bauchi and enjoy whatever right is due to its indigene. Nobody here is raising any eyebrow. Our only grudge is when our people on the other side of the border are not treated with equal degree of hospitality.
Plateau State has a lot to learn therefore from other states. Its influential people should know that integration of its human resources is essential to the sustenance of its development. The tin city is unique among all other cities in the North. It is the only city built solely on commerce in the twentieth century when tin mining attracted people from all over the country, but particularly from North eastern zone. The dream of cultural homogeneity is inconsistent with economic development. Its decade of tolerance has paid of, as no other northern town, apart from Kano and Kaduna, is as developed as Jos, and I doubt if any other enjoys a better cultural heterogeneity.
Having said this, I would like to turn to other causes of the crisis. Life is bitter on the plateau as bad as it could be in any part of Nigeria. The common man is far from being satisfied with anything around him. The civilian government there, like many others like it, has not been able to turnover the fortunes of its citizens for the better. Under economic difficulties, political escapism becomes a handy tool in the hand the lazy minded who cannot think deeply.
There are lots of youth talking about occupation of their lands. They have grown up and, like many other youth throughout the North, have very little education and skill. Unemployment, more than any other thing, has become their companion. To worsen the situation, many of them are paying for the wrong decision taken by their parents and grandparents who sold their lands to settlers, sometimes, as in Lamingo and its environs, as a condition for the continuous habitation of the settlers. Since rural economy has never been good in Nigeria, such grandparents could not make a better investment than consumption.
Add to this frustration of the youth is the down turn in tin mining and the attendant ecological hazards of dams and pits that have rendered the soil non-arable. Their parents, like many of the Hausa settlers, also lost their jobs at early age since the discovery of oil. For the indigenes in particular, the most biting catastrophe is the loss of farmlands either as a result of mining or the unwise, or do we say necessary, decision to sell them to others. To crown the dissatisfaction, the federal government is deaf and dumb to their request for their own ‘ompaedec’ to redress the loss of land to tin mining or give mining a priority position in the nation’s economy. I have little doubt if the crisis last week would have erupted had mining of tin and other minerals continued to sufficiently provide jobs for inhabitants of the plateau as in the 1950s.
So provision of jobs through resuscitation of mining on the plateau will go a long way to reduce the ongoing insurgence of intolerance among its population. Tackling the falling standard of education is another thing for education is indisputably befriended by wisdom, occupation and tolerance.
Let us now move to other factors in which Muslims also, I must be objective to confess, must swallow a portion of the blame. I feel it is time for believers of Islam and Christianity, the two religions that will remain dominant for most part of the twenty first century in Nigeria, to know that tolerance is really required for their successful practice. The train of hate will take us to nowhere but the graveyard, prematurely. The quick way in which religion is employed by politicians and the ignorant is devastating to the minds of any informed believer of both religions. Places of worship have enjoyed a prolonged safari of neglect by security agents. Words coming from preachers of both religions on many occasions make the good-natured heart to tremble for the violence they urge through the crude blend of sentiments and scripture. It is sad that this attitude is found in a country that is regarded as one of the most religious in the world.
I will therefore recommend that an eagle eye be kept on preachers, and government must not hesitate in apprehending anyone found using abusive words or advocating hostility. Most of our problems, as we have been mentioning before with lavish measure of sadness, springs from negligence of government.
The ordinary man has not helped matters either. In his vulgar lexicology he employs a derogatory diction to describe people of another sect. For example, I cannot find any justification of the continuous use of the words like arne. This word which was innocently used for non-Muslim Hausas who have taken tsafi (paganism) and alcoholism as their religion. The term cannot be legitimately used on Christians whom the Quran honorably call Nasara or “Helpers” (of Jesus). However, many Hausa-speaking people will prefer to apply the term only to Europeans. We should endeavor to abandon this term as the Fulani abandoned kado and the Kanuri kirdi or afuno. We should be ready to accord all mankind the dignity that God has created every man with, as the Quran indicated.
I doubt much if shariah has played any role in the recent crisis. No one has agitated for shariah in Plateau State, even in the Muslim dominated areas like Jos North and Wase local governments. It might have helped to fill some few holes in the background but not strong enough to qualify as a foreground factor.
Consequences
While we ponder over the tragedy that has engulfed the tin city, it is wise to foresee its consequences. I am afraid that Jos and its environs, to the delight of the culprits but to the regret of patriotic and peace loving citizens will not be the same.
Jos is not the only city to witness the tragedy of religious and ethnic crisis of this magnitude. Take Kaduna for instance. The demographic and economic impact of the last crisis on the city has been great. Streets that used to be busy from Monday through Saturday now look like Sunday. For visitor like me who once lived there, the sight is pitiful. Jos is very likely to experience the down turn in activity. The enviable demographic equilibrium of its city and countryside is likely to give way to a sharp slant towards ethnic and religious singularity. The unquestionable implication is a retardation of its fast growth. I have heard people vow never to return, both among city dwellers and rural cattle Fulani and Hausa traders in the countryside. You need to stand by the highway at Akwanga, Saminaka or Babale to see how the flight of both people and capital makes this theory real.
On the other side, the crisis will make investors to contemplate twice in sinking any capital there. Even for residents that are bold enough to remain, many will most likely not build their next structure in the city, for they have seen how their investment could be reduced to rubble overnight.
People will lose their childhood friends and neighbours. Those who remain will for sometime undoubtedly live amidst apprehension and the cruel memory of the horror that they witnessed during the last crisis. The countryside will long for the cattle that whitened its hills and plains but few will be found grazing. The delight of those who wished this disaster to happen will certainly be momentary.
Conclusion
The government of Plateau State has an arduous task of tackling all the political, economic and religious factors that precipitated the last crisis. They need to reinvent the industry of mining on the plateau, to educate its youth and to inculcate the culture of mutual tolerance among its population, Muslims and Christians alike. It must be ready to dismiss the past with its content of rancor and hate over historical happenings and deprivations.
On our part, there is the need for adherents of both Islam and Christianity to realize that tolerance is relevant to our peaceful coexistence without which worship would be both difficult and impossible. People can contemplate of relocating to places they feel are safer for their families who were subjected to unnecessary revulsion. Constitutionally, they are free to live anywhere. Some will accept the assurances of government and remain.
Whatever would be their choice, and whatever would be the reaction of the indigenes of the state, the city of Jos and its surrounding hills and plains are crying with one voice. Their surface is being razed by the fire of hate and bigotry; the blood of the innocent has stained their soil; and the odor of revenge and recurrence has adulterated their air. Instead of flight, the beautiful landscape is pleading with us to return in order to put off that fire of hate and bigotry, to cleanse it of that stain of innocent blood and, finally, to refresh its air with the lavenders of mutual trust and enterprise. It is the joint responsibility of the peoples and government of Plateau State to this noble call of its landscape. I pray that God would bless them with the wisdom to respond favorably. Amen.

We Must Revenge this Genocide

We must revenge this genocide


The subject matter
I have a difficulty with the choice of the subject matter for this page. I have promised a friend, Mal. Ya’u Shehu Darazo, that I will use this week to write about the Arewa Consultative Forum, less than a week before its next meeting. But recent happenings in the Middle East have since made that promise difficult to fulfill. I am sorry. I thought I would write a strong article urging all governments in predominantly Muslim states to severe relations with Israel. Recently, there has been a growing unholy romance with the Zionist state with our governors and local government chairmen frequenting it. One wonders why they feel that we need another master in addition to America. If they have the feelings of their people at heart, they should borrow a leaf from the late Sardauna, who expelled all Israeli related companies from the North in the early sixties.
But writing about Israel too will not be possible with the recent genocide in Lagos. Why discuss about injustice in a distant land when you have enough perpetrated here at home, committed by the people with whom you share the same nationhood? And so I feel compelled to postpone discussing about Israel, like that on Arewa Consultative Forum, until another day.

The crux
The recent genocide against Hausas – and that, in the context it was used by the bloodthirsty Ooduists in Lagos, means anybody of Northern extraction – has illustrated what I discussed last week. That is, for the peaceful and continuous existence of this country as a single nation, the North, which is clearly in the majority, has to maintain its hegemony particularly under a democratic set up. We have no other option. We must take over; we must discontinue the insensitive and partial government of Obasanjo in 2003.
What is at stake is justice. Nothing else. Innocent people are losing their lives. When the life and honor of citizens are not safe anywhere in the country, the responsibility to restore confidence and protect lives and properties lies squarely on the able hands of the majority. The President came to power with our blessing; he rode on our backs. But if he cannot prove to be responsible enough to let us live, then getting rid of him in the next election becomes imperative and a national responsibility in which all well-meaning Nigerians must join hands. That is the crux of the matter.
We owe the nation a duty to return the sense of belonging to everybody, southerners and northerners alike. We cannot sit back and watch the selfish parochial whims of some primitive tribalists exterminating the lives of defenseless citizens, more so when such bizarre scenes of lawlessness become increasingly recurrent.

Primitivism
What actually is OPC aiming at? What on earth is the crime of an innocent housewife in her home that makes her deserve a hatchet when she was preparing a breakfast or a supper for her hungry kids? What in fact was the fault of her kids who were herded and burnt alive on their way to school without given the least chance to say farewell to their poor mother back at home. What sin did their father commit, when he was cut into pieces after a hectic day that was spent gathering the little he could find for the kids and their mother? What was their crime to deserve this barbaric brutality? These are questions for the OPC, the President and his service chiefs and other supporters of the Oodua ‘curse’ as well?
When the Babangida Administration first muted the idea of a southern President after the nullification of the Yar’Adua and Ciroma primaries, some of us could see the danger inherent in entrusting such a strong office in the hands of people that have a pathological hatred for all other ethnic groups in the country.
The argument from the protagonists of the idea among Northern politicians then was that it was time for the North to allow others a chance. A barsu su ma su dana mana! Some of them were innocently naïve, not knowing the implications of a power shift. But many were deliberate and hungry prostitutes that entered an agreement with the South. And as Joseph was sold at a paltry price, they traded off the North and our national security for peanuts. They were shameless to make clean their breasts on it publicly.
It was a combination of naivety and deception that brought Obasanjo to power in the last election. No one will denounce the overwhelming support the North gave him. But other factors or groups of people came into play this time. One was the sympathy for June 12 as pointed out by many writers. The second was those who wanted to protect their loot. The third was those who thought that Obasanjo was the same person they knew in the seventies; that is assuming that they had a clear understanding of whom he was, which the world now has every cause to doubt.
Whatever was the role we played in making Obasanjo successful in the last election, one thing remains crystal clear: that though he has fulfilled the desire of the second group, those wishing him to protect their loot, the other two groups are grossly disappointed. That is because he has failed to satisfy the yearnings of the majority of Nigerians who are looking for nothing but the peaceful atmosphere in which they will make a living for their children and themselves. This feeling of betrayal has thickened our political atmosphere, taking us back to square one.
Questions
May God have mercy on the souls that were lost! If they were to reincarnate, they would have asked two people two simple questions. They would ask OPC and their supporters, “What is our crime, as children, as housewives, as petty traders, as mai-guards, as tanker drivers to deserve your anger, brutality and murder? I know the answer from their murderers would be simple, “intori iwo gambari ni.” Then they will look at Obasanjo and say: “where is your campaign promise or is it the reward we deserve for voting you into power?” What would his answer be other than what the OPC had told them earlier? Baring his back to expose the beatings he allegedly sustained during his detention, he would say, “Ausa, look wetin you do me...”

The insensitivity
When the recent genocide in Lagos started on Sunday, one thing must have preoccupied the minds of northerners living there, that an intervention from the Federal government security agencies will come soon enough to save their souls from the champions of an ethnic cleansing. Monday morning came to pass. The government was quiet. Its evening was worse. The Tuesday that followed was not better than its Monday. Wednesday came, nothing throughout the day. In all these days, the President was busy attending summits and conferences in Abuja.
Until the 9.00am news when the hoping souls have died away, their bodies butchered, and enough news of the mayhem have reached the North that the government, through no better person than its amphibious Goebbels of this administration, came out saying that it condemns this act in the strongest terms, that the OPC is banned and its members will be arrested... I wish the voice that was only meant to save the souls of Yorubas in the North had come early enough to save the northerners in Lagos.
We are tired of this rubbish, of this deafening mediocrity and its conspiratorial underpinnings. We are tired of empty promises and delegations of sellouts coming to pacify us. Why should the government solicit for our forgiveness without telling us its sin? Tell us what wrong you did, that you are now coming down kneeling, asking for forgiveness. We urge traditional rulers to keep a long distance from the gimmicks of this administration. If the government is serious it should undertake a mass arrest of OPC members and force their supporters in government to resign. We are tired of its ambivalence and its double standard.
Didn’t the President have the time to publicly come out and mourn the dead as he once came out to solicit for their votes? Didn’t they deserve it? I would like to believe that he did not have the courage, if at all he cared. Months ago he told us that he has given an order that anybody who claims to be a member of OPC should be arrested or shot at sight. Was it done? On the contrary, Fasehun was ubiquitous, attending meetings with the cream of the Yoruba ‘nation’ and running his clinic. Even after his arrest, we wait to see what justice will be meted on the tribal gangster. The case is adjourned until mid-next month! That is news No. 1. May the dead rest in peace!

The Task
But God has decreed that the dead will not return to ask questions or to take revenge. We owe them a duty to terminate this government, wait a minute, not through a coup or other nefarious means, but by the constitutional means of voting it out of power. Nigerians other than the Southwest brought it to power. And with this record of insensitivity no one would deny them the right to choose a different set of leaders altogether.
We will be patient. When the time comes, Tinubu with his fake certificates and army of butchers will have no place to hide. He will be prosecuted and there will be no Obasanjo in power to shield him. Those that engaged in these dastardly acts will be brought to book too. They will be made to wear the same shoe as the alleged murderers of yesterday. We owe the dead this responsibility. Let no one be in doubt.
It is not Obasanjo alone that will lose the 2003 election. The entire Yoruba ‘race’ are squandering a golden opportunity that would have guaranteed the possibility of being entrusted with power once more during our lifetime. I assure them that Nigerians will never grant any of them such an opportunity again.
And one really wonders how their amoeboid machinations encapsulated the President. Time is fast running out and, believe me, there is not a single achievement that this government can show. Where is it, with these killing, with gross partiality in administration and resource allocation, with the capacious inability to tackle the smallest problem it has inherited? I just called a friend and he told me that a gallon of petrol is N600.00 in Lagos, N500.00 in Kaduna while I know it to be N350 here in Bauchi. The Abacha that this administration likes to castigate so much was in this respect alone a thousand times better than Obasanjo. This administration was quick to cash on the temporary effort of General Abdulsalami Abubakar; it falsely moved to claim that the availability of petrol at its debut was as a result of the transparency they introduced into the system. But lies, as the Hausas would say, only flower but cannot seed. So is the transparency over now with only three people, two allegedly close to the President as pointed out by Wada Nas last week, importing 90% of our petrol requirement? At least Abacha was magnanimous enough to allow as many as fifteen (!) Nigerians share the contracts.
Where is the efficiency that the President promised us on 29 May 1999? Where is the security to lives and property that he promised to guarantee? Gone with the winds.

2003
Before closing this discussion, I would like to advise the government to concentrate on leaving a last minute record, if it is interested in any. It should forget the dream of returning in 2003. I would like to say the same thing to its supporters in other parts of the country. I heard that a forum has been formed in Sokoto with the aim of improving the image of the Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar. What a wild goose chase! Who told them that his image is so bad to need a whole forum to improve it? A good beer does not need a push. Last year this time, who ever thought that they will return to the North so early, cup in hand? We thought the North was worthless, deserving only abuses. Ashe wargi wuri shi ka samu wallah.
On the other hand I was shocked because I never believed that there are still political prostitutes willing to sell a failed government. But I know Sokoto very well. Its people who are descendants of Jihadist will be the last to support the perpetration of injustice. They will do the right thing when the time comes. They will reject the political prostitutes in their midst.
We must work extra hard to block every path towards the return of this government to power come 2003. They want to come back through the back door, using Atiku as a ladder. That will not prevent us from doing the least that the dead expect us to do on their behalf.

Conclusion
We must revenge by compelling the President and his boastful Oodua army to hand over power to a respectable Nigerian whose heart is large enough to tolerate our sight and accommodate our differences. That will be a great moment to witness. It will then be time for justice to take its cause. The culprits will be brought to book. That is the cudgel that those who lost their lives in the recent genocide in Lagos would like us to take up. May their soul rest in peace!