Child not Bride and Allied Matters

While the controversy over child marriage may be simmering down, there is a much broader conversation that we must have about the fate of Nigerian children in the context of Nigeria’s federal architecture. That debate should revolve around the Child Rights Act. Passed in 2003 by the National Assembly, it is yet to be domesticated in ten states of the federation, most of which are in Northern Nigeria.

The unremarked subtext of the child marriage debate is the fact that a number of our national developmental objectives now fall within the brief of states rather than the federal government. The military era’s unitary command and control governance is gone and along with it any possibility of uniform national development. For this reason, much of the ire directed at the Senate recently in the name of the Nigerian child was misdirected. Whether a girl in Zamfara or Yobe goes to school or winds up prematurely as a wife is entirely up to the states involved.

It is significant that even as the debate has raged in recent weeks, five Northern governors whose states possess some of the most atrocious social indices with regard to children were traversing the country parleying with former heads of state and President Goodluck Jonathan in an effort to resolve the strife in the ruling party. Unofficially, the jaunt is part of the maneuvering for the 2015 elections. It is sadly often the case that governance is at the mercy of politics.

This raises the issue of the dereliction of duty by governors who are rarely found within their states attending to the affairs of their people. The media itself abets gubernatorial truancy by disproportionately focusing on the presidency and the federal government and virtually ignoring what goes on in the states where governors rule in absolutist fashion. Indeed, the presidency though constitutionally powerful, is constrained by the legislature, the media’s relentless scrutiny and even the governors themselves; whereas, the selfsame governors administer their states like private estates with the media uninterested in their deeds and misdeeds. If this were not the case, civil society would have taken the errant governors to task for not having domesticated the Child Rights Act but as things stand all attention is obsessively focused on the federal government. This is an important point because by 2015, a number of governors will be vying for the presidency. We should judge them not by their declared intentions for the presidency but by their gubernatorial records.  

The undue focus on the central government is also a vestige of the imprint made by overbearing military dictatorships in the national consciousness. But since 1999, federal democracy has slowly become more tangible and governors have grown more assertive. The fact is that many of the issues that directly affect Nigerians fall under the purview of state and local governments. The media and civil society have been slow to correspondingly adopt a “federal mentality.”

The key to addressing issues like early marriage is education. The pervasiveness of early marriage is consistent with low school enrolment among females. A high incidence of poverty is also consonant with high female illiteracy which prevents women from being able to function as autonomous economic actors. States that wish to lower the incidence of early marriage should consider enacting compulsory primary and secondary education which would equip girls (and boys) with the tools to be productive citizens. Secondary education should be the baseline for educational attainment.

The preponderance of girl-child education in an area is a fairly accurate predictor of the sustainability of early marriage. A number of the polemicists who argued in favour of early marriage defended it as an institution that protects feminine virtue from social immorality. Some of these arguments were rife with male chauvinism, misogyny and the patriarchal objectification of women. These quibbles aside, it is worth noting that the practice of early marriage is itself increasingly linked to rising divorce rates in Northern Nigeria.

In keeping with the general African view of marriage as a class statement, men in Northern Nigeria tend to see a new bride as a status symbol. According to research findings in 2010 by Dr Ismaila Zango, a sociologist at the Bayero University Kano (BUK), one out of two marriages in Kano ends in divorce. Similar patterns of matrimonial and family failure subsist in Sokoto and Katsina states. Vesico-vaginal fistula, a condition that arises from early pregnancy, is rampant. Over two hundred thousand women nationwide, the majority of them Northerners, suffer from the disease. Paradoxically, sufferers of VVF are likely to be divorced by their husbands and thrown out of their homes. Legions of women divorced for the slightest infraction can be found on the streets of Kano. With no means of economic empowerment these women either succumb to destitution or take to prostitution, thus fuelling the onslaught of HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted plagues. It is a vicious cycle in every sense. In this instance, far from being a guarantor of feminine morality, early marriage only leaves females as vulnerable as ever while not imposing any regulatory discipline on males.

The point of female education is to empower young women to sustain themselves regardless of their marital status. Educating girls would render them less vulnerable to the depredations of male patriarchy and empower them to survive the desperate economic circumstances of divorce.       

It is important to note too that despite the religious colouration given to the debate over child marriage, this is not a religious matter. Child marriage is not a pillar of Islam. The persistence of this cultural practice has less to do with the resilience of Islam than with the low penetration of the North by modernity. In other parts of Nigeria, it is the march of female education rather than any socio-cultural epiphany that has drastically reduced the incidence of early marriage; after all, the betrothal of girls is not unknown to other cultures.  

The early marriage of girls is a vestige of the agrarian social economy which defined early Islamic societies. Economic activity in agrarian economies being labour-intensive was uniquely suited for brawny males who as the main economic actors were enjoined to spread an umbrella of socio-economic protection over the “weaker” womenfolk. Modernization, industrialization and the knowledge economy which favour brains over brawn have been characterized by the increasing education of women and their emergence as competent economic actors. They no longer need the protective umbrella of the men in the same way as it was during the agrarian age. This dynamic has yet to fully penetrate the largely rural agrarian reality of Northern Nigeria where female literacy remains low.

This trend is also reinforced by socio-cultural institutions. It is often the case that male patriarchy thrives by using its dominance of instruments like organized religion to control and manipulate the vulnerable, among them, women and children, whether through early (and forced) marriages or the institutionalized destitution of children known as almajiri. It is therefore important that we reject the use of faith to mask or justify the perpetration of crimes or the perpetuation of retrogression. It is significant that female literacy is far higher among Muslim communities in Southern Nigeria than in the North. Iran is a conservative Islamic theocracy and yet 70 percent of its science and engineering students are women. Across the Middle East, the taboos against educating women are receding as is the notion that Islam is a divine license for female subjugation. One need not be a “feminist” or a “westernized liberal” to appreciate this point. Both Uthman Dan Fodio who advocated the education of women and his daughter, Nana Asmau, who was an accomplished intellectual stand out as irresistible examples of progressive enlightenment.

The objections to the Child Rights Act in the states yet to domesticate it are also about much more than early marriage. There is the matter of the Act’s intolerance of child labour, for instance. Street hawking is something the Act frowns at and yet it remains a fixture of urban life in much of Nigeria not just in the North. The Child Rights Act is at the mercy of the tension between legislation and custom. Politics rarely leaps ahead of culture. When trying to change practices rooted in tradition and culture, the levers of change have to be localized. This is why ideally, driving education and ending early marriage are ultimately matters for state and local governments. It takes agencies of change embedded in the socio-cultural environment in question to effect transformation from within. There is only so much that can be accomplished by proclamations in Abuja. The fate of a young girl in Dirin Daji or Talata Mafara will be shaped less by remote proclamations in Abuja than by transformative actors in her own community and municipality. The economics and politics of developmental transformation are local.

Primary education, in particular, falls under the ambit of state and local authorities. Yet local governments have been reduced by governors to being mere lifeless appendages of state governments thereby crippling their administrative potential. Ironically, the Senate voted against the proposal for local government autonomy (although it was approved by the House of Representatives) that would have unshackled municipalities from the oppressive grip of states and empowered them to drive development from the bottom up. The Senate’s vote demonstrated a refusal to recognize that only empowered communities can efficiently generate and distribute developmental deliverables. The centralized and dysfunctional bureaucracy headquartered in Abuja simply cannot remotely manage the aspirations of over 160 million people.  

The alternative to this is to give the federal government sweeping powers to enforce the Child Rights Act across the board. Any serious enforcement effort would surely involve the establishment of a federal child welfare bureaucracy that sanctions errant families and takes custodianship of victimized children as wards of the state. This would be a vast and costly undertaking that would meet with socio-cultural and political obstruction and likely require authoritarian measures to force through. To avoid unnecessary conflict and confrontation with federal authorities, this challenge is probably best managed by states and local governments. In any case, this administration certainly lacks the enthusiasm, political will and capacity to embark on such social engineering. It also does not seem likely that we will witness the federalization of primary and secondary education in the North to force the issue.     

Under the current federal arrangements, the question of development will be answered mostly by how competently states are run. Given the lackluster performances of several governors and the disparate social indices of states, it is clear that divergence in developmental outcomes will continue to be a facet of our national life. Already, a child born in Northeastern Nigeria will likely encounter a substantially lower quality of life that a contemporary born in the Southwest. These disparities pose a serious challenge to efforts to construct a common citizenship.

How vibrant states are in this new era of greater responsibility and diminishing oil revenues will be determined by the vigour of civil society in those states and a new willingness by the media to interrogate what actually goes on in those states by way of development.

These developmental divergences will either become the basis for a continuation of the slothful politics of entitlement that focuses on revenue allocation, more oil money from the centre, and lazy populist demagoguery or it could lead to the emergence of visionary politics that focuses on transformative governance, wealth creation, entrepreneurship, social and economic justice and the obliteration of retrogressive institutions that entrench poverty.

(All images sourced online)

States of Emergency

President Goodluck Jonathan’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States may signal a turning point in the Nigerian government’s conflict with Islamist insurgents in Northern Nigeria. The military’s deployment of more troops as well as helicopter gunships and jets has been greeted by a euphoric note of optimism in the media. The sense is that the armed forces, now unshackled from political inhibitions, are about to showcase the hitherto underestimated might of the Nigerian state and finally crush Boko Haram. Such militaristic boosterism should be tempered by more sober appraisals of events.

In imposing emergency rule, President Jonathan acted decisively if belatedly, for this was a measure that arguably should have been taken a year or two earlier instead of engaging in fruitless attempts to appease the terrorists. It had become necessary to prevent the Northeast from a descent into ungovernable chaos. The expectation now is that the escalation of force will swiftly end the insurgency but it is more realistic to think in terms of months and years rather than weeks.

Counterinsurgency campaigns take time because of the hydra-headed and often protean nature of insurgencies. The proper comparison is not, as some commentators opine, between the Nigerian situation and the recent Anglo-American military expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Nigerian army is not a foreign invading force. The more accurate comparison is with the conflicts between Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers, Britain and the Irish Republican Army, Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army and India and the Naxalite Maoist rebellion. All these insurgencies have lasted decades.

The current offensive may well degrade and even destroy the organization known as Boko Haram but this is unlikely to end the plague of terrorism for a number of reasons. Firstly, even though the group is probably in its death throes, it would be prudent to expect it to mount last gasp bombings, shootings and kidnappings and to attempt high profile attacks on major cities including Abuja almost as a sort of murderous final flourish. The Islamist anarchist cult Maitatsine was first “crushed” by the military in 1980 in Kano but its sporadic uprisings continued across the north, particularly the northeast, until 1985. This resilience is typical of a manifestation of terror that has evolved beyond an organizational format to become a socio-cultural phenomenon. When we think of terrorism now, we should think less of organizations and more of a subculture of violent rebellion against the state.

Beyond this, the technology of violence is now diffuse. Terrorism executed with easily accessible low tech implements will likely become a normative feature of Nigerian life for the time being. Furthermore, Boko Haram is not the only terrorist threat facing Nigeria. The first terrorist attack of the Jonathan era was carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a seasoned purveyor of bombings in the Delta.

The country’s vast pool of unschooled, unskilled, and unemployed young males of working age is a veritable incubator of anti-state aggression. This is coupled with politicians’ penchant for domesticating and co-opting violent groups for their own purposes instead of properly addressing them as criminal elements. Indeed, it is impossible to separate terrorism and insurgency from the culture of political violence that suffuses partisan politics. A presidential adviser, Kingsley Kuku and Asari Dokubo, a Niger Delta militant gang leader recently threatened violence if Jonathan is not reelected in 2015 demonstrating the complicity of politicians at the highest levels in the plague of terrorism. The politically-connected oil-stealing gangsters who call themselves “Niger Delta militants” symbolize the nexus between terrorism and politics.  

As was the case in the Niger Delta, the prolonged militarization in the North east and the complexity of combating a stealthy group hiding in the midst of a civilian population and using it as a human shield, carry the risk of human rights violations by the military. Such abuses will radicalize an embittered populace and further fuel the flames of the insurgency. The geography of the north east, which is the epicentre of this insurgency, has enabled Boko Haram to develop transnational affiliations and close links with criminal and terror networks extending from the Sahel to the Maghreb. It will take concerted and persistent action to root out these groups. In the Northeast, the veins of alienation which extremist groups tap into run deep. If Islamist terrorism was going to germinate in Nigeria, it seems logical that it would be in her much neglected northeastern frontier.

Whatever its eventual success, this military action should be understood as an ad hoc measure. A medium to long term national security strategy requires the urgent development of institutional capacities to address the new range of threats posed by low intensity conflicts such as that between the pastoralists and farmers, an essentially ecological conflict driven by climate change but with the potential to assume a broader sectarian scale. These include threats posed by insurgency, ethnic militias and privately-owned paramilitaries. Piracy in Nigeria’s coastal waters is a growing threat with international implications and could become the next major national and international security crisis.  

A revised national security strategy must surely involve an enhanced border security administration including the short-term militarization of Nigeria’s exceedingly porous borders with her Sahelian neighbours. It will also call for police reform initiatives that restore civilian policing to the front lines of security and law enforcement administration. One of the more pungent symptoms of Nigeria’s dysfunctional security architecture has been the militarization of law enforcement with an overburdened military tasked to combat everything from highway banditry to kidnapping. This, in addition to the neglect of the police, has contributed to a climate of militarism that feeds violence and in which a regard for due process of law can scarcely flower.

A pre-emptive security doctrine would blend modern, well-tooled policing with conflict resolution mechanisms and early warning systems in communities. This means leveraging civil society resources in creating mechanisms that prevent small scale altercations from flaring into all out conflict. Security and intelligence services must become more adept at tracking the evolution of ethnic and religious associations, and identifying those whose philosophies dispose them towards future radicalization and militarization.

Institutional reforms in the security establishment are much more difficult than proclaiming emergency rule. They require administrative rigour and the political will to challenge obsolete orthodoxies. They call for a shift from the establishment’s obsolete military era obsession with state capture through coup d’etat – a steadily diminishing threat since 1999 – to a broader cognizance of the perils posed by non-state actors and the intersection of politics, organized crime and terrorism. No security sector reform, for instance, is complete without reviewing the use of perverse affirmative action schemes in staffing strategic agencies. If there is any area of governance that urgently needs to be run as a meritocracy, it is the intelligence, security and law and enforcement administration. 

The Terrifying New Normal 

 

Before the 1980s, there were no religious disturbances in Northern Nigeria. From 1980, they became normative fixtures of the northern urban life. A variety of factors were responsible. The oil boom of the late 1970s had driven many youngsters from rural agrarian life to the cities in search of jobs. Deindustrialization subsequently eliminated a significant segment of the blue collar work force and provided the Maitatsine cult with fodder for its various uprisings from 1980 onwards. Other factors were the proliferation of radical Islamist groups supported by Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia and Shia revolutionaries in Iran which fed on rampant socio-economic dislocation, the politicization of religion after the 1978 Constituent Assembly debates on Sharia and later, military regimes’ manipulation of religion to generate support in Northern Nigeria and mask their misrule. All of these factors coupled with the failure of the state and the deepening poverty of the region provided fertile ground for the chronic spate of urban terrorism that are frequently described as religious riots.

In much the same way that religious riots became normative after the 1980s, it is reasonable to project that Boko Haram-style terrorism will continue albeit in isolated and sporadic proportions for the time being. It will become part of the fabric of our national life. Safety measures will be out in place to adapt us to this terrifying new normal. Bomb detectors are already almost ubiquitous in public spaces. More of such devices will become customary. But the problem with a scenario in which terrorism ceases to have any impact is that terrorists will seek to carry out even more spectacular outrages to register their agenda on a desensitized public consciousness. Nigerians are already accustomed to great insecurity so terrorists might feel compelled to use more vicious tactics to breach the threshold of public outrage. Should the socio-economic conditions that incubated Boko Haram be left unaddressed, we can also expect a better armed and more organized insurgency to emerge from the ashes within a decade.

Ultimately, however efficient the military and the security forces may be, their work is only a stopgap measure. Elected politicians must actually govern and provide the developmental deliverables that will turn a teeming young population away from nihilism and anarchy. There are no foolproof guarantees against terrorism but intelligent governance can shrink the population of malcontents to the barest minimum of misanthropes that are beyond salvage. The more young Nigerians are empowered to live creative lives and achieve upward mobility, the less likely they are to be seduced by psychotic visions of paradise or careers in political thuggery. It is this failure to create social security and to provide paths to a meaningful life that is the greatest generator of terrorism and conflict in Nigeria. 

(All Images sourced online)

Pax Americana and Its Discontents

Current trends in the domestic politics of the United States have implications for the world. On major issues requiring bipartisan consensus for progress – welfare and social security reform, gun control, cutting the deficit and immigration – recalcitrant Republicans and Democrats are locked in an ideological impasse. The only area in which the US president has real latitude is in foreign policy. Presidents shackled by the restrictions of stalemated domestic politics can still look impressive and act imperiously on the world stage. Nowhere is this more evident that in the president’s power to conduct wars.

We may be approaching a time when presidents will orchestrate military engagements abroad in order to shore up their ratings at home. With domestic politics deadlocked, American voters may have no other means for evaluating their leaders than how muscularly they conduct themselves abroad.

In August 1998, President Bill Clinton, while facing intense congressional scrutiny over the Monica Lewinsky affair, ordered cruise missile strikes on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan in retaliation for earlier attacks on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some critics thought that Clinton was trying to deflect attention from the tawdry scandal threatening to submerge his presidency by appearing presidential and decisive on the world stage. They cited “Wag the Dog”, a movie in which the White House hires a Hollywood film maker to create a fake war in the media to divert attention from the president’s sexual peccadilloes. Clinton administration spokesmen denied that the president was trying to wag the dog.

The notion that an American president could stage an international incident for domestic political gain is not outlandish. We could yet see the assassinations of foreign nationals whether terrorists, rogue scientists or dissidents strategically timed to provoke an uptick in pre-election polls. This would simply be a logical advancement from the George W. Bush administration’s use of colour-coded terror alerts to frighten the American public into acquiescence.

Foreign wars conducted by special ops units and Predator drones can enable presidents to exorcise the “wimp factor” that comes from being unable to push their agenda through an implacable congress. Bitterly divided at home between Liberal secularists and conservative religionists, war-making may become a logical means by which a president conjures patriotic paroxysms and rallies his people to the Star - Spangled Banner.  

The last decade witnessed an unprecedented expansion of the president’s war powers and their disconnection from congressional oversight and democratic constraints. Liberals had hoped that Barack Obama would reverse the trend which began under Bush. But it has continued largely because politicians are rarely inclined to refuse more power and also because of the sense that an assertive presidency is needed as a counterweight to an intransigent do-nothing congress and to shepherd an evidently “confused” electorate which keeps sending divided governments to Washington. As Peter Beinart wrote recently in Newsweek, “Liberals may not be thrilled about the drone program, but they trust Obama’s judgment in a way they never trusted Bush’s. And… they want a president strong enough to impose his will on a Congress that they consider reactionary, corrupt, and dismissive of the public will.”

During the 2012 elections, Republican efforts to tar Obama as weak on national security as they typically do to liberal presidents simply failed to stick against the man who took out Osama Bin Laden and ordered more drone strikes in his first year than his predecessor did in his entire eight years. With presidents rendered impotent at home but virile abroad, thanks to the exigencies of the “war on terror”, the world has ample reason to fear American militarism. Because drones largely eliminate the need for boots on the ground and therefore the spectacle of flag-draped body bags arriving from foreign lands to public outrage, they offer a politically cost-effective way of waging war and attaining the tough guy image that reassures Americans that the president is keeping them safe. With their disregard for the niceties of sovereignty and international law, drones are the new symbol of US imperial omnipotence.  

It is worth noting that the debate in the US over the drone-assassination of Anwar al Awlaki, an American citizen, was about whether the president can order the termination of a US citizen. It is taken for granted that he can order the killing of foreign citizens. Indeed, the US can kill foreign citizens in their own countries as drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen indicate. The toll in “collateral damage” – civilians, men, women and children – is deemed an “acceptable loss.”

The international media, so often exercised about Arab terrorists and African warlords, its favourite pantomime villains, has little to say about the serial misdeeds of the biggest war-making power on earth. The very viable case for hauling US officials (Bush and Dick Cheney would be great) before the War Crimes Tribunal is simply laughed off. It is the most pungent indication that the international community is an unfair constellation and that might is still right. While western pundits fulminate over the election of Uhuru Kenyatta who is billed to appear at the Hague for alleged crimes against humanity, they side-step the fact that US and British officials are responsible for far more deaths of innocents in  Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that wearing a suit and sitting in White Hall or the White House while ordering a war on the basis of fabricated evidence (as in Iraq), confers immunity from justice.

As is so often the case, technology has a way of democratizing power and will do so yet again in this brave new world of imperial presidents and drones. It was when China and Russia joined America in the club of nuclear nations that she began to advocate nuclear arms control treaties. American officials will start preaching restraint in the use of drones once China and Russia carry out drone campaigns of their own. The Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive war undermined America’s customary self-righteous sermonizing to other countries. US officials bleat tamely about the need for dialogue and restraint when China and Russia carry out bloody campaigns in Tibet and Chechnya, because they recognize that it is hypocrital to do so. Vladmir Putin gamely defined Russian operations in Chechnya as a “war on terror”, appropriating Bush’s terminology and implying moral equivalence between the two nations’ militarisms.

The problem with Pax Americana is that its imperial character cannot make the world more peaceful. After witnessing the Euro-American intervention in Libya which ousted Gaddafi, other nations took note. They watched as western nations violated a country’s sovereignty, aided an internal insurrection, bombed the country into submission, and saw to the killing of the country’s leader. They learned that Gaddafi had signed his death warrant when he signed away Libya’s weapons of mass destruction. This is why Iran and North Korea are unlikely to give up their nuclear aspirations; because they fear a power that has arrogated to itself the right to determine who rules other nations. Despite the war weariness in the west stemming from the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the potential for conflict in the Persian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula is quite high. 

Thus, Pax Americana by default, if not design, can only generate conflict in the world. It will continue to do so until two things happen – until the US resolves the contradictions that have paralyzed its domestic politics which in turn prompts her presidents to play “Captain America” and engage in imperial overreach. More importantly, there has to be a common plumb line for global justice that targets war criminals of every hue…Yes, including those that are to be found in White Hall and the White House.   

All Images Sourced Online.  

Our Empathy Deficit

A curious thing happened last month. Terrorists blew up a bus in a Kano motor park killing and injuring scores of passengers and bystanders. Since the park was in Sabon Gari, the victims were thought to be Igbos and thus victims of Boko Haram’s plan to rid the north of Igbos and southerners. Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark even suggested that Chinua Achebe’s death might have been hastened by the slaying of “his people.” Some polemicists declared the attack to be part of a pattern of anti-Igbo violence in the North. Debate along these lines ensued in the senate with media reports of frightened northerners fleeing the east fearing Igbo reprisals. Then the Kano State Government released the names of some victims of the bombings, a number of whom were apparently northerners. An awkward silence followed to enable us to reflect on the farcical level of discourse in the media and in the legislature.

Some people attacked the Kano Government for releasing the names and contradicting the preferred narrative of Igbo victimhood. That a number of northerners died in the bombing seemed to have rendered it a non-event. Disappointed Lagos newspapers could no longer publish sensational headlines about Igbos being slaughtered in the North. Their profit projections would have to be scaled down, at least until a more handsome number of southerners or Igbos in the North are slain. Overwrought “activists” could no longer belch out threats of reprisals and market themselves as “Igbo leaders.”

There was yet more buffoonery and opportunism on parade. Abia State Governor Theodore Orji who in 2011 fired non-indigenes (including Igbos) from the state’s employment called on Igbos in the North to return “home” since they were not safe. As though Abia, the hotbed of commercialized kidnapping where Orji moved from advocating capital punishment for the kidnappers to placating them with an amnesty offer is necessarily any safer for Igbos. It is unlikely that a politician that has been so brazenly prejudiced against “non-indigenes” could possibly protect the “returnees.”

The corpses were still smouldering from the bombing when some opposition politicians claimed that it had been carried out by the ruling party without bothering with the inconvenience of providing a scintilla of evidence. Some of them even used the opportunity to call on the federal government to issue an amnesty to the terrorists. To think that these hacks who would make political capital out of this tragedy, who could scarcely be troubled to issue condemnations of the act or condolences to the grieving, are now advertizing themselves as alternatives to the incumbent government. And this is leaving aside the fact that Boko Haram’s insurgency emerged from states mainly controlled since 1999 by opposition parties.   

 Whatever else the terrorists are doing, it goes beyond attacking specific ethnic groups. They are striking at physical and psychological fault lines with the clear intent of expanding their murderous campaign into an all out sectarian war. But in Nigeria today, outside of churches and mosques, it is really impossible to target crowded public spaces such as markets and motor parks with total assurance that the casualties will belong to one ethnic or faith community. In Kano, is it really possible to report a terror attack in public in such exclusivist terms? And even if this were the case, should it matter? Should the victims of terrorist attacks disclose their states of origin and their religions before we grieve their deaths? Does it matter whether the victim is named Abubakar or Nnamdi, Ejiro or Tersoo? Is it not tragedy enough that lives can be so cavalierly cut short? Can we not mourn the brazen assault on our collective humanity, close ranks in solidarity as human beings and call evil by its proper name?

The great moral demand of our time is reverence for life. It means that when a bus is blown up, the ethnic origins and faiths of the victims should matter less than the fact that this is a demonic violation of our humanity. This specie of violence is what medieval jurists called hostis generis humani – “an enemy of humanity.” We should be affronted by these murders whether the casualties are Muslims or Christians, atheists or agnostics, Igbo or Kanuri. This is the ultimate barometer of our humanity. For in the final analysis, only God can verify the authenticity of our declared religious convictions; whether one is truly Muslim or Christian or neither. The only thing that we can be certain of is that we are truly human.

The only measures that can protect us all from the predations of reprobate elites and terrorists are those that are humanist and universal. In other words, there is no way of protecting only Igbos or only Fulanis. We share the same geography and eco-system; the same perils and opportunities and indeed the same future. Only the umbrella of a state that protects all can protect each. This is why attempts to sectionalize what is a human tragedy and claim a monopoly of suffering are daft. We are all victims and casualties of this omnivorous plague of violence.

To the extent to which we persist in entertaining sectarian narrow-mindedness and comfortable bigotries, we will remain vulnerable to terrorism and all the plagues of our society that are not restricted in their reach by our faith or ethnicity. The October 2010 Eagle Square bombing which was carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta killed a diverse range of Nigerians – Muslims, Christians, Southerners, Northerners, Civilians, and security agents. Terrorist attacks follow this pattern because the perpetrators seek to maximize casualties and thereby sow fear – the dread of mass deaths in sudden acts of random violence – into the public mind. They usually cannot afford to be too specific or risk sacrificing spectacular casualty figures. This normalization of mass murder is a threat to all.

When politicians and religious leaders claim that only their people are being killed by Boko Haram to the exclusion of other victims, they are guilty of moral myopia. What they should be doing is casting the terrorists as enemies of the human race, killers of Nigerians of every creed and clan. They should be promoting empathy and solidarity, not monopolizing grief and using it as a moral bludgeon to inflict feelings of faux guilt on fellow sufferers. But hamstrung by a lack of empathy and moral imagination, too many religious leaders and politicians have resorted to rabble-rousing that only inflames sectarian passions and offers neither moral clarity nor healing.

What motivates a self-proclaimed Jihadist to kill Christians or a self-proclaimed Christian militant to kill Muslims is not primarily hatred for Christians or Muslims although these are factors. It is fundamentally misanthropy – the hatred of humanity – that is at work. The difficulty is not in killing a Muslim or a Christian but in taking a human life at all. Once that threshold is crossed, all else is fair game. The hand that can slay the stranger can, and will likely also eventually, slay kindred. Annihilating infidels is only preparation for exterminating apostates. It does not take long before those who have been raised to kill unbelievers begin to hunt believers who, in their view, do not believe accurately enough.  

This explains why violent crime flourishes after the cessation of hostilities in conflict-prone locales. Those who have tasted blood as ethnic combatants will likely do so again as gangsters and brigands. Violence is addictive and the god-like power of ending a life on a whim proves irresistible. This is why youths used as political thugs by politicians eventually turn to terrorism, banditry and murder for hire. It was veterans of the Aguleri-Umuleri communal wars of the 1990s that almost sacked Onitsha and Aba in an orgy of banditry in the early 2000s. It is a generation raised in an environment that turned a blind eye to the wanton slaughter of religious minorities as infidels and the destruction of their churches and homes in chronic bouts of religious rioting in the 1980s and 1990s that has produced the anarchist terrorist group that now slays Muslims and Christians alike. Violence tends to reproduce itself and it is this culture of misanthropic violence, no matter the cultural garments that it wears, that we must repudiate. 

What we should fear even more than the psychotic malice of terrorists is the loss of empathy that desensitizes us to tragedies as long as they are happening to other people that are not kin or fellow believers. It is empathy that enables us to keenly identify with the sufferings of others. The Bantu concept of Ubuntu which tells us that we are human through other human beings speaks to the notion of empathy and collective humanity. It tells us that we do not truly exist independent of others and that what ails one will shortly ail all. When we cease to feel the afflictions of our fellow beings, it is a sign that that we are losing our humanity; and that our society is becoming a jungle.  In such conditions, no one, regardless of ethnicity or religion is truly safe. 




(All Images sourced online) 

Globalization and Its Hypocrites

Since the 1885 Berlin Conference in which western nations carved up Africa among themselves, the relational dynamic between both regions has stayed the same. Africa remains a resource farm exporting primary products to the west and importing manufactured goods. Even after decolonization, the continent remained the site of resource extraction and structural adjustment programmes designed by western –dominated international financial institutions. Throughout the cold war era, western nations installed puppet dictators in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, to guarantee their control of natural resources and keep their countries from the communists’ clutches.

U.S. and European farm subsidies, which clearly violate the gospel of free trade, have helped to decimate Africa’s agrarian economies. The unfair economic relations between the west and Africa are further fortified by existing economic conventions that effectively subvert the continent’s potential for industrial growth and perpetuate her status as a dumping ground for foreign goods.  Even so, western envoys continue to lecture poorer nations about the civilizing virtues of unfettered markets and trade liberalization.

Western experts often talk about how failed states led by corrupt despots have become terrorist havens. They ignore other salient factors – errant colonial cartography in Africa and the Middle East, the subversion of African and Middle Eastern publics by western intriguers to prevent nationalists or Islamists from coming to power, the legacy of resource extraction, unfettered deregulation, and the inequities built into globalization which have degraded the sovereign capacities of the said failed states.

            The most significant consequence of these policies has been the epic flow of migration from benighted third world enclaves to the rich first world. This was triggered by the repression and recession that western-backed dictators inflicted upon their countries. During the late 1980s and 1990s, the trickle became a deluge. Denied economic opportunities that would have been provided by large scale industrialization, poor third worlders followed the bread crumbs to where the opportunities were. The magnetism of the markets proved irresistible. It is profoundly ironic that migration is now altering the complexion of first world nations.

The recent implosion of Anglo-Saxon capitalism has triggered a severe bout of cultural hysteria. In Britain, the unspoken reason why the Conservatives, Labourites and Liberal Democrats are competing to craft the most Draconian immigration laws is the fear that Britain, so historically tolerant of immigration, is losing her sense of collective identity. In the post 9-11 world, and particularly after the 2005 terrorist attacks on the London underground, the notion that some British citizens might feel a greater allegiance to obscure Imams in Pakistan than to the Queen is deeply disturbing to the guardians of the realm. The ideal of a multicultural Britain is dissipating in a climate of creeping recessionary xenophobia. There is a sense that British identity which has always been a tenuous veneer overlaying the older Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish allegiances, is being frayed by the relentless influx of foreigners.

In Continental Europe, right wing demagogues have stoked similar panic over “Eurabia”, the supposedly imminent overrunning of the continent through stealthy overpopulation by Arab Muslims. This is far from reality but bigots are not inclined to let facts get in the way of populist fictions. 

In America, the already robust immigration debate has been inflamed by projections that she will shortly cease to be a white majority country and become a nation of minorities – Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians and others. Some pundits despondently attribute Barack Obama’s reelection to the emerging “post-white” electoral coalition. Rightwing scare mongers warn of America being seized from her white owners by liberals consorting with subversive foreigners. The lingering rumours in some quarters about Obama’s birthplace and the belief that he is a foreign-born Muslim reflect this paranoia which rightwing politicians habitually play on.

But why should immigration be so frightening to western nations? In the global order they have long advocated, it should not be strange that for political and economic reasons, Africa and the Middle East will export labour in prodigious proportions to the first world just as crude oil and other natural resources flow in the same direction and just as jobs have moved from the first world to China and India (via outsourcing). 

After all, the logical end of globalization is a borderless planet in every sense; a world of infinitely expanding diasporas. Why should western countries worry about the coherence of national identities when nations are, in globalization’s orthodoxy, obsolete chauvinisms? Aren’t we all supposed to be global citizens now? National borders are a relatively recent innovation; a mere blip in humanity’s long history of free-ranging migration. Why should giant transnational corporations be global citizens but not intrepid people seeking their fortune from far-flung places?

It is incongruous to insist upon the mobility of capital as western leaders have done for decades while raising barriers against the mobility of labour. So what if migrants depress wages and deprive locals of jobs? This is exactly how market forces are supposed to operate. Why is economic Darwinism ideal for poor nations but not for Charles Darwin’s country?

If western nations can dictate policy to African countries, then the latter should protest the illiberal immigration policies being adopted by the first world as unfair trade practices and violations of the spirit of globalization. In preaching capitalism and democracy worldwide, western nations have implied that the quest for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a universal human right. Surely, the logical extension of this doctrine is to permit people seeking life, liberty and happiness to go wherever these treasures are evidently domiciled. Indeed, why can’t we all just jet out to any country that catches our fancy without the nuisance of travel documents? After all, the natural corollary of free trade is free migration.

This is what globalization means. Unless, of course, globalization is a relative term – a protean theme that merely fits the prejudices of its proponents – and therefore has a different meaning in Davos than it does in Delhi or Dakar. 

All images sourced online.