Of Christian genocide and the search for justice by Abimbola Adelakun

In his responses to USA officials who amplify the narrative of “Christian genocide in Nigeria”, the Special Assistant to the President on Information/Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, counters by listing the various avenues Nigerians do, in fact, get killed. You see, when your entire professional skillset is honed to battle Obi-dients on Twitter, this is how you stray into the barbarous terrain of undisciplined thinking. Otherwise, why is announcing that gruesome killings are an equal opportunity event in Nigeria a reasonable official rebuttal? The killing of Nigerians by maniac killers has become so normalised that Onanuga offers it as a counterpoint. In 2018, I similarly took up presidential aide Femi Adesina when he boasted that more people had died during the tenure of President Goodluck Jonathan than under Muhammadu Buhari. I asked why his idea of progress was about counting deaths rather than those living and thriving. This troubling mindset offers a revealing insight into the psychology of Nigerian leadership.

When this “Christian genocide” issue first started, I wrote that while what we call “Christian genocide” is a complex narrative, Nigeria itself has not justified itself by frequently pandering to the Muslim fundamentalists who arrogate to themselves the power to take life. The state’s reluctance to take this matter seriously has given room for opportunists to regurgitate what we have been shouting for years. The massacres are real issues impacting real communities, but these people go unseen until election time, when their votes are needed to legitimise a political order that does not see their humanity.

At all levels of government, our leaders are blind, deaf, and mute. Lawmakers will be quicker to set up a panel on Bobrisky than to attend to the violence displacing people into IDP camps. Now that Washington politicians have turned their scrutinising gaze on us and our leaders are squirming under the harsh concentration of light, will they finally stand up?

A group of Nigerians wants the rhetoric to be toned down, fearing that further escalation might lead to a recurrence of the Libyan situation, which also began when Libyans, during the Arab Spring, invited powerful countries to intervene in their situation. My problem with this group is their tone deafness. So desperate are they to spin this into all kinds of frivolous narratives of how certain partisans want to destabilise the country to boost their chances of defeating the incumbent that they are reading the room badly. Some of them are right to fret because, given the politics some of them played under Jonathan, they know where this is going. Like the proverbial decapitator, they cannot allow a machete outside their line of sight.

While we cannot rule out mischief in some of the calls for foreign intervention in Nigeria’s insecurity situation, the fervent apocalyptic desire to see the end of this order is also a fallout of our democracy and the monstrosity it has become. When you think about it, this democracy has been hollowed out by unscrupulous agents who have taken advantage of its principles to systematically disenfranchise us.

We have an expensive legislature, but nobody knows their usefulness. You never see them in session and harbour the mistaken impression that they spend any time preparing for the roles they occupy. They cannot sustain a debate for 10 minutes. The best they know how to do is shout “Aye!” “Nay!” on cue and when required, jump on their obsequious feet to sing “on your mandate we shall stand…!”

The poor quality of leadership is not improved at the judicial level, where politicians make an open show of buying judges without any consequences. What subsists is a system where judges without judgment deliver judgment without justice.

Things are not better at the executive level. Politicians are more invested in contesting the next election than justifying their mandates. Nobody is thinking or acting; our leaders are in a self-preservation mode. When Senator Smart Adeyemi raised the issue of insecurity in Nigeria in the National Assembly, it was Mrs Remi Tinubu who tried to silence him, saying he should not play into the hands of the opposition.

Today, they oversee Nigeria’s affairs and are tasked with ending insecurity. That is why I laugh in scorn each time presidential aides dispel the rumour of “Christian genocide” by noting that the First Lady is a “pastor”. Someone who would rather watch poor people die than let their plight affect her political privileges?

There is nobody to hold anyone accountable or even define standards; they are all in a self-preservation mode. Nigerians are never treated as the focal point of leadership; we are an afterthought. People will die in a massacre, and the presidential aide will ask the poor victims to “go and reconcile” with their killers. That is an indication that they lack the will to stop the perpetrators. Every year, we allocate humongous sums to the defence budget, but Nigeria is still besieged by a crop of maniacs who freely attend “peace meetings” with high-grade weapons. Of what use is a democratic order that is too weak to confront these besetting problems?

Democracy has been crunched into a nepotistic farce that has no efficacy, just a bunch of clowns genuflecting before the almighty presidential power. Things are so bad that a governor will publicly instruct his commissioners to wear the political insignia of the president to cabinet meetings, taking sycophancy to the next level. They think their ostentatious toadying is for an audience of one—the president—but the public also sees it for what it is: power has been captured at all levels, and there will be no recourse outside this narrow band of hacks who have arrogated all the instruments of justice that democracy offers to themselves. We, the people, are blockaded on all sides into a confederation of mediocrity and sheer ineptitude. In this rigged system where the odds are against us, we turn to a higher form of power for succour. When a populist politician comes barging in and promising to save us with “guns a-blazing”, it is hard to blame anyone for making plausible connections between appeals to a supernatural power and the supra-national power that has offered to intervene. They have finally found the higher power that can compel their insensitive leaders.

Since Washington started bearing down on us on this issue, our leaders have demonstrated a greater sense of accountability than one has seen in years. Even ex-army chief Tukur Buratai, whose hands still drip with the blood of the Shiites, wants to instruct us on how to respond to the USA. He is so detached from his crimes that the irony of his defining “genocide” for us flew over his small head. It is precisely because of jesters like him that I am wary of the well-meaning calls for us to dial down the rhetoric so as not to escalate the issue. They want us to project a united front and push the foreign interloper away, but what happens when our populist saviours move on to other distractions? Our leaders, long inured to such killings, will simply return to the status quo. For now, even merely watching them boxed into a corner and defending themselves fills me with a huge dose of gratifying schadenfreude.No, I am not one of those who delude themselves that our salvation will come from abroad. No God, or any human agent playing God, will solve Nigeria’s insecurity problems. Any marine that comes here with blazing guns will spend the next 20 years running from north to south, dousing many treacherous fires. When they finally get tired and leave, their withdrawal will not be any neater than what unfolded in Afghanistan. Our country is our responsibility to save, but we must first admit we have a problem.