Some stories and comments on and about the boy-bomber Mutallab suggest that we Nigerians cherish the qualification of situations. By that I mean that we avoid absolutes, as if such absolutes are beyond us. This attitude features in our public and private life and it is at the centre of our country’s present (under?) development. Even the manner we practise our religions- Christianity and Islam- bear the mark of this frailty. Our knack for the gradation of values knows no limit.
We grade values or vices, depending on what we want, just to suit us and our peculiar and changing situations. Our traditional divides which mutate at will emphasis this weakness. Let me digress. We loudly scream democracy but are scared to the marrow with all the challenging details of democracy. We dread what democracy demands. Instead we conveniently add ‘nascent’, ‘fledging’, ‘home grown’ as adjectives to qualify ‘democracy’. Is insincerity not another name for this behaviour? Now, let us return to Mutallab.
Terrorism- a 23 year school boy shocked the world with an act that nobody could have, before December 25, 2009, associated with a Nigerian. We read how the young man, within two weeks, was in three continents of Asia, Africa and North America. We read how a day before the attempted attack the boy, ready to do damage to life and happiness, hopped into the lucky aircraft within the boundaries of his country of his birth, in a city where his banker father had allegedly reported the boy’s suspicious bahaviour. The report made in Lagos to the U.S. Embassy seems to attract some kind words on the Mutallab family and made the unhappy family an example for others. But the outrage that trailed and still trails the act of the bomber on Chrismas eve will not yet abate. The criminal act would indeed remain to agitate the thoughts of his countrymen and assault the sensibility of every civilized mind. The Mutallabs, whatever their rich and enviable background, remain a bad advert for the elite and a warning on poor parenting.
Two letters published in The Guardian come under focus here. The first was on January 5, 2010, by one Peter Agbor. The letter dwelt on the Mutallabs. Mr Agbor regarded the alleged report made by the father of the boy-bomber, Umar Farouk Mutallab to the American Embassy about the suspicious behaviour of the boy, as an act worthy of emulation by Nigerians. To Mr. Peter, the elder Mutallab has shown good example. The second was earlier in time and a kind of reaction by Muslim Rights Concern to the terror act by a Nigerian Moslem. It was published on Wednesday, December 30, 2009. The letter written by one Is-haq Akintola for the Muslim group, like the latter one by Agbor, condemned the action of the younger Mutallab. The group also commended the elder Mutallab. It went on to praise the action of father Mutallab in these words: It is to the credit of the father of the suspect in the U.S.terror incident that he monitored his son’s movement and had even reported him to the U.S Embassy in Nigeria concerning his son’s clandestine and worrisome activities in the recent past.
From the above quotation we may, for convenience, glean ‘monitored his son’s movement’ and ‘in the recent past’ for our exercise. The two write ups earlier cited, to be sure, did not play down the importance of good parenting. They never did. But, in my view, what the commentators and most Nigerians ignored is the attitude of most wealthy Nigerian parents in the upbringing of their children. And this strikes at the root of the Mutallab episode. Sadly, neither Is-haq Akintola nor Peter Agbor alluded to it. If they did they were not emphatic, and it paints a wider picture. Unless we are wrong, it has been shown that the young bomber attended big schools in places far removed from his home town of Funtua, Katsina. He has easily, at his age, touched base in some world capitals and interacted with some unhappy elements in big cities. In a widely publicised picture, Umar Farouk Mutallab, as recently as 2001, was shown in what looks clearly like a boat cruise when he was at the International school, Togo while on a school trip to London. Who was paying for these trips? Who bore the cost of these luxuries? Surely, all these are big things in Nigeria of today; air tickets are not bread labels! Infact, how could a father monitor his son’s movement in Abdulmutallabs’ case?
Nobody has, as far as I know, asked to know when the elder Mutallab became aware of his son’s change of behaviour to warrant his (elder Mutalab’s) report to the American Embassy. Nobody, at least those recommending the Mutallab family action, has asked why the elder Mutallab headed straight to the U.S. Embassy without also alerting Nigerian security agencies. From the information available to the public, Abdulmutallab was never a student in the U.S. unless the route to Yemen and the U.K where he had an expensive apartment leads through the U.S. In simple term, there was a kind of parental slack, its dire consequences the alleged report at the Embassy has done nothing to weaken, it effects the commendations so far have done little to make better. We are talking about terrorism. Terrorism has the potential of straining relationship among countries and attracting unnecessary and outlandish security measures because of the colossal human and material it targets for destruction. And such huge destruction it unsuspectingly achieves without advancing humanity an inch. It all begins, like everything good or bad, from the home, in the closet.
At home the man, as a father, is the enforcer of good morals. He too must embody such morals in words and actions. We must accept, nomatter how bitter, that what is bred in the bone will be out in the blood. We seem to heap a lot of burden on the state and its institutions and expect the institutions of state to play our roles as parents or as friends. State institutions now groan under the weight of numerous crimes of which terrorism, in our clime, is the latest item. Maybe, the older Mutallabs may have seen their parental task as just providing for the wishes of their lucky kid Umar Farouk. The event of December 25, 2009 changed all that, and perhaps, for the good of humanity. The state must do its own part within the law churn out by its legislators. But ‘Good Society’, Judge Antonio Scalia said ‘ are not achieved by good laws, but are built upon the effect of one good person upon another and to expect more from law than good behaviour demeans virtue.’ Parents should pray not to emulate the elder Mutallab by reporting their wayward kids who have by their activities sworn to bring shame on their country as Abdulmutallab did. Rather, the Mutallabs remain a warning on how not to inadvertently breed terrorists in the guise of giving children the best in life.
Opunim writes from Calabar, Cross River State.
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