JOS: UNREBRANDABLE SYMBOL OF SYSTEM COLLAPSE

When one complains of lack of electricity, insecurity, lawlessness and other problems bedevilling Nigeria, one should just be reminded that this is a country where everything, including governance at the top of the power pyramid, has collapsed. The few sectors still managing to survive – the banks and the telecom companies for example – only […]

When one complains of lack of electricity, insecurity, lawlessness and other problems bedevilling Nigeria, one should just be reminded that this is a country where everything, including governance at the top of the power pyramid, has collapsed. The few sectors still managing to survive – the banks and the telecom companies for example – only do so because they operate outside the ‘system’ as we know it.
What happened last week has brought the hypocrisy of those prime candidates for the War Crimes Tribunal into the open. All of a sudden, our compatriots have realised how painful it is to lose a loved one; how gory it is to hack a woman and a baby to death; how merciless people can be when they use machetes to cut down fleeing humans and exact a pound of flesh, literally.
The world is all about propaganda. With all this hue and cry about last weekend, the international observer may be tempted to believe that that was the first time such mayhem has ever been visited on a people in that area. All of a sudden, the leaders of the nation, leaders have realised this is a massacre. And the shameless attempts to justify earlier massacres make everything so obvious.
The earlier victims, whom the whole world knows as the underdogs in this ethnic cleansing war, have not used propaganda to their advantage. Why would they go and bury their dead silently? Why did they not invite the international media to witness the burial spectacle? Why did they not call the whole world to count the number of dead bodies, the number of women, the number of children, killed on their side? Why didn’t their women come out to protest the wanton massacre of their own people?
When in November 2008, the ‘sons of the soil’ marauded around downtown on a murderous rampage, they were communicating with each other in Hausa, the language of their victims, the ‘settlers’. Again, listening to the rulers of Plateau State, speaking in almost fluent Hausa on the media, the massive irony of it all is lost only on the most naïve. Here are ‘sons of the soil’, out to ethnically-cleanse a ‘settler’ community, yet borrowing the victim’s own tongue. Yet again, when these ‘sons of the soil’ appear in public, they are more often than not regaled in what could pass for Hausa clothing, the attire of their hated ‘settler’ compatriots.
Hausa is lingua franca among the array of the Babel of Voices the Good Lord has blessed the so-called Middle Belt with. And yes, necessity of identity may have made Hausa attire dressing franca for many a northern people. So the Hausa ‘settlers’ can ‘donate’ their language, their dress, their food, their culture for adoption. But one thing the ‘settlers’ cannot aspire to become is a miserable chairman of a local government. For that audacity of hope to become a local government chairman, they would be exterminated, using all means necessary including the historically-biased security agencies.
It did not start today. It had happened earlier in 1994 when a certain Hausa person was appointed a caretaker chairman of the Jos North Local Government by a military government. Hundreds perished for that miserable office. It again happened in September 2001 when another ‘settler’ had the audacity to be appointed head of a Federal Government (yes, Federal Government) poverty alleviation agency. Who was he to offer himself to serve in a position the ‘sons if the soil’ felt should be reserved for them? For a week, all hell broke loose on the ‘settlers’. The world did not get to know the extent of the mayhem early enough, for it coincided with the 9/11 attacks on the United States.
Then again in 2004, it happened. The orgy of violence, now remembered as the Yelwa Massacre, was so unprecedented that the Federal Government had to declare a state of emergency and sack the governor for some time. Yet the same scenario was allowed to happen again!
The Hausa are magnanimous settlers. The British settled in Australia, and Aboriginals have never been the same. Today, Australia is a White Man’s country through and through. The same British settled New Zealand and the original Maoris rue the day Captain Cook reached their shores. The same White settlers went west and settled today’s Americas. The indigenous ‘sons of the soil’ have never been the same: they in fact even lost their identities for a derisive, pejorative term: Red Indians. They were shot and killed, and those who refused to die were infected with syphilis and gonorrhoea, commodities in great abundance among the Whites. The same Israel that Christian Middle Belters always look up to as bulwark against Muslim hegemony is also a settler community which has usurped the lands and resources of Palestinians, Muslim and Christian. The Hausa have indeed been magnanimous settlers.
What the ‘sons of the soil’ should now advocate is a constitutional amendment to say that democracy should no longer be a game of numbers, and certain positions, especially Chairman of Jos North Local Government, should be reserved exclusively for ‘indigenes’. They would do well to study the Malaysian constitution for international best practices. And then all those Biroms working in the factories of Kano, the heart of Hausaland, would pack their luggage and return home, having won the great battle against the Hausa. Then harmony and tranquillity would reign supreme in the home of peace and hospitality.
Or they should study Jos’s parallel city here in Africa; Doaula in Cameroun. Doaula, the commercial capital of Cameroun, has also been always in the grips of indigene-settler crisis. The ‘sons of the soil’, called Sawa, are a minority in the city they claim to be theirs. ‘Settlers’ such as the Bamileke, the Fulani and the Hausa (those Hausas again!) took residence long before the natives left their fastnesses. In the July 2003 legislative and municipal elections in Cameroon, the ‘settlers’ won Douala. Out of five municipal councils, four were won by ‘settlers’ and one by an ‘indigene’. Of the four ‘settlers’, three were Bamileke and one was Hausa (the Hausa again!). The Sawa have not (yet) taken up the cudgels to murder the Bamileke and Hausa (perhaps until they are coached by Plateau’s ‘sons of the soil’).
What the Sawa did was simple: noting that the winners of Doaula elections belonged mainly to the opposition party, they cosied up to the ruling party at the centre. Now all ‘Federal’ appointments come to the Sawa, including poverty alleviation. They leave the miserable municipal positions (actually Local Government chairmanship) to the ‘settlers’ until the next election.
The way we are going, if we allow these ‘sons of the soil’ to redesign Nigeria, by the time everyone is unravelled, this writer would have to re-trace four hundred years of nomadic wanderlust and relocate to Futa Toro or Futa Jallon or similar exotic places west where the Fulani emanated. And then the Guineans and the Gambians and the Senegalse would say we are ‘settlers’, again!
Let us end with this really revealing indigene-settler exchange which is said to have taken place recently. It was the United Nations, and the Palestinian Representative rose to speak: “Before beginning my talk,” he said, “I want to tell you something about Moses. When he struck the rock and it brought forth water, he thought, ‘What a good opportunity to have a bath!’ He removed his clothes, put them aside on the rock and entered the water. When he got out and wanted to dress, his clothes had vanished. An Israeli had stolen them.”
The Israeli Representative jumped up furiously and shouted, “What are you talking about? The Israelis weren’t even there by then.” The Palestinian Representative smiled and said: “Exactly. And now that we have made that clear, I will begin my speech.”