Skip to main content

The High Cost Of Nigeria’s Democracy

April 23, 2011

On Tuesday April 26th, Nigerians in 34 states (all except Kaduna and Bauchi) will go to the polls to elect their Governors and State House of Assembly members. If the elections of April 9 and April 16 are anything to go by, this next election will pass by without much incident. During the day that is. But later that night, the hounds of hell will call, and mayhem will yet again be unleashed on the long suffering Nigerian people.

On Tuesday April 26th, Nigerians in 34 states (all except Kaduna and Bauchi) will go to the polls to elect their Governors and State House of Assembly members. If the elections of April 9 and April 16 are anything to go by, this next election will pass by without much incident. During the day that is. But later that night, the hounds of hell will call, and mayhem will yet again be unleashed on the long suffering Nigerian people.

Over 260 people have died since April 16th. Many of them young Nigerians engaged in the youth corps scheme. We sent these young people to the battlefront to fight Nigeria’s war for survival. They discharged their duties creditably. But we failed them when it mattered most. When gangs of thugs unleashed by their political masters massed at their doorsteps, we were not there to stop the rapes, the maiming, the necklacing, the burning, and the carnage.

There is no nation that trivializes life the way we do in Nigeria. Not even in Afghanistan and Iraq where full scale wars have raged for close to a decade is life so cheap. Today the headlines of every major media outlet heralded the killing of 75 protesters in Syria. The death of a little over a hundred protesters in Egypt was enough to bring down the Mubarak regime.

Late last year, we watched in awe as the threat to the lives of 27 miners in Chile brought the world to a screeching halt. But here, in Nigeria, tens of thousand have died since 1999 in conflicts that are deliberately inflammed by ethnic and religious bigots driven by an inordinate desire to hang onto or to claim political power – yet not a word is said to honor the dead. No memorial is erected in their honor. No monument lists their names. No day of mourning is declared for the departed. Not a word of solace is sent in the way of their families and loved ones.

It is time to say enough. In 1987, I was a JSS 3 student when the Zangon Kataf crisis broke out in Kaduna State. That infamous event was the first in the series of ethnic and politico-religious crises that have engulfed Nigeria in the last three decades. Since the Zangon Kataf incident, lives have been lost in Kafanchan, Kaduna, Kano, Bauchi, Jos, and Adamawa.

 Reprisal killings have also occurred in the Southern parts of Nigeria. Yet, inspite of claims that the high profile instigators are known, not one person of note has been brought to book. We all know that the jobless young men who have been conscripted into the dastardly act of killing their own countrymen did not purchase the army uniforms, the AK47 rifles and the dynamites and bombs with which they operate.

Psychologists and Psychiatrists who study serial killers will tell you that the first killing is the most difficult one. Once that heinous threshold is crossed, the next killing is easier. Whenever I am in Kaduna, the city of my birth, a city in which at least ten thousand people have lost their lives since I witnessed my first sectarian crisis in 1987, I often wonder whether the ineptitude of our governments over the years has not inadvertently led to the creation of a city full of sociopaths, or of a nation peopled by psychopaths. Since the killings in these crises are by mobs of about 50 to a hundred persons, it means that Kaduna’s ten thousand deaths might have involved at a maximum about five hundred thousand to a million cold blooded murderers! We are dealing with a situation where hundreds of thousands of people who have shed human blood are probably walking Kaduna’s streets like normal people. Those who wonder how it is possible for the type of carnage that we constantly witness in Nigeria is possible should understand that there is an army of sociopaths and psychopaths that walk our lands. Every crisis is an opportunity for them to whet their murderous appetite. These people abound in their thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, across Nigeria, particularly in the crises infested North. Each crisis that is left unaddressed, each pogrom that is ignored, each sectarian or ethnically motivated killing that is swept under the carpet increases the army of sociopaths that will unleash mayhem in the next conflagration.

Until the financiers, instigators, perpetrators, organisers and enablers of this current conflict are brought to book, this senseless cycle of carnage will continue. It was Thomas Jefferson who famously said that “the tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants”. In Nigeria, we have watered the tree of liberty exclusively with the blood of patriots. It is time for the tyrants to contribute their own quota to the tree of Nigerian liberty! The government must ruthlessly prosecute those who are responsible for the current mayhem no matter who they are.

Dr. Malcolm Fabiyi was a candidate for the Senate in the 2011 elections. He is a former president of the University of Lagos Students’ Union

 

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content1'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('comments'); });

googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('content2'); });

Topics
Politics