Questions for Kaduna’s warriors

I am so averse to blood-letting that I have not slaughtered a chicken since 1979, so today I have a few questions that I want to ask the people on both sides of the ethno-religious divide that have perpetrated many rounds of inter-communal violence in Kaduna city and environs since 1987. My first question is, what […]

I am so averse to blood-letting that I have not slaughtered a chicken since 1979, so today I have a few questions that I want to ask the people on both sides of the ethno-religious divide that have perpetrated many rounds of inter-communal violence in Kaduna city and environs since 1987.

My first question is, what is the strategic goal of killing one another across religious and communal lines? Is it to deplete the other community’s numbers in order to gain demographic, fiscal, electoral, commercial, technical or other advantage? If that is so, evidence is that no one’s population is shrinking. The number of Muslims is increasing and the number of Christians is also increasing, not only in Nigeria but across Africa and in fact worldwide. We should therefore reconsider this failed strategy of piecemeal decimation.

Or, are we killing, maiming and burning merely to inflict pain on the other community? Now, what is the use of inflicting pain on the other community when it has equal capacity to inflict pain on your own community? There is no empirical way to measure the quantum of pain being felt in the other person’s heart. Even if there is, the quantity of grief in the other person’s heart will not in anyway ameliorate the pain in my own heart. What is the gain if we are burying our dead and the other guys are also burying their dead? The strategic objective of looting other community members’ shops and houses is also dubious, since they can retaliate and loot our community members’ shops and houses.

What is the strategic utility of reprisal attacks? As perfected by pastoral communities, who are famous for never forgiving an offense, the main reason for reprisal attack is deterrence, so that next time “they” will not do that to us again. In relations between nation states, reprisal attack is meant to prevent future attacks. The strategy often works because statesmen are rational. However, it has not worked here because hoodlums in all communities that are the storm troopers of inter-communal carnage are not rational and they are not deterred by painful reprisal attacks on their communities. The fact that the cycle of attacks and reprisal attacks has continued unabated for several decades means we should reconsider its utility because it has failed as a strategy.

The strategy of waylaying and killing highway travelers as “reprisal” for the killing of our folks in other places, perfected at Gonin Gora and Dura-Du, has also failed. In the latter case it also backfired when community hoodlums waylaid and killed an Army General. Now the whole community is paying a heavy price. The strategy of a community using youths as battering rams in inter-communal conflicts also needs re-examination. We must ponder: do we want our youths to taste human blood, learn to loot and maim and grow up believing that stealing is okay and human life is cheap? The day when we are not around and today’s youths become the community leaders, are those the values that we want them to pass on to their own children? Our communities are like this even though our own parents and grandparents tried to impart on us the culture of peace, faith and forgiveness. What happens in future when youths are taught the opposite values?

Another question is, why is it that our two major religions teach about peace, forgiveness and the sanctity of human life, yet their adherents do the exact opposite? Either the clerics on both sides have failed in their preaching, or maybe they are the ones who taught their followers that human life is precious only if it belongs to an adherent of our religious faith. If that is the case, they should better change their message because it has become counter-productive in the sense that others are being taught a similar thing by their own clerics and all of us are unsafe.

When I first went to live in Kaduna in 1990, the city was thoroughly mixed ethnically and religiously. Now it is strictly divided communally. This communal segregation was not part of the Max Lock Kaduna City master plan of the 1960s, so my question to the communal warriors who amended the plan is: what commercial, cultural, industrial, technological or educational benefit has it brought? When Donald Trump recently started a trade war with China, top economists warned that less trade could plunge the world into recession. Kaduna warriors however think it is beneficial. All of Nigeria’s great cities became what they are due to waves of immigrants over many centuries and the skills, arts, goods, labour, services and cultures that they brought. Lagos, Ibadan, Kano, Jos, Enugu, Port Harcourt and Kaduna all attained greatness due to the mix of peoples.

If ethnic and religious purity is the formula for material progress, why is it that our villages stagnated while communally mixed cities expanded and prospered? USA, which became the melting pot of European tribes, speedily overtook all European nations in material progress. So why do we think that Kaduna will fare better if it adopts the communal purity of a village? One of the things driving community hate and rage is the belief, sowed in youths’ hearts by community elite, that other communities are marginalizing them and are responsible for all their woes. Well, I have news for you. The community that you think is marginalising your community also believes it is being marginalized by other communities. All of us Africans believe that Caucasians marginalized us. They in turn worry and fret that there are aliens somewhere who have marginalized Earth by inhabiting a juicier part of the universe.

If only the youths will stop for a minute and think; what role did our local elite play in our community’s marginalisation, at least by misappropriating most of the small crumbs that fell on our table? Sitting down for decades on end to complain about marginalization will not end it. Luckily, every community has a chance to emancipate itself, especially through education. “Advantages” enjoyed by some communities such as high population, rich territory inhabited, resources found under their soil or cultural alliances across regions occurred over many centuries and are difficult to reverse. Minority ethnic groups in Nigeria, for example, tend to feel that the major groups marginalize them because of numbers. You can overcome that with hard work. An American writer once wrote that when Lebanon wrote its constitution in 1932, the presidency was zoned to Christians because they were in the majority while the Muslim minority got the prime minister. The writer said “Lebanese Muslims then went to bed,” emerged decades later as the majority and demanded for the presidency.  You can even leave a group with its numerical advantage and still dominate it, as the Rwandan Tutsis did to the Hutus.

To end cyclical inter-communal carnage in Nigeria, I think we should borrow a leaf from medical doctors. To attack a disease, you should identify its weakest link and attack that one because the chain is no stronger than its weakest link. To fight malaria for example, mosquito was identified as the weak link in the chain and WHO nearly eradicated it with DDT. The weak link in the inter-communal fighting chain are the jobless, uneducated or poorly educated youths. Remove them, and there will be nobody around to kill, maim or mount “reprisal” attacks however aggrieved a community is.

Right now, both Kaduna communities are teeming with such youths. To deplete their ranks [before they deplete ours] will require an expanded, reinforced and sustained educational and industrial program. That will take time, so we can start by apprehending and severely punishing everyone that took part in inter-communal carnage. Too many people who committed cold blooded murder, looted shops or inflicted serious injury on others are walking around freely in the communities. We need a Dura Du-scale operation to apprehend all of them.