The cleric made a few more telling points than generated the uproar
When Bishop Matthew Kukah of the Catholic Arch Diocese in Sokoto wrote his Christmas message for 2020, it generated quite a flak, and not always for the good reason. The only portion of the address that raised hubbub tended to downplay the more salient things he said.
It was the minister of information who referred to the address without even mentioning his name. He referred to the text in which Bishop Kukah railed at the lack of fairness in the Buhari administration. He noted: “Every honest Nigerian knows that there is no way any non-Northern Muslim president could have done a fraction of what President Buhari has done by his nepotism and gotten away with it. There would have been a military coup a long time ago or we would have been at war.”
But that was not all the cleric said. He did what any observer would agree is a rigorous dissection of the state of the nation. He was right about hunger in the land. The average Nigerian did not enjoy the last Christmas as they did in the past. This plight did not just begin in the year just ended. But many would agree that the market turned inflation into a horror, and those who served rice were fortunate, and those who served that same rice know how unfortunate they were because it cost them a leg and an arm to serve a leg and an arm of chicken.
He referred to a visit to the president by a team of Catholic priests when President Buhari lamented the decay he inherited and wondered if the government officials before him were just eating and going to toilet. Now, noted the Bishop, it is a luxury now to make a trip to the toilet.
He also looked at the issue of insecurity, and how the North that hailed the Buhari administration is at the short end of the stick, which is properly a torch of death. We are witnesses as a people how the north that this administration met was a seething cauldron. We seemed to have a respite within a few months that inspired Minister Lai Mohammed to declare that Boko Haram had been technically defeated. It was an optimistic effusion, naïve and without an immersion in the facts on the ground. Today, the facts are staring us like blood spills in the face.
He referred with potent rage to the fiery episodes of militant outbursts across the north. Of note is the matter of the Kankara boys. Militants like defiant fireflies buzzed into town and corralled hundreds of pre-teen and teenage boys to their camps. They undertook long treks. They did not have good meals, and they gorged on unknown vegetables and slurped dirty water, and they were not guaranteed any life. The world wailed, and the federal government demonstrated helplessness until the Katsina government waded in and the militants, probably for want of what to do with the human largesse, gave them up. The bishop did not gloat. He expressed gratitude, while understanding that the underlying problem still haunted the north.
He referred to the Emir of katsina and the Sultan of Sokoto who had decried the vulnerability of the north and its elite to stymie the situation.
It is when he entered the region of geo-politics that the Bishop jarred not a few nerves. He wrote that, “It is curious that President Buhari’s partisanship and commitment to reinforcing the foundations of northern hegemony have had the opposite consequences.” The north where he was once hailed messiah has become the place of mass crucifixion. “The north that the president sought to privilege has become a cauldron of pain and a valley of dry bones,” he said.
It is out of the indignation of these observations that the reference to military coup and war can be located. The Bishop has said he did not call for a military coup as Mohammed and a few commentators have excoriated.
“It is unfair that a journalist or news medium to report that I called for a coup while expressing my personal view about Nigeria,” he fired back. The Bishop had written a forthright Christmas message, and if he had not called directly for a coup, he should have admitted that he implied it. It is what lawyers call innuendo. If you say a military coup might have happened long ago or a war could have resulted were another leader in the saddle, it implied that Buhari’s privileged ethnicity and region had sheltered him from dislodgement. He should take responsibility for the implication of his language.
He wrote as a northern minority who feels the ache of the hegemonic shadow of the Fulani. He was born and raised in the north, and his cry comes from the heart of a sufferer. His jeremiad must therefore be appreciated.
In all, the bishop’s writing was a wake-up call, using his ecclesiastical platform to twit power and hold the state to the mirror.
