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The Jos Crisis and the Abuse of Punditry (1)

January 29, 2010

You would think that Adamu Adamu and Mohammed Haruna would let the raw emotions of the Jos crisis recede a little before spewing their familiar partisan, inciting rhetoric. No. They can’t help themselves. Both have unleashed their predictable, one-sided tirades that function as incendiary devices in moments of ethno-religious madness. It is a familiar, if jaded, script. But they never fail to deploy it.

You would think that Adamu Adamu and Mohammed Haruna would let the raw emotions of the Jos crisis recede a little before spewing their familiar partisan, inciting rhetoric. No. They can’t help themselves. Both have unleashed their predictable, one-sided tirades that function as incendiary devices in moments of ethno-religious madness. It is a familiar, if jaded, script. But they never fail to deploy it.
Haruna has extended his obsession with the person of Jonah Jang, the Plateau State Governor. He has always enjoyed flattening all the complex issues in the long-running Plateau crisis into one overwhelmed governor. In Haruna’s recent column in Daily Trust and The Nation on the Jos clashes, the Jang-is-the-problem rhetoric is encased in a scaffold of religious incitement and ethnic baiting, the type that one has come to expect from Haruna, an ethnic Nupe who, when religion enters the mix of things, loses all ecumenical and cosmopolitan sensibilities and projects an ethnic supremacy that would put the Hausa authenticity of Bayajidda, the legendary Hausa progenitor, to shame.

For Haruna, Jang is the embodiment of all that is wrong on the Plateau. Dariye has been stripped of the title, which appears to automatically go to whoever is the governor of the state.

For his part, Adamu has, in addition to participating in the now fashionable demonization of Mr. Jang, prescribed a stealthy, camouflaged formula for confronting what he theorizes as the threat of anti-Hausa pogrom. He has issued a sneaky call to arms, one that is laced with the threat of North-wide anti-Christian violence. His piece, Jos: Playing with Fire, was published on Nigeriavillagesquare.com. It lives up to Adamu’s notoriety as a rabble-rousing voice of religious insularity.

To say the rhetorical and semantic choices of the duo are alarming is an understatement. Adamu in particular has abandoned all pretences to the ethics of punditry, making a disguised declaration of war and endorsing one of several speculated causes in the crisis   —   a version that supports his conspiratorial, paranoid take on the bloodletting on the Plateau.

They have now been joined by a new ally in the insensitive purveying of reverse bigotry and alarmist hyperbole.  Mohammed Haruna wanna-be, Garba Deen Mohammed, an otherwise lucid thinker, has inserted himself into this clique of self-appointed discursive policemen of Hausa-Muslim interest, giving this campaign of violent  punditry a hint of coordination.
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For Mohammed Haruna and Adamu Adamu (and now Garba Deen Mohammed) every ethno-religious crisis in the Northern part of the country is an opportunity to consolidate the ethno-religious base and ingratiate themselves with the Northern Islamic establishment. Of secondary consideration is the need for discursive restraint, for pathos, reflexive sobriety, and conciliatory gestures conveyed through the pundit’s pen. The tragedy of this kind of punditry is that while it provokes and predicts the next orgy of mass murder, its proponents revel and thrive in the controversy that it generates. The more controversial and bizarre their theories the more media sensation they create. All of this translates into a notoriety that is quarried into economic and social capital at the personal level. It is a gory way to profiteer and raise your stock.

Mohammed Haruna is the master of this type of inhumane opportunism. He thrives on taunting his favorite bête noirs (Southerners and Christians) to the cheering admiration of the small but powerful segment of the Northern establishment that believes its own myths of supremacy and manifest destiny. It’s a win-win tactic for Haruna. Notoriety as a strident “defender” of “Northern” and “Islamic” interests is parlayed into profitable discursive gigs in the South while satisfying his loyal cheerleaders in the North.

Garba Deen’s piece on the Nigeriavillagesquare.com mimics Haruna and Adamu in many ways. A self-confessed admirer of Haruna’s misuse of punditry to stoke ethno-religious hatred and tension, Garba Deen surpasses his model only in his hyperbolic semantics. One frightening example: for him, the Jos crisis was a genocide perpetrated by Jang and his kinsmen against the Hausa. No mention of the Christians and non-Hausa  —Christians and Muslims alike  —  who also died in the crisis. Not a care for the intractable ethnic and religious complexity of the crisis. What he supplies instead is yet another charged label calculated to inflame an edgy situation and sow more paranoia in a traumatized populace.

Genocide? Committed by whom against whom? Have we reached that tragic threshold, or is this Mohammed’s reckless instinct for sensationalizing human suffering in the hope of being cheered by the forces of parochial umbrage? This is what the combustive mix of emotionalism and opportunism can do to people, even those who have the sacred responsibility of collating and shaping public opinion though commentary. They succumb to the seduction of provincial impulses and their rationality takes flight, making way for this type of provocative drivel. Where is the sobriety and responsibility demanded of those who comment in the public space on crises of this nature?

Apart from trying to out-Haruna Mohammed Haruna, Garba Deen Mohammed’s is a visceral, emotional, almost impulsive ramble that congeals into an equally thoughtless prescription: the creation of another state from Plateau for the Hausa of Jos with Jos North or parts thereof as its core. A commentator on the Nigeriavillagesquare.com rightly and contemptuously describes the recommendation as a non-starter, but this critique does not go far enough, for it misses the mindset from which the absurd “solution” emanates.

But let’s move on to Adamu Adamu.

Adamu criticizes the police commissioner for endorsing one causal theory over another—in the heat of the crisis when investigations had not been conducted. Fair enough. But then he goes on to endorse one version over another, just not the one declared by the commissioner. How disingenuous! There are two main theories of the cause of this crisis contending for space and acceptance. Both have enjoyed similar currency and media visibility. But none of them has been established as more credible or as being the definitive trigger of the crisis. The bottom line is that no one knows for sure what caused this crisis.

It was unprofessional, premature, and downright insensitive of the Police Commissioner to endorse one version without having conducted a full investigation. But Adamu Adamu is equally guilty of endorsing one theory over the other. The disguise of his partisanship with an agreeable critique of the police commissioner fails to mitigate the egregiousness of such overt bias. Criticizing the errant commissioner’s conduct is fine. But why then proceed to commit the same error that you are criticizing him for?

The most reprehensible aspect of Adamu’s essay is his cryptic endorsement and even prediction of what he calls revenge attacks in some Northern states, and his declaration of anti-Muslim, anti-Hausa bias on the part of the police. These ominous declarations about “revenge” attacks and state complicity in the aftermath of a violent clash between two groups are a template for prolonging the conflict into an elastic spiral of violence and retribution. This is precisely the stuff that ingrains a persecution and victimhood paranoia in people and makes them suspicious of even innocuous gestures from ethnic and religious interlocutors and security forces. The response to this kind of fear-fueled insularity is to interpret any and every gesture as an assault and to reside in a permanent psychological state of war. Adamu’s toxic prediction must be rejected off-hand by all those who value peace.

Irresponsible punditry can inspire fear and violent fantasies in impressionable readers. Adamu either does not realize this or does not care about the consequences of his feisty rhetoric.

This incendiary nonsense in the wake of such an orgy of blood spilling belongs in the world of unenlightened, absolutist, and closeted bigots. Unfortunately, Adamu tends to take detours into that world as frequently as these crises occur.


The author can be reached at: [email protected]

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