Nigeria: Living dangerously
By Femi Adesina kulikulii@yahoo.com 08055001928
Saturday, February 25, 2006

The outgoing week may well pass in history as the most testy, most trying for us as a nation. It was a week that tried the country’s soul, that stretched its elasticity and cohesion to the limit. A week that rocked the very foundations of the polity, one that revealed the artificiality, the specious nature of the contrivance called Nigeria.
The week began with two developments which were monumental in proportion.

On Sunday, news broke that militant Ijaw youths had the previous day abducted nine foreign oil workers, who were being held in unidentified locations. This came just a couple of weeks after the four earlier abducted and held for 19 days in January were released, with President Olusegun Obasanjo vowing that such would never happen again. So soon, the President was being forced to swallow his words.

Monday of the same week was D-day for the rank and file of the police to go on strike, after an ultimatum issued weeks earlier had lapsed. The malcontent policemen wanted official intervention in matters pertaining to their welfare, which they felt was nothing to write home about. Therefore, the nation went into the second day of the week, with prospect of law and order breaking down hanging ominously on its head like an Incubus.

About the same time that the expatriate oil workers were being seized by Ijaw youths on Saturday, Maiduguri, capital of Borno State in the north was being seized by the jugular. Islamic fundamentalists, like a mass of Armageddon, flooded the streets, protesting against cartoons published several weeks ago by a Danish newspaper, which portrayed prophet Mohammed in a manner considered sacrilegious. At the end of the orgy, no less than 35 Nigerians were dead, most of them Christians of southern origin. No less than 30 churches were equally burnt, and anarchy virtually walked on all fours.

The question on many lips in other parts of the country was: What is our own in a cartoon published in faraway Europe that would warrant such toll in lives and property? A family of seven, in an instance, was reportedly burnt to death, while a Catholic priest was skinned alive. Did they draw the cartoon? Shame, shame, oh Nigeria.

About the time Maiduguri was smouldering, Katsina too was exploding. Some lives were lost, as people trooped out to protest the then impending review of the constitution, which many fear is a smokescreen to prolong the life of the Obasanjo administration by a sleight of hand. That weekend, it just didn’t rain for Nigeria, it poured. But that was just the beginning of the birth pangs.

On Monday, Bauchi equally erupted. A religious riot broke out, after a teacher seized a copy of the Holy Qu’ran from a female student, who was reading it during lessons. That was enough reason for fundamentalists to detonate a time bomb, which saw up to 16 non-Muslims being killed across the city.

As if to confirm the truism that no one has a monopoly of violence, and that killing begets more killing, Onitsha and Nnewi were to explode later in the week. And of course, it is the Hausas who bore the brunt of the action. People, who perhaps had no link to the mob in Maiduguri, paid with their lives, simply because of their ethnic origin.

It was bloodletting at its basest, its most primitive level. I even shudder to recollect some of the things that reportedly happened.
In the midst of all these, tension was raised to a higher notch by a notice to President Olusegun Obasanjo by the Oodua Peoples Congress, which gave a seven-day ultimatum for the release of its leaders, Dr Frederick Fasehun, and Otunba Gani Adams, who have been held in detention since late last year.

And right in the middle of all that, a charade called public hearing on review of the constitution was taking place in certain parts of the country, with some people using it as a forum to canvass a third term for President Obasanjo. How badly does this nation fritter the grace which God makes available to us? How long will we drag ourselves to the edge of the precipice, only for God, in His mercy, to pull us back? How long?

A writer says “resentment is a poor prop for anyone to lean upon.” But in Nigeria, that is the order of the day. There is resentment, malice, malignity, bad blood, bitterness, malevolence across the land. This is one country in which the different ethnic nationalities carry giant-sized grudges in their hearts against one another. If not, why should the northern Muslim begin to kill the southern Christian because some reckless people drew an irresponsible cartoon all the way in Denmark? Why should a Nigerian pay for the sins of harebrained, negligent cartoonists thousands of miles away, if not that malice had been an underlying factor of the relationship?

Curiously, since the cartoon protests broke out in different parts of the world some weeks back, Nigeria now has the unenviable reputation of the country that has the highest casualty figure. Even largely Islamic countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Libya and Iran, among others, did not have such high number of deaths. This clearly shows that it was simply more than the cartoon. Here, it was bile, rancour. An opportunity to vent spleen by people who had been seeking such opportunity.

The barbarity in Maiduguri was wrong. The one in Bauchi was equally wrong. And the reprisal in Onitsha and Nnewi were wrong. All these wrongs can never make a right. But then, they all show one thing: There is too much pent-up anger, animus, ill-will in this country. And the matter is not helped, rather it is exacerbated, by a suspicion that Obasanjo would elongate his stay in office through artifice. When those murderers flooded Maiduguri streets, they were not only out to kill perceived infidels, they were also venting their spleen on people who want to hang onto power, which they equally felt is the birthright of the North. That is the complexity of this nation called Nigeria.

Since he came to power in 1999, Obasanjo has been told severally of the need to restructure this country, of the need for us to sit and negotiate the basis for our co-existence. He refused. Now, as we count the days to his relinquishing power (yes, he must, on May 29, 2007) I wonder how he feels that he fluffed the opportunity to organise a true national conference, which would have put this country on better, surer footing. The conflagrations in the land were not caused purely by religion, they were demonstrations of a people who lean on resentment as a prop. A poor prop, which if we’re not careful, may send the whole edifice called Nigeria crashing.