What Yar’adua, NASS must do
It is to be expected that a solution that is to be truly permanent would not only be difficult to arrive at, but would come at a heavy prize. That’s how it should be: peace has never been cheap; often it is achieved through the barrel of the gun. Europeans, Americans, Asians, the entire human […]
It is to be expected that a solution that is to be truly permanent would not only be difficult to arrive at, but would come at a heavy prize. That’s how it should be: peace has never been cheap; often it is achieved through the barrel of the gun. Europeans, Americans, Asians, the entire human race knows this only too well. In Africa, the harrowing situation in DR Congo, Somalia and Sudan are testimonies to the high cost of peace. In the case of Plateau state it is a joke to expect that the contending parties would, under any guise, be able to settle down and tolerate one another within the existing political and geographical set-up. The amount of violence unleashed within the state is enough to last another century; and because violence begets violence, and hate generates hate, there is really only one solution to the Plateau crises: the creation of another state out of the present Plateau state.
Since the mayhem of last November, and after the publication of last week’s article, many people from within and outside Plateau state have expressed various shades of opinion concerning the immediate and remote causes of the crises and the remedy against future recurrence. Listening to those people, some of whom displayed remarkable intelligence and very impressive understanding of the fundamental issues at stake in Plateau, certain facts stand out. One is that there is general agreement that the only reason why these hate attacks keep recurring is because government has never seriously punished its perpetrators even where they had been identified; from the time it started in Zangon Kataf in 1987 to date. There is also unanimous agreement that if left unchecked it could ignite an all out war in the country,
To attack the problem effectively, many of the stake holders have proposed solutions that may sound varied in detail; but which ultimately lead to one destination: separating the contending parties in Plateau state in such a way as to grant each party a little of what it desires while extracting appropriate sacrifice from both parties.
One solution that is a hot favorite with almost everyone, especially the perennial victims of these genocides, in this case the Hausa-Fulani and Muslim population of Plateau state, is to remove Jos North from Plateau state and merge it with Saminaka in the north-west, Tilde, Toro and Magaman Gumau to the east and such other small towns and settlements within this geographical boundary. The new entity may then be made to be part of Bauchi state or be given the status of a state of its own altogether.
According to the advocates of this formula, other Hausa-Fulani and Muslim settlements that are located deep in other parts of the state such as Yelwan Shendam and Wase may be given the option to either migrate to the new state or be carved out and be made to be part of Nasarawa or any of the adjoining states with which they share similar sociological characteristics.
Of course this may sound like an over simplification of what may appear to be a complex problem. Perhaps it is over simplified, but it might well be that the solution is not that complex if the will to find it is there; in any case it is very close to the position of the “Movement for the Jasawa Forum”, which is an umbrella organization for the Hausa-Fulani and Muslims of Plateau state. In 2005 the Forum submitted a memorandum to the National Boundary Commission in Abuja, with the specific request for the Commission to “Merge Jos North LGC with Bauchi state.”
Who feels it knows it. Some of us only share the pain and anguish of the victims of the Plateau crises from a distance; for the victims, the grim prospect of a violent death, or the death of a loved one is an everyday reality. If those people are citizens, then the Federal Government and the National Assembly must move fast to treat them as such, to guaranty their rights as enshrined in section 33 to 46 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999. And this responsibility rests solely with the Federal Government and the NASS.