As Kaduna descends into another chaos
Against the backdrop of recent communal clashes, Kaduna State Government says it intends to hold communities to account. Malam Nasir El-Rufai has a valid point even if the laws he seeks to enforce are colonial. While, I do not subscribe to collective punishment or ethno-religious stereotyping, I still understand that extreme situations demand for extreme […]
Against the backdrop of recent communal clashes, Kaduna State Government says it intends to hold communities to account. Malam Nasir El-Rufai has a valid point even if the laws he seeks to enforce are colonial. While, I do not subscribe to collective punishment or ethno-religious stereotyping, I still understand that extreme situations demand for extreme measures – especially when what is at stake is human life and the preservation of social harmony.
Surely, communities that breed killer drug addicts and tolerate such miscreants in their midst (a hibernating army of murderers), should bear the consequences of their inaction. In essence, collective responsibility for presiding over mass breeding of human trash will make the local leadership, at the neighbourhood level, sit up and hold parents accountable for the proper upbringing of their wards. In Africa, “it takes a village to raise a child.” This enduring truth remains valid to this day. So what we are seeing is a failure of the collective.
Cudgel and cutlass wielding miscreants are worse than terrorists!
For terrorists, at least they lay claim to some twisted ideology. They have some focus regarding their objectives. And they usually export their wickedness far from home.
However, killer squads that prowl the streets to unleash mayhem during civil unrests, those ones have nothing except their shared desire to kill and maim. Fueled by drugs and intoxicants, they unleash anarchy on their own neighborhoods – places where they grew up. By lunch time they would have annihilated the very friends with whom they shared breakfast only a few hours earlier. It is cruelty at its meanest – in which even the worst of predatory animals do not indulge.
Even when slaughtering animals for food, it is always easier to despatch that strange ram you bought from the market than to kill the one which grew up in your compound. There is always a sense of guilt.
Higher emotional investment due to familiarity is natural with normal humans. Yet this doesn’t appear to be normal with violent rioters in Nigeria.
To me, it is this singular disconnect from emotion and empathy that makes Nigeria’s rioters more reprehensible than terrorists on the world’s scale of evil, if ever there was one!
Communities that sit and watch while their members procreate, on an industrial scale, without parental accountability, should be held duly responsible for their folly.
Frankly, there is a limit to what the authorities can do. In a developing country like Nigeria, government alone cannot monitor every individual to ensure that their humongous sexual appetites do not translate into churning out uneducated and unhinged human scum to mix with the rest of society. In fact, some will even quote scripture to justify their unrestrained randiness – and scream that their religious freedoms are being infringed upon when cautioned. Well, we all know that there is no gospel that preaches “go forth and multiply your scumbags.”
Irrespective of the fact that a hungry man is an angry man, hunger should never transform people into their neighbors’ killers nonetheless. Such nonsense never manifested in even famine stricken countries like Ethiopia or Yemen. Therefore, such escapist theories are only plausible where cannibalism is the end game – at which point proponents would need to prove the existence of a famine on a scale not yet experienced since recorded history began.
Let’s not lose sight of the fact that apprehending and bringing to justice the perpetrators of wanton violence against their compatriots remains the ultimate deterrence! Those killed or traumatised deserve justice! Enough of endless committees of enquiry into civil unrests please. We all know that they are useless! Police investigators can unravel who did what or instigated whom and arrest them!
Fundamentally, from Plateau to Benue, Kaduna to Taraba and Adamawa, political “crises-preneurs’ must be dealt with like the common criminals that they are – and be charged with treason!
The political will to do what is right must be demonstrated practically! This is the surest way to arrest our descent into “state-of-nature.”
The pretenders, the stokers, the closet enthusiasts of mayhem and the brazen advocates of ethno-religious chauvinism must equally be dealt with decisively! Rule of law should never remain at the level of empty campaign sloganeering. Human life MUST have value in Nigeria!
Aliyu Ma’aji (Ma’ajin Zazzau), Abuja