Blame Buhari, el-Rufai For Southern Kaduna Bloodbaths
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
(ikechukwuamaechi@yahoo.com; 08055069065)
You automatically hit a brick wall trying to make sense of the senseless killings in Southern Kaduna, because the massacres, which question our humanity and cast aspersions on our claim to civilisation, are absurd and bizarre. They simply defy logic.
Even more eerie and disconcerting are the rationalisations by both President Muhammadu Buhari and Kaduna State Governor, Nasir el-Rufai.
Why will the Nigerian government, which primary duty – as it is all over the world – is to ensure security of lives and properties abdicate?
In the past month alone, Southern Kaduna has been in the news for very atrocious reasons – harvest of deaths.
On July 24, ten people were murdered in cold blood in Zipak village, Fanstwam Chiefdom, Jemaa local government.
When the guns went silent, Joel Cephas, a five-year-old boy; Luka Garba, 75-year-old man; and Martina Dauda, 70-year-old grandmother; were all dead.
Kingsley Raphael, another victim, was 28 years, Katung kantiock 60, Victor Ishaya 22, Madam Dakaci 52, Kuyet Yayock 25, Cecilia Audu 65 and Yanasan Dauda 70.
Nobody is spared in the carnage – men, women, young and old, even children. It is that bad. None is immune to the deadly violence.
On July 23, seven people were gruesomely murdered in Agwala Magayaki village in Kajuru local government. It was the second time in a month the village would come under attack.
Those killed included an 80-year-old John Mallam, 85-year-old Albarka Mallam and 76-year-old Jumare Sule. When the murderers first came on June 20 to hawk their malevolent ware, they also left seven people dead.
Before Agwala Magayaki, it was Kizachi village, Chawai chiefdom, Kauru local government where five people – the youngest, Jummai, a girl of nine years, and the oldest, 27-year-old Living Yohanna – were brutally murdered.
So, in just 72 hours, 23 Southern Kaduna natives were murdered in the most grisly manner with knives, daggers and machetes by marauders.
On July 20, 21 persons were killed in Kukum Daji village in Kaura local government, and a day later, 11 others, including a village head and a six-year-old boy, were slaughtered in Gora Gan village, Zango-Kataf local government.
These are human beings, not just statistics. Aside the dead, the attacks have created dire humanitarian crisis with many of the survivors living in IDP camps.
Some Nigerians in the Diaspora have petitioned Fatou Bensouda, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), accusing the global body of failing Nigeria and urging her to “act against genocide now.”
Interestingly, among the signatories is Baroness Caroline Cox, member of the British House of Lords, a consistent and outspoken champion of global human rights and religious freedom, just as her colleague, Lord David Alton, likened the Southern Kaduna massacres to the notorious Darfur genocide for which the former Sudanese strongman, Omar El Bashir, may be extradited to face trial at the ICC.
So, where are our elite? Why the seeming conspiracy of silence in the country in the face of this egregious ethnic cleansing?
Inexplicably, while ordinary people, including non-citizens, are shocked and outraged by the horrendous killings, the federal government is not. Instead, it is blaming the victims.
Buhari insists that the carnage persists because of the “evil combination of politically-motivated banditry, revenge killings and mutual violence by criminal gangs acting on ethnic and religious grounds.” And so? I ask. Does it matter who the criminals are and what their motive is? Should the government stand by and watch misguided citizens, assuming their claim is true, to mutually destroy themselves? Even if that is the idea, is it not possible that there are people who are not part of the criminality? Shouldn’t the government save them from being collateral damages?
On July 21, Buhari’s spokesman, Garba Shehu, claimed the government has provided “comprehensive security deployments” in the area “to forestall criminality and keep the peace.” Yet violence continues spiking.
Of what use are security deployments if they cannot guarantee security of lives and properties of the people?
Assuming without conceding that the killings are activities of criminal elements on both sides as claimed, does that make it right?
Is Buhari saying that the children killed wantonly are also members of the criminal gangs? Who has been arrested and prosecuted for these heinous crimes?
Has Nigeria become such a jungle that hundreds of people will be slaughtered every week and all the government does is blame the victims?
The ethnicity of the victims is not important. What matters is that they are human beings created by God with the inalienable right to life.
The essence of government, which has monopoly of all instruments of coercion in a state, is to guarantee that right. Ceding the responsibility to so-called armed gangs and non-state actors is a crime against humanity.
Expectedly, el-Rufai, who is Buhari’s alter ego, doubled down on federal government’s claim. On Monday, he said Nigerians were dressing up activities of bandits in ethnic and religious robes and passed off responsibility to the victims.
“Ultimately peace depends on the willingness of people to live in harmony and to settle their differences peacefully,” he rationalised.
So cavalier!
This reaction is cold-blooded but it is typical of el-Rufai who sees power as a zero-sum game. But he is only being too clever by half. He can only deceive himself.
The same el-Rufai now telling the people to take their destiny in their own hands, literally, is the same person who brought down the roof when he claimed without evidence in February 2019 that 66 Fulani, a number he later increased to 130, were killed in Kajuru.
Then, he addressed a press conference. He visited Southern Kaduna. He went to see Buhari in Aso Rock. He claimed Fulani were the victims and Southern Kaduna natives the villains.
He threatened the alleged villains and ordered their arrests because his tribe’s people were the victims. Isn’t el-Rufai supposed to be governor of everybody in the state?
This is the same man who shocked the whole world when he narrated in December 2016 how he traced some Fulani murderers to Niger, Cameroon, Chad, Mali and Senegal to compensate them for coming to Kaduna to kill Nigerian citizens.
His message to them in his own words was: “There is a new governor who is Fulani like them and has no problem paying compensations for lives lost and he is begging them to stop killing.” Did they stop the killings? No!
I don’t know how both leaders sleep at night. Do they have conscience? Nigeria under Buhari’s watch has failed in the last five years to adequately prosecute these murderers. Rather than restituting the victims, the villains are rehabilitated. The same week these atrocities were committed in Southern Kaduna, the federal government ‘reintegrated’ 602 ‘repentant’ Boko Haram terrorists into the society after paying them. Yet, the victims are left to languish in abject misery.
On Wednesday, Senator Ali Ndume, chairman of Senate Committee on Army, a member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), who represents Borno South senatorial district, told the BBC Hausa Service that many of the so-called repentant Boko Haram fighters who were granted amnesty by the government have gone back to terrorism.
“This government’s programme is unacceptable to our people. The right thing is to stop it, forthwith,” Ndume said. Of course, he has not said anything that Nigerians are not aware of. But coming from someone like him amplifies the message.
A widow, victim of these same Boko Haram murderers that Buhari is rehabilitating and throwing back to the society, who also featured on the BBC programme, lamented: “This is painful. They killed my husband in my presence, they killed my son. I am left suffering with four young orphans. Till death, I will never forget that day … See how harsh life is today, some days we eat, others we stay hungry. That is how we are suffering with the children.
“Look at the kind of care given to the Boko Haram members. We that have suffered for six years now, we are not taken care of but the repentant Boko Haram. Truly government has not done justice here.”
This goes beyond incompetence. It borders on sheer heartlessness.
Just like Buhari, el-Rufai has more affinity to Fulani, no matter where they come from, than to fellow Nigerian citizens. But it is a slippery slope.
Well-meaning Fulani should condemn this evil because Buhari will not be in power forever. The table may turn tomorrow when the axiomatic king that does not know Joseph ascends the throne.
Besides, why are Nigerians keeping quiet? Have we lost our humanity? Why are we abandoning the people of Southern Kaduna to their fate? Haven’t the fate of Ndigbo taught us a lesson?
If other Nigerians rallied around them when they were being massacred in waves after waves of pogrom in the North, actively supported by indigenes of Southern Kaduna and Middle Belt, perhaps these massacres today would have been attenuated.
The killings in Southern Kaduna should be unacceptable to all of us. If we don’t do anything about it, those committing the atrocities will be emboldened. And who knows whose turn it will be tomorrow?
We must all rise before this evil of ethnic supremacy consumes all of us believing as Dr. Martin Luther King, the late American civil rights icon, said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
