This column originally appeared in Vanguard.
When Trump threatened to take lethal action against Muslim criminals who have turned parts of Northern Nigeria into killing fields, he gained a whole bunch – maybe millions! – of new fans overnight.
Many Christians who had totally despised him till then started to speak well of him and regard him as some kind of avenging saviour. I continue to be deeply sceptical about Trump. But I must salute him for reminding the Nigerian government that it is extremely necessary to quit messing about and take the carnage in the North seriously.
GENOCIDE: DIFFERENT VIEWPOINTS
Everyone agrees that both Christians and Muslims are being mercilessly slaughtered by Muslim criminals in the North. But there is considerable disagreement about whether it is an exaggeration to describe the Christian murders as genocide. I have been asking various people to comment on this difference of opinion.
Here is the text (hence abbreviations) response that I received from Professor Chidi Odinkalu, the distinguished lawyer, author and human rights activist:
Good morning, my Oga sis. I hope you are good? From my admittedly limited vintage, issues are – not surprisingly – neither white nor black.
1. It is interesting that it has taken Americans to get the govt to acknowledge that Nigerians are getting killed in intolerable numbers. Whether it is Christians or Muslims or animists or atheists – in my view – matters very little. They are human.
2. There is – again, in my view – an undue fixation with the emotive load of “genocide”. So, let’s deal with that first. In practical terms, the significance of the distinction between “genocide” & other atrocity crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, etc. – is not necessarily of much consequence anymore, especially not since the disintegration of former Yugoslavia.
3. As a matter of record, the numbers of killings casualties we are looking at are beyond substantial, the pattern is distinct & associated dislocations & displacements appear targeted in many places.
4. The pushback by govt appears to conflate Boko Haram in NE with the Middle Belt. In NE, clearly, more Muslims are being killed. In the NC, the victims are mostly Christians & there may be good case for arguing that it is very targeted. Most conflict monitors look at the 3 theatres in Northern Nigeria – NE, NW, NC – as separate. So, the 2 truths can coexist.
5. Until now, the govt, which cld & shd have acted to do something about it, refused or neglected to do anything about it.
6. Most of these places where the killings are happening, de-populated as they are, return election results, mind you, usually in favour of ruling parties from “voters” in mass graves or in far flung IDP camps where no actual voting took place.
7. It is no answer to the targeted atrocities in the Benue, Nasarawa, Plateau, SK, to claim that Muslims are being killed in Borno or displaced in Zamfara. The latter fact does not excuse or contest the former.
8. It is the sense of complicit impunity that shd hold our attention.
9. So, I wld suggest the focus shd be on the idea of complicit impunity in the face of evident Mass atrocities. Complicit impunity is compatible with intentional liquidation of a people.
10. It is rather unusual – isn’t it? – that your people are being killed in large numbers, you can do something about it, & you fail to do so. Is that normal?!
The next message comes from an unrepentantly outspoken reader called Mike who is based in the Mushin district of Lagos:
Dear Donu, it’s unfortunate that in a nation that ought to be a secular state some disgruntled, unconscionable, unscrupulous riff- raffs; otherwise, called bandits/ jihadists terrorists wants to impose their religeous beliefs, ideologies/ concepts on Nigerians. they rob and kill as deranged beings that they are. As extremists or religeous bigots, they kill christians to satisfy the small god or whatever that they claim to worship. They kill true muslims who disagree with them in the interpretation of their book. They are in a supremacy contest and have become emboldened by the muslim-muslim government put in place by a desperate, over ambitious, egoistic self-centred, inconsiderate ambition of ‘one man’.
In this Tinubu era, there is a high degree of consciousness on our ethnicity and religeous fault-lines. We must go back to the status quo of christian-muslim or muslim-christian tickets in aso rock.
Whatever appointments Tinubu makes are less visible to the ordinary man in the streets. Bandits know only President and VP. There is a feeling now that the country belongs to muslims, hence, it is open to them to do whatever they like with it. Christians are not second class citizens.
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NIGERIA UNFILTERED – spicy commentaries on Naija issues – appears every Wednesday, while DONU’S WEEK appears on Fridays and is international as well as local, covering a mixture of soft and tough issues around my personal life, my work, and my worldview.
In the past two weeks on Nigeria Unfiltered, I have quoted Funmi Para-Mallam, a professor who is convinced that the killings of Christians by Muslims in Northern Nigeria amount to a religiously-motivated genocide. I have also discussed accepting an award on behalf of my Governor, Sim Fubara.
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