Religious fanaticism and impunity were on the march recently when a deranged mob unleashed violence in Talata Marafa town in Zamfara State. In the resultant melee, eight persons were burnt alive in their homes for alleged “blasphemy,” the latest episode in the sectarian bloodletting threatening the fabric of the Nigerian state. Will the Muhammadu Buhari government ruthlessly enforce the law or continue to waffle like its predecessors?
Failure to rein in bloodthirsty religious fanatics is pushing the country to the brink and the government should act decisively or risk an unpredictable implosion. The orgy of hate and manic violence is familiar fare in Northern Nigeria. According to reports, an argument among some students of the Abdu Gusau Polytechnic veered into the religious realm and soon, as is so common in that environment of intolerance, a spurious allegation of blasphemy was made against a young man. This, again as usual, prompted a mob action. The youth was beaten to a state of coma and left for dead. That would have been the extent of that day’s violence, but events soon spiralled out of control.
The mob re-grouped when it learnt that the victim had survived and had been driven to a hospital by a sympathiser. The fanatics then went after the Good Samaritan and, not finding him, pounced on his car, smashed it and set it on fire. They then headed for the hospital seeking to finish off the alleged blasphemer: they, thereafter, descended on the home of the sympathiser, vandalised it and set it ablaze. Eight persons were burnt alive, while the mob went on to attack some churches.
The senseless attacks by fanatics must end if Nigeria is to remain a peaceful, united country. It does not matter whether the eight roasted human beings were Christians or Muslims, the carnage is becoming unbearable. Already, some Christian clerics, infuriated by the continued seeming helplessness of the state, have been calling on their flocks to “defend themselves.” Their frustration is informed by decades of murder and mayhem that have gone unpunished, which have also emboldened the maniacs. Recent outrages include the killing of a 74-year-old grandmother in Kano by zealots who accused her of blasphemy after an argument. A similar accusation arose from an argument in Pandogari, Niger State in May that led to rioting in which four persons were killed and several churches burnt.
Buhari, who has vowed to fish out and punish religious fanatics, should match his words with action. He, the northern traditional elite and state governors should ask themselves why Muslim zealots are so quick to label people blasphemers in the region and proceed to go wild without fear of censure.
One ready answer is that, in almost all the cases, they go unpunished. While the penalty for murder is death, we have not seen scrupulous prosecution of the fanatics that slaughtered over 300 persons in Kafanchan, Zaria and other parts of Kaduna State in 1987; mum is the word on those who killed over 200 persons in 2002 when fanatics declared the proposed Miss World Beauty Pageant in Kaduna blasphemous, or about those who in 2006, killed over 50 persons in Borno State, destroyed over 30 churches and 100 vehicles over allegedly blasphemous cartoons published in a Danish newspaper.
As long as swift arrest, prosecution and conviction of the culprits fail to follow criminality, the familiar homilies of traditional rulers and governors after every fresh outrage will continue to ring hollow and hypocritical. Elsewhere, where, under the rule of law, human life is valued and the leaders are not complicit in religious intolerance, the law is swiftly applied on offenders. Umar Abdulmuttalab has been jailed in the United States; the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber is on trial there too; a London court has just imposed a 20-year jail term on a pro-terrorism cleric. In Nigeria, however, rioters and mass murderers move about freely.
The other reason for mob impunity is that the state often sponsors religion. Nigeria’s leaders should learn from history and from others. Sectarian intolerance has delivered horrific crimes against humanity in Bosnia, Lebanon and Iraq. Stubborn and cynical promotion of religion has made Pakistan a dangerous nuclear-armed ticking bomb held at bay only by a strong military that is however outnumbered by a seething mass of religious fanatics that will not hesitate to blow up the world when they eventually overwhelm the generals. Nigeria is not Pakistan where 62 out of the 1,472 persons arbitrarily accused of blasphemy between 1987 and 2015 have been killed by Muslim mobs.
It is the northern religious and political elite that brought us to this pass. Instead of mass education and economic empowerment programmes, they seek influence though religious bribery. This is becoming more untenable by the day. With so much tension and disaffection in many parts of the country, the outcome of a spark and conflagration is hard to predict. Human Rights Watch estimates that over 10,000 persons have died in sectarian violence in the North since 1999.
We must stop this contagion. In Pakistan where over 60,000 persons have died in the last 20 years in religiously-motivated violence, illegal religious vigilantes have been slaughtering innocent lives. Blasphemy should not be a crime under Nigerian law. Its provision via the penal aspects of Sharia law adopted by 12 northern states in defiance of the 1999 Constitution is an anomaly. Nigeria is a secular state whose basic law forbids the adoption of any state religion. Fanatics are emboldened by the head-long involvement of the federal and state governments in religious activities. It should end today. The secularity of the Nigerian state must be defended. For the great French scholar, Jean Bauberot, secularism has three parts: everybody has freedom of conscience and thought and is free to change their beliefs and manifest them within the limits of public order; there is no state discrimination against people on the grounds of their religion or non-religious worldview and everyone receives equal treatment on these grounds; religious institutions are separate from the institutions of the state and there is no domination of the political sphere by religious institutions. This is reasonable and fair.
We cannot be waging war on corruption and at the same time, allowing the philosophy of jihadism to fester. Those who are too blinded by religion to feel the Zamfara horror must know that no one is safe in a jungle of religious fanatics. The task before Buhari is clear: he should order the police and the Attorney-General of the Federation to fish out, arrest and immediately scrupulously prosecute all the recent sectarian perpetrators of murder and mayhem across the country. Only then will Nigerians and the global community accept his sincerity and readiness to arrest the creeping Pakistanisation of the country.
