Religious genocide: Of half-truths and half-lies

The idea that Nigeria is an Islamic state where Muslims persistently persecute Christians is somehow prevalent in some circles. I have been in certain places where—after introducing myself as a Nigerian—I was confronted with well-meaning sympathies from those who imagined that we (my family members and I) face religious persecution.

The narrative partly endures because accounting for the violence in some parts of Nigeria, especially where Christians have been routine victims, is easier to narrate to outsiders through the dialectic of “Muslims vs Christians” in almost the same way the “good vs evil” trope is fundamental to storytelling universally.

The average Nigerian knows that the reality is a lot more complicated, but explaining the nuances to an inquiring foreigner would necessarily entail describing Nigeria’s history up to 1914. Not only would people end up confused, but the complexity of such accounts will also undermine the urgency of the situation.

Now, when the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, would respond to the foreign agents who portray the insecurity situation in Nigeria as a genocidal campaign against Christians, he claimed it was “a gross misrepresentation of reality”. He listed several instances of Nigeria’s defeat of key bandit figures and concluded, “These feats underscore the determination and success of our security forces and expose as unfounded the notion that Nigeria is passively tolerating religiously motivated terrorism.” Both the narrative and the official statement challenging it are examples of how half-truths and half-lies can travel together.

Which is why, when asked to swear in the courts, we are supposed to tell the truth and “nothing but the truth”. Those who added that clause know that one can tell the truth and still tell something other than the truth.

First, the Nigerian state officially tolerates religiously motivated violence, and this has been serially demonstrated through the years. There are many instances of violent activities carried out by the maniacs that Nigeria spinelessly failed to confront over the decades for fear of triggering an irascible people.

The more our leaders have hesitated to decisively confront those who think they can wield the power of life and death over their fellow citizens, the more implacable those fanatics have become. These people were the ones who agitated for Sharia as soon as Nigeria’s return to civil rule produced a Christian president, not because they cared to inscribe religious ethics to reform the country, but to mobilise their troops who could not bear the symbolic loss of political power.

They tried to reassert themselves through violence and soon followed Sharia law with mass riots and massacres over even the most trivial of issues.In all of these, the government has typically done little to punish the perpetrators. They often chose the path of appeasement over legal redress, an attitude that makes it rational to conclude that the official state itself has been a collaborator in the spate of religious-based violence that has engulfed the country.

Nigeria’s failure to put its constitutional foot down has allowed the excesses to metamorphose into the monstrosity of terrorism that now consumes everyone.

When Boko Haram started, the first targets of their terroristic attacks were Christians and churches. They viciously attacked churches. Some misguided Muslims, still sore from losing the presidency to a Christian southerner, thought Boko haram was their avenging angel. They imagined it as the radical strain of Islamism that would achieve what human rights activists would not let the Sharia courts do, and they passionately defended them. But weaponised violence almost always escapes the control of those who think they can monopolise it.

It is only a matter of time before some other upstart contends for a portion of that authority and deploys the same means to stake their claims. Boko Haram has since fanned out into banditry, branching out into various locations from where violent criminals claim territories wherever they get a foothold. As they build their strongholds in multiple geographical locations, they have claimed just as many Muslim victims. The more precise religious lines that once defined those attacks have long blurred, but the westerners seeking to use the plight to redirect attention from Gaza are still stuck on the initial version.

Even with the monstrosity these people have become, Nigeria still moves on the spectrum from fighting them to mollycoddling them. We were here when a lawmaker stood up in their supposedly hallowed chamber to plead for amnesty for bandits, saying he could not wait to see them enter “politics”.

There was no mention of justice for their victims, only redemption and rehabilitation for the perpetrators. Governors openly talk of paying off bandits; the sense of propriety that should curtail a public admission of bribing killers has long died. It is, therefore, no surprise that we are now at a place where bandits openly flaunt high-grade weapons, take territories, and even announce fundamental human rights for people in the communities they have held captive. These are all the consequences of the state’s weakness and indecisiveness in confronting religious violence.

Nigeria’s tolerance of their violence is such that a random guy once petitioned the police to punish an atheist for posting an anti-Islamic diatribe. All he needed to do to get the police’s attention was to subtly hint at Muslims’ propensity for violence. The mere reminder of what they were capable of was enough to get security agencies to jump into their vehicles, race to arrest the atheist, put him through a sham trial, and have him sentenced to 24 years’ imprisonment! There was no time that the thought of his individual right ever came up.

I cannot imagine the circumstances under which the police would have responded similarly if a Christian wrote such a petition. It was the same cowardice the police manifested in Ilorin when some Muslims determined the Ìṣèṣe practitioners would not hold their festival. It was also the same moral failure exhibited when a man named his dog “Buhari” and they had him arrested because some Muslims threatened violence. In 2016, a Christian woman named Bridget Agbahime was lynched in Kano by fanatics who accused her of blasphemy, but the court acquitted her alleged killers because the state attorney-general could not procure enough evidence to ground a conviction.

It occurred in broad daylight in the marketplace, but they were unable to find sufficient evidence. Then, there was the case of Deborah Samuel, whose killers audaciously put themselves on video yet were never convicted.

There are so many of these instances, and one cannot blame foreigners who look into the country from outside and conclude that Christians are victims of a genocidal campaign. They might not have an accurate picture of the general dysfunctionality that plagues the country, but what they have is not entirely false either. The selectivity of those who target Nigeria is not unfounded.

Ghana, right there beside us, is also multi-religious but does not appear in international news for the same reasons as we do. We have organised our politics in such a way that nobody can stand up for what is right for fear of how these fanatics might react come the next election cycle. When a presidential candidate dared to condemn Deborah Samuel’s murder, they threatened his candidacy.

He had to assuage them by taking down his post. Put all these together into a definite pattern and you will see that we have a problem because we have a government that passively and, in fact, actively tolerates Islamic violence.