Mathew Hassan Kukah: Various

[Toyin Falola]

How Jonathan Can Stop Boko Haram

Posted by TheNEWS on October 10, 2011 // 6Comments

Matthew Hassan Kukah, who was recently elevated to the position of Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, is a public intellectual. To him, the clergy should not stand aloof while people who were elected to govern ride roughshod over the people. A prolific writer, bibliophile, public commentator and trouble-shooter, Kukah has served on many government panels, the most prominent of which were the Oputa Commission which dealt with the atrocities committed in the days of the military and the one that probed the environmental degradation perpetrated by Shell in Ogoniland. Bishop Kukah is a journalist's delight any day and the people's welfare remains the cornerstore of his episcopacy. Our Kaduna correspondent, FEMI ADI spoke with him last Tuesday. The Bishop spoke on his new position, the Boko Haram problem, Jos crisis, what President Goodluck Jonathan should do, Islamic banking and other issues

 

* Matthew Hassan Kukah.

You were recently elevated to the position of Bishop of Sokoto Diocese. How do you hope to handle proselitising in a predominantly Muslim setting?

It is very interesting that people - 90 per cent, a substantial per cent - still call me Father Kukah. For its sentimentality, it's very endearing. A bishop mentioned in his sermon one Fulani man who went to meet the Bishop of Yola and said that he heard that Father Kukah is now Bishop of Sokoto and he said yes. The Fulani man said: Please can you beg the Pope to allow us to be calling him Father Kukah?

Let me say how grateful I am to God, Nigeria and Nigerians. If anything, my installation has reaffirmed our faith, our hope and our belief in this great country. And truly I say to people, I might have been the subject of the event, people would say it's because of me that people came. But I say that I was actually the object. This is because, really, the sheer quantum of human beings cutting across different spectrums of life that turned out there defeats the whole notion that we have a Muslim/Christian problem in Nigeria. Really, I am very convinced that the notion of whether you are indigene, settler, Muslim, Christian, southerners, northerners and so on, is a symptom of the very poor intellectual content of governance in Nigeria. It is also evidence that those who govern us can really not have the imagination to take absolute and full control of this country, because we ought to have one father, who is the President of our country.

With proper governance, with proper leadership, we ought not to be talking about tribe, religion, about our traditional rulers, alternative non-state actors who are occupying the stage. The sheer turn-out of people in Sokoto across these lines tells you that we don't have an ethnic or religious problem in Nigeria. We have a problem of leadership, with such a limited and constrained vision that just cannot create a platform for national integration.

I am not talking about President Goodluck Jonathan; we are talking of the of last 51 years. If you ask how do I hope to deal with this matter, it is to indeed say that the fact the Sultan took care of so many of my guests, the fact that ordinary Muslims ran around and fed people, in fact I don't see myself in Sokoto representing a small Christian community in a predominantly Muslim environment. I think I want to see my being in Sokoto as being in any part of Nigeria. I am a citizen of Nigeria and I take anyone I see in Sokoto primarily as a citizen of Nigeria, who is just accidentally a Muslim or Christian.We have to reduce poverty, insist on certain levels of justice, insist on certain minimum conduct that can enhance the lives of our people, not as Christians or Muslims.

Do you think the country has genuine cause to celebrate, given our stunted growth at 51?

The fact of the matter is that we have a country that has been mangled, fangled and totally destroyed by a bunch of unbelievably incompetent people. Nigerians tend to think that we have bad or good leadership. That is not the issue. I have had the privilege of meeting every Nigerian head of state or president, except people like Late Murtala Muhammed and Sani Abacha. I consider myself as a very privileged Nigerian. Each and every one of these people that I met, I consider them as people who truly wanted to do the best they could for our country.

If you take all these together, you have many good people wanting to do good things. But if you send somebody to do a job without the requisite or adequate equipment, it would affect his performance. Go through the whole list, you will not find a single Nigerian president whom you can say sat down, planned and studied this country so as to understand what this country needed before saying I want to be President of Nigeria. There is hardly any person. Maybe you might say Abiola, but Abiola didn't make it. Perhaps, that is why he couldn't be president. Maybe you can name other people. But you discover that a good number of those who have studied this country and have the passion to continue to struggle, saying, Look, I have an answer to the problems of this country, have not had a chance. To ask where Nigeria is at 51, we should thank God we are still a country.

But we cannot continue to dwell on the past, because the past is the past and it is an ugly past. The tragedy is that the bad ways of the past still persist. We should ask ourselves, how did we find ourselves in this incredible pool of corruption? How is it that corruption has become the garment and the gown of honour? How is it that things the most primitive of society should be ashamed of, those are the things that have become articles of faith among our leaders? Unless these questions are answered, we cannot begin to think of how we might correct or make the next years better. Where we are now is a tragedy because we ought not to be standing there. What is most unfortunate is that, I do not see a clear, aggressive, articulate, clearly defined strategy for getting us out of this mess. And that may be the cause of my personal anxiety and sorrow. I don't see enough being done to block all the areas of wastages that have held us down for so many years.

Many would have thought that a President from a deprived area would have a reasonable knowledge about the problems and use such background to provide the much desired change.

Minority politics has its own logic. When you are co-opted by a much wider, bigger, time tested hegemonic elite from a minority background, you have the tendency to act in a particular way. All you can do is to look like someone in person of President Barack Obama, and the sentiments of 2008 have all evaporated because black people thought, here you have are a black man, an orphan, who finds himself in such a position. President Obasanjo was head of state, he has not hidden the fact that he came from a very marginal part of Ogun State. Gowon can't say anything different. There is hardly any president that came from a privileged background. There are a lot of issues, but let me just take two.

If you become president, for you to have the sagacity to take certain decisions, most of that is contingent on what your plans are. If you decide that you are going to put your vision ahead of the realities around you, it might cost you your life, your political fortune. John Kennedy knew the consequences of what he did; it meant he never managed to stay long as President of America. But some of the decisions he and his brother took still reverberate today. It is not a question of how long he stayed as president, but he took decisions that were purely and simply suicidal.

When I spoke at the Governors' Forum, President Jonathan was there. One of the points I made to him frankly was that he has a choice: either you become metaphorically an orphan, in which he came from an environment with no shoes and therefore make putting shoes on the feet of the ordinary Nigerians the primary duty he was going to achieve. In which case, it will come with consequences. He has to literally break bones. Because it means that he has to take food away from the indolent and corrupt, who have decided that they would not do anything except to continue to feed and feed themselves. Or alternatively, he could become part of the big boys and then become the prince. If he becomes the prince, the minority status is no longer important because he is no longer the poor boy that came from the poor background. He is now playing with the big boys, talking like the big boys, walking like the big boys, singing like the big boys. And they reproduce the paraphernalia that is required to play that role. There are no two ways about it. Tragically, many African or Nigerian presidents have the best of intentions, but because they don't take very fast decisions, what then happens is like a man standing on quicksand; the longer he stays, the deeper he sinks.

All these hyenas who are hanging in the periphery, these vultures who have learnt how to be friends at the seat of power and who are simply waiting for you to waste two or three days before they sweep in, they build a cage around you and you can't escape. Seeking to escape from that cage will be trying to do good for Nigeria. It's up to Jonathan. We could still go on the same road and you could still not get to Ore. We could still not have the road, we could still not have the railway, we could not have power simply because there is no clinical imagination to understand that where we are in Nigeria, corruption is now the blood of survival of the elite in every department. How you go to devise the mechanism and the antiseptic device to cleanse all these as to make water flow to ordinary people is the challenge.

Too many politicians build their ambitions around these guys who claim they are the ones that brought you to power. If you don't know what is happening, you will not be able to understand what is happening. A lot of goals that Jonathan set for himself are achievable. But frankly, the problem primarily is not only about fixing power, roads, all these areas that are so capital intensive, where criminals are making a living. There are quite a few things that we could really do quite differently to motivate our citizens to higher ideals. A lot of things are so basic; that is, about getting food on the tables of ordinary Nigerians. If you go back and read Mandela's speech he delivered on 18 May 1994. At his inauguration, one of the things he promised the people of South Africa was salt. One of the things that Mahatma Gandhi used as a symbol for liberating the people of India was salt. If you simply say no Nigerian must go to sleep on an empty stomach, you devise a strategy for achieving this and it could just make the difference.

What do you make of the anger of the Islamic sect popularly called Boko Haram?

My problem with this Boko Haram thing is that I don't know where to start, because it is also in a way evidence of intellectual carelessness. What we hear about Boko Haram is purely and simply what you, journalists, are writing. There has been no serious intellectual effort to understand what their problems are. Everybody is saying, Boko Haram people say they don't want education. But now we are reading reports about Boko Haram sending emails. Read the story of the man who held a meeting with Obasanjo. I read an interview which he granted 20 hours before he died. What did he say?

The man said their father - that is, the father in-law of Yusuf. He was Yusuf's brother in-law - died living with 26 or 37 children, I am not too sure. And he said he had managed to get some of them registered in higher institutions - one in the state polytechnic and another in the University of Maiduguri. And he said it was a great achievement.

That is the man that people are insisting said he didn't want western education. If you ask, what are these people asking for? If you read the text of what they are saying, it is literally in every sense Aminu Kano talking. They are concerned about the basic things that the rest of us are concerned about. How and why is it that we are living in such a rich country but are suffering? We are still not connecting the Boko Haram of bombing and the Boko Haram of 2008.

They have said, You people say in your constitution that everybody must have western education before you become councillor, local government chairman, right up to senate or president. There is no evidence that if you have a certificate in Arabic studies you can become a councillor in Nigeria. At least that is what the law says. And they said, Since you people require western education to access these positions, we are not part of it. It now turns out that with all your western education, which is the licence you are using to access power in Nigeria, we can't see the water, we can't see the light, the cheque you are signing to steal our money is not in Arabic script, but in western script. The banks are western contraptions, they have become platform for theft. My understanding of their view is that if this is all western education is about, then it is haram (taboo), because it is not meeting the needs which education is meant to meet.

They are saying the local government chairman who is a thief; member of the House who is a thief; senator who is thief; minister who is a thief, and all other people who are thieves, all they have in common is western education. I am not reading a news script, but as an intellectual I have a duty to decode what message I understand, not what I am reading in the newspapers.

Because, so far, what we are hearing about Boko Haram is what their enemies are saying, not the context of what they are saying. Now the people are saying they want to negotiate, but who is coming forward to negotiate? Whom are you negotiating with? You are creating proxies and they are saying we don't want them to negotiate for us. People know the billions that it cost to secure amnesty. And the thousands of elites across this country who smiled all the way to the bank as a result of cutting those deals. Are you going to blame segments of the northern elite who are cashing in and saying they can negotiate because if we say we want to negotiate with Boko Haram, they are going to appear as proxies. We are not going to give Boko Haram money directly.

But Boko Haram has not told you it's looking for money. I have read what their demands are, even the ten-point statement in the letter they wrote to the President. All the points they raised were basic, things you couldn't quarrel with. They said, Bring back our people who needed to be resettled, build our homes, release our people.

For you they may be criminals, but a man who is in prison is someone's son or someone's husband. I am not making a case for them, but I am just saying that we need to be honest and sincere to what we are talking about. Why is it that no Yoruba has come out to negotiate on behalf of the Oodua People's Congress, OPC? Why is it that no Igbo man has come out to negotiate on behalf of the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra, MASSOB? What we have is a dysfunctional society. For me, these are simply political problems, they've got nothing to do with religious leaders, they have got nothing to do with panels of investigation. As far as I am concerned, what we are talking about is not impossible, it is not unachievable. What did Mandela say when the white people told him they wanted to negotiate with him? Mandela simply told them that it was only free people that could negotiate.

They offered Madela freedom, not once, not twice. It is in his biography. He told them: I cannot be free if my people are not free. So the question we should be asking is this: how and why did Nigeria allow its citizen to adopt a stepfather when his father was still alive? If the government or President that we elected is unable to hold us together, are we going to blame your children for adopting an uncle, the one who is feeding them, as a father? So, it is not about Boko Haram, but how we created the condition that allowed Boko Haram to thrive. Maybe the dominance of their violence has made them what Karl Marx called "propaganda of the deed"; that if you want to propagate a message, do and act so that it's so decisive that everybody sits still. If there is a burst somewhere and you shout Boko Haram, everybody will believe you.

Is it unreasonable to fear that their activities could harm the corporate existence of Nigeria?

It is like if you are driving and you pick a small nail. If you continue driving you are posing a question: is it likely that your car is going to somersault? Why not? If you strike a match and light a bottle of petrol near the refinery and you ask the question: is it likely that the refinery could get burnt? Why not? If you are suffering from diabetes and you get a small wound, you don't deal with it quickly, it affects the whole body. The question we should be asking ourselves is, how and why has the government found it impossible to bring this whole thing to a halt? It is not impossible. What I see is just lack of pure diagnostic imagination.

What is your assessment of government's handling of the sect?

If I were Goodluck Jonathan, I would not be sitting down in Abuja, I would not be at the United Nations. We didn't need to spend millions of dollars to go to the United Nations when our country is burning! If I were Jonathan, I would relocate to Jos, understand and find a lasting solution. I would equally relocate to Maiduguri to do same. We cannot say that as a president or governor, certain places are no-go areas. It is not possible and unacceptable.

The problem is, who are we really talking to? If for example you have problem in your home and you are at the club and they come and tell you that your children are fighting, would you say don't worry, let me finish this bottle of beer. The critical problem is that government is insisting on dealing with this problem by deployment of proxies. We are told that George Bush was reading for small children [on 11 September 2001] - some of the tapes were played on the anniversary of September 11. He left and went to Ground Zero. What did he do when he got to Ground Zero? He climbed the truck where a fireman was and the man became a hero. It was beside him, with his hand across his shoulders, that George Bush addressed the people. And that single address was what turned his entire presidency around. Because George Bush, as some people said, just didn't have the credentials to become America's president. Let me tell you, that single disaster turned his presidency around completely. Finally, George Bush said: I am not going to let anybody touch any American citizen again. He said it, he meant it and from that time to date, there is no single American citizen who has lost his life because of September 11 inside the United States of America. Even when they fought in Afghanistan and other places, Americans are only dying from bombs not as a result of the war. What I am saying is that the President must, whether they are Muslims or Christians, Fulani or Berom, say that I am going to make sure that nobody hurts you.

Our President, our governors, promise me light, water, roads. Only the living can enjoy those social amenities. The businesss of the President is to tell every citizen that these 925,000 square kilometres that make up Nigeria are sacred territory. Nobody is going to come here to hurt you. The situation here is like nobody is in charge. Everybody is starting his own push everywhere. And there is no doubt this will threaten the corporate existence of Nigeria. There was this unfortunate and tragic statement by the CAN President that he would like a bill to be sponsored for citizens to bear arms. It is unfortunate, but it was one borne out of desperation. When you allow this kind of situation to exist, everyone thinks nobody is going to look after his/her welfare.

Successive governments have demonstrated that they don't care about us. That is why every area now has its vigilance group. It used to be common in Lagos, but it's now everywhere. An aggressive policy that makes our citizenship a most vital tool for survival is far more important to me than promises of infrastructure, even as important as they may be. Because if we don't have a country, our infrastructure is of no use.

What do you make of the deafening silence of the northern political elite on activities of the sect?

Let me tell you, I am what you call a non-state actor. People put themselves up to be elected to govern us. If I felt I had a good mechanism for protecting the people of Nigeria, I would have put myself up for election. But I didn't. People put themselves up for election and they lost. You are literally telling me that if we lost the finals of the World Cup to Brazil, it is the business of Brazil to come and help us reconstitute our team. Frankly in my view, is it Buhari or others who lost election that they are asking to come and help solve the problem? If those elected couldn't do it, who do you expect to do it? What locus would a northern leader have?

Secondly, it is the business of the President to design the necessary template and listening devices that enable him to pool the human resources that are available. People like Umaru Shinkafi are still alive, people like M.D Yusufu and Muhammadu Gambo are still alive. If you remember, most of those that have dealt with the issue of security are still alive. When Katrina happened, George Bush Snr didn't jump on a plane. His son who was president called him and called Clinton and sent them on errand. If you are no longer head of state, you are no longer head of state. Obasanjo decided to take an initiative, people laughed at him, literally making fun of him. Somebody has to do something.

With whose resources are they going to do anything? They will call a meeting now and transport people. With what? They take an initiative and what would be their locus? The point I am making is that if we close the doors and we sit down to ask ourselves what is the problem, [we would get result]. We are using old methods that are not working. The President has set up about five or six committees and the President and the people who are participating know nobody would read the report. The President also knows that he doesn't have the time to read the report. So what information are you looking for? You went to the hospital to complain that you have a swollen stomach and a test was run on you and the doctor gave you result. You collected the result and put it in the drawer, and turned to sorcerers, prayer warriors and other spiritual agents to do something about the swollen stomach. You can hire all the prayer warriors and traditional rulers in the world, they are not going to solve the problem.

The point is that one of the greatest tragedies we have with leadership in Nigeria is that non-state actors are now given prominent roles that they really don't deserve. When there are simple classical issues concerning security, they are not subject to speculation. But many would tell you that there are many people in higher positions that are resorting to the guaranteeing of prayer warriors. They will tell you nothing is going to happen in the name of Jesus! I am a bishop, I take the name of Jesus very seriously but please, if we elect you as governor, you are accountable to Christ as a Christian but not every governor bears the name of Christ. I am not going to say God has nothing to do with it, but based on what people have elected you do; you didn't put God on the ballot paper. It was you that was on the ballot paper. But there is this sheer incompetence, inability and unwillingness to deal with these issues.

I have said repeatedly that a President does not have to be an intellectual. All he knows is that he has a big desk, he can call anybody any time he wants. When George Bush examined the seriousness in issues surrounding September 11, he asked himself, is it possible that people hate us this much? I remember meeting Christianah Amanpour in Oxford and she was talking about Americans asking: why didn't people tell us that people hate us as much as this? She said she put her life at risk going to cover and bring the reports to Atlanta, CNN headquarters. Bush said, I don't have all the answers but I know somebody who has the answers. What did he do? He set up Homeland Security as a separate organisation. He had the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA; the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI, and other security agencies, professionally competent. But he said this was not a policeman's, military, CIA, or FBI job. He needed a special platform to deal with the issues of September 11. He gathered people with enough technical competence that understood what the issues were. They could rally round all those who spoke Arabic and others and that is how America was secured.

There is also the notion that you add N1 billion to security fund. There is another bomb blast and you add another N1 million or N1 billion. That is not the answer. If I were the President, I would say, let the bombs come.

When the burning of churches started in 1987, I remember reading one report. One church was burnt and the government said, list the number of churches that were burnt and let's pay everybody. They started paying and there was one man who had a small church beside us at the seminary, with corrugated iron sheets. He said his church was worth N3 million and the government was afraid, saying, Don't question churches, just pay everybody. Now, when these people collected N3 million, the pastor pocketed some, but also built a new church. The man who had a better church beside the burnt church, of course, would say if the fire had touched his house, he would have made sure his church didn't survive. People do not want to die, but the man who makes coffin prays every day for people to die. Even within this convoluted environment, where some people are dying, there are those who are making money out of all this. The notion that we are pumping money into security and more bombs are exploding everyday is questionable. The Hausa man says when you are felling a tree with an axe, after some time of cutting, look at the blade, because if the blade becomes crooked, you are wasting your energy.

We are not taking time to ask ourselves about these monies that we are sinking into security. The President went to the UN General Assembly to speak to them, but has anyone bothered to speak to Homeland Security people?

How much threat do you think the sect poses to Christians in the northern part of the country?

They said when you have HIV, if it moves to the next stage, malaria can kill you. Anything can kill you. What we should be asking ourselves is, how did this virus get into our system? The issue of Boko Haram has got nothing to do with Christians, when more Muslims are dying. It is the business of the President to ask: How am I going to protect my children? It is not my business. Again, this is the danger: if you tell me now that I am going to protect myself. This is where and how we ended up in this mess; everyone has devised his instrument of self-protection. If you have five children and you think that your neighbour is a threat because he is from a different tribe and you give a gun to your wife, you say to one child, take this gun, to another, take this knife, to another you give razor blade. And you tell them: We are all armed in this house, if our neighbour makes a mistake, we will deal with him. The first thing is that because your children are armed, they are not going to fear anybody. But you have forgotten that one day, for failing to pay their school fees, for beating mummy, the same children can pick up those weapons against you. I want to consider myself, at the risk of sounding arrogant and boring, a public intellectual. I think that we have to return to the scene of the crime.

And when you watch Crime Scene Investigation, if a crime has been committed, the first thing to do is to secure the place. And every damned piece of item is important, from stones to sand. I thought we would have actually done a crime scene investigation after 1999 to ask ourselves: These years of military rule, what has happened to us? How can we devise a template of governance when we spent 30 years without a constitution? Before 1999, there was the National Democratic Coalition, NADECO. There were people acquiring arms, and there were people threatening here and there. Why would a President ignore the visible threat of small arms that have pervaded this country? Almost every nook and cranny, the police know everybody, know that in most villages now we have blacksmiths who, instead of making hoes for farming are now making dane guns and all manner of things. Those in authority know. If you have a country where everybody is fully armed, either as a tribe, religious group or club, isn't it crazy?

Frankly, everything we are talking about could be blown up tomorrow. You are wasting your time counting billions and billions and simply planning about supplying electricity, when those things could be blown up by an angry population. You are not addressing why is it that people are unhappy in Nigeria? This is a critical question and nobody is asking why are people unhappy and what are they unhappy about?

If you don't ask people what the problem is, if Boko Haram says in view of what we want this country to become - 100 per cent Islamic country - I am prepared to say to Boko Haram, You are right. But we are in a democracy. If you want to sponsor a bill to the state House of Assembly, if the bill pulls through, fine. For me as a Christian, I would want everybody to become a Christian and not only Christian but Catholic. That is my dream. It hasn't happened but I am not going to kill myself to make it happen, because Jesus Christ didn't make it happen. Though he had the power to make it happen, he didn't. God himself has the power to make it happen but it didn't happen.

There must be a reason things are the way they are. If we don't develop a mechanism for containing people's excesses and making them legitimate by at least listening to them, then people will seek other alternatives. Honestly, this is what this Boko Haram thing is all about .

Does President Jonathan inspire confidence, considering that he had to inspect a guard of honour in Aso Rock, instead of the traditional Eagle Square venue?

That is an interpretation. I am yet to confirm why the President did that, so I am not in a position to comment. But what I always try to do with this position is that too many wrong things become popularised in Nigeria. I called one of the President's aides in the evening of October 1st and I asked him: I heard you people had to lock up yourselves to cut the cake and do your parade. And he said, We just finished celebrating the 50th anniversary [that of 2010]. It cost a lot of money and we invited a lot foreign dignitaries. We didn't want to repeat the same thing [in 2011].

But I think with better management of information, even what the President wanted to do, he could have said that on 28th or 29th September - before the day. Tragically he played into the hands of these characters. Like one American president who said the greatest fear is the fear of fear.

There are those that are opposed to Jonathan's presidency, or opposed to Nigeria as it is presently constituted. This is why Boko Haram has become a metaphor for expressing their disgust. The President's view has been narrowed by the quality of advice.

As a Southern Kaduna Christian, the situation there is similar to Jos in terms of demography. What exactly is the problem in the two places? Why don't settlers and indigenes see eye to eye?

I don't think it's true. The part of Southern Kaduna that I come from, you run from my village in 10 minutes and enter a settlement belonging to Fulani people. Unfortunately, they had their settlement burnt by some irate young men after this whole thing happened. When it happened, they ran into our family house to take refuge. Again, we have not been able to understand the basis of people's grieviance.

There are Christians in Jos who are also settlers. In Southern Kaduna, there are Christians who are settlers. Fulanis are not the only settlers. You read in the papers about what happened in Zamfara. The story is that 19 people were killed. The story is that about 150 people came from nowhere, they didn't pick a pin, they didn't take anything from anybody, they just slaughtered 19 people and left. Now the argument, according to the newspaper, is that they are Fulani people

Why has the crisis in Jos defied efforts to halt it, to the extent that some prominent politicians are clamouring for a state of emergency?

The question to ask is: what happened to previous impositions of state of emergency? We've had state of emergency in Jos before, under Governor Joshua Dariye. What happened to it? If it had the capacity to bring peace, why didn't it? There are very few places in this country that produce soldiers of the quality and calibre of those in Plateau. So, if it were simply a military matter, we would not be having this conversation. Governor Jonah Jang himself is a retired military officer. The decision of the Federal Government to push soldiers into Plateau, in my view, is another issue of government by proxy. We didn't elect soldiers, we elected politicians. These politicians must have the courage to take full responsibility. It is not soldiers that are collecting the cheques in Abuja. We left this whole thing unattended to and so everybody began to look after himself. We are not going to resolve the issue of Plateau or Maiduguri by mere conversation. We say dialogue helps, but dialogue is just verbal. If you simply send soldiers into Plateau and are constantly feeding every crisis with soldiers, you are undermining democracy, because every inch soldiers occupy, democracy is in retreat. If soldiers have the capacity to deal with issues, they ruled for 30 years, what did we get? The institution that should have been far away from circulation should have been the military. Because their image has been so battered, they require all the peace and security they can get to put back their integrity to be real professional soldiers again. But that the President continues to bring soldiers to solve our problem is, in my view, quite risky.

The problem of Jos is not impossible to solve. If I were the President, I would carve out something as little as N1billion - as you know, they just allegedly stole a N100 billion from the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, as the papers reported. Take aside this N1 billion and imagine if he went to Jos and gathered all the people and simply say to them: We are here to build your homes, we are here to rebuild your schools, we are here to construct a hospital for you. Do you think anybody would be talking about being Fulani or settlers? You are telling them to go and dialogue, when it has been shown that violence can actually be lucrative. On a good day, like you saw in London, if you are strong, beyond shooting, you can actually come home with a television. What we are dealing with is not a war but riot. Of course, you know riots are spontaneous, they can happen anywhere at any time. It is our inability to frame a proper response arising from a clinical analysis of what the problems are that makes the problems to linger.

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Toyin Falola
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
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