Eid-el-Kabir: “Ashes in our mouths”

It is our unfortunate lot, nowadays, in our beleaguered nation, that celebrations of joy, seasons of festival of all manner—religious and social, spiritual and profane—have been repeatedly and sordidly marred by tragedy, blood-letting and mindless violence. Our traditional moments and seasons of wining and dining have constantly been converted to seasons of grieving and mourning. […]

It is our unfortunate lot, nowadays, in our beleaguered nation, that celebrations of joy, seasons of festival of all manner—religious and social, spiritual and profane—have been repeatedly and sordidly marred by tragedy, blood-letting and mindless violence. Our traditional moments and seasons of wining and dining have constantly been converted to seasons of grieving and mourning. Let us draw a few painful instances to drive home the sad point. The May 29, government chosen Democracy Day of last year was done in grand style, with pomp and pageantry hardly ever witnessed in our nation. It was fireworks, impeccable colour of martial dexterity by our men of arms. Our school children gave delightful artistry that left our international visitors stupefied. But as these events were going on, bombs were detonating nearby on the streets of Abuja, and many lives lay stone-dead from suicide bomb-blasts. It was like putting a handful of salt in the mouth, and then shitting into it. Last Christmas was a season of disturbed peace, as death mounted the pulpit in Jos and its environ through bomb explosions.

Now, just imagine the macabre state of national scare that we live in  this country that the 51st Anniversary ceremony and the Presidential change of guards, was  for the first time  ever, held within the confines of the State House  instead of a full public parade to mark the independence celebrations.  Now, it is Sallah. What we expected was the slaughtering of rams—and the ram race was certainly diminished, as is the tradition at Eid –el-Kabir. It turned out not to be a celebration of joy, which it was meant to be. Bomb explosions rocked our nation to its foundations in the cities of Potiskum and  Damaturu, Yobe State, as over a hundred souls perished, in our season of religious festivity—as pilgrims ascend Mount Arafat in the Holy land in Saudi Arabia, bodies were lowered to the earth, never to rise again.

Why are we so bled?

The occasion thus appears a re-incarnation, an epiphanous re-echo, of the event that provoked the above epigram  that opens this column—by Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka and Nigeria’s foremost radical literary critic, Biodun Jeyifo. Professor Wole Soyinka, in 1986, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the very first time an African and a black man would win the coveted prize, ever. The occasion deserved spell-binding and deafening celebration and, as in Soyinka himself humbly remarked in an interview after the announcement, the event was a ‘tribute to the heritage of African literature.’  The occasion provoked, in Jeyifo’s words, ‘intoxication, spontaneous joy …probably without parallel in Nigeria in recent years.’ But the joy, the fan-fare, the stupor-bound merriment and revelry, was aborted, truncated, midrib, both for Nigeria and Africa, as profound horror and tragedy broke loose, within the same week of the Nobel. Two events, of equally devastating proportions, struck; Dele Giwa, the charismatic, brilliant and sensational journalist and founder of the Newswatch Magazine was assassinated through Nigeria’s first ever experience of death from a parcel of bombs. Before the outrage calmed, the revolutionary leader and President of Mozambique, Samora Machel, was killed in a plane crash, an occurrence that was greeted with unrelieved suspicion.

Why are we so blest?

Our nation is in the throes of profound and pervasive cynicism, where violence deriving from genuine and sinister motives, make happiness, even of the conventional caliber, impossible for us. Every possible moment of joy and bliss has been converted to bouquets of grief and mourning. Terror (or terrorism) has become the most strident vernacular happening on our land. Why may we not say amen to our barrage of prayers? Why are our words thrown up and our thoughts weigh down beneath the earth and the moments of our celebration overtaken, every so often, with malevolent grief and disaster?

Here is Sallah, Eid-el-Adha. It is, rightly, taken as one of the most celebrated events in the calenderical year of the Muslims. It is a season of symbolic sacrifice, through the agency of the ram, of Prophet Ibrahim’s only son, Ismail to Almighty Allah, in a total and unequivocal obedience of Allah’s injunction. Based on his unalloyed self surrender, faith and obedience, Allah gave him a ram to sacrifice to him instead of his son. That marked the beginning of the religious ritual of sacrifice by the faithfuls in appreciation of Allah, in merriment and the spirit of sharing. The spiritual component of the festivities is anchored on unbridled obedience, faith and sacrifice, and in the veritable instruction that the ceremony carries. It also manifests in the lesson of humility, purity of the spirit and sobriety in the perception of man’s relationship with his creator and his fellowmen. Fellow-feeling, compassion, love and humanness are the anticipated attributes of Sallah. Leaders are in particular admonished to imbibe these quintessential values of service through self-sacrifice rather than perceiving leadership in the grab-and-greed dimension, characterized by rabid corruption, moral turpitude and obsession with the external trappings of power, which have characterized governance in our country and which is responsible for the failure of leadership and dim-witted governance that is our lot. It is an extension of this uncommitted and passionless governance that has produced inequality, economic hardship and religious extremism which certainly gave rise to Boko Haram, which has presently seized the jugular of our nation.

There can be no greater and better moment for sober reflection among the leadership cadre of our society—secular and religious—to internalize the instruction of Eid-el-kabir; lessons of ethical conduct in leadership, sacrifice, humaneness and, above all, compassion in governance. Leaders who love their nation would serve rather than steal or practice capital flight and money-laundering—carting away the wealth and toil of their nation to other lands while their subjects and fellow compatriots wallow and groan in pains of poverty. Such inequity, selfishness in power, absence of sacrifice; veritable lesson of Sallah and most other religious festivals—breed social discontent and violence, the like of which the Boko Harams are made of.

It is therefore not difficult to find the roundly condemnable and dastardly acts of serial and multiple murders and blood-letting, which dispatched over a hundred innocent Nigerians to their untimely graves and numerous others left in various stages of wound in Potiskum and Damaturu, Yobe State, being carried in period of holiness and piety. Kill-joy cynicism, leading to horrifying and wanton ill-motivated bomb attacks which have claimed precious and quality lives among whom are a Professor, a lecturer, innocent youth corps member and several other citizens who would rather celebrate the Sallah in peace, bliss and happiness but whose lives were seized, midlife. This even further accentuates the insecure state of our nation, where all spaces of peace, of joy, of festivity and worship, of merriment and socialization, have  become targets of sorrow and death.

It is gratifying that Mr. President expresses grief, according to the information issued by Dr. Reuben Abati, over this colossal loss of valuable Nigerian lives. It is good that he cancels social engagements, including the wedding ceremony of his brother. It is good and responsible display of sensitivity. But the situation demands prompt, well-thought- out action on the side of government, to address this matter of death visitation at moments when we should cuddle, embrace and celebrate life.

All said, it is still Barka da Sallah to our Muslim brethren and may our nation survive these painful, dismal times.