Hausa hallucinations

Al-Ahram - Aug 2, 2009

Across Muslim sub-Saharan Africa, militant Islamists are garnering support among the disillusioned population. This week's religious violence in northern Nigeria and Somalia poignantly drives the point home, notes Gamal Nkrumah

Nigerian politics is a dirty business. After a long run of bad decisions and worse luck, Islamists now rule the roost. Prominent members of the political class have predominantly been Muslims from the north of the country-- both civilians and military rulers. A big part of the explanation sits, scowling at the Nigerian populace at large, in the demographic realities of Africa's most populous nation that happens to have a Muslim majority. Militant Islamist vigilantes have taken matters into their own hands. They understand the weaknesses of the Nigerian democracy. They know that these weaknesses have not yet morphed into strengths.

Moreover, the militant Islamists seem loath to seek a whole-hearted accommodation with the authorities. They concocted an ideology that refutes the legitimacy of the country's democratically elected rulers.

Wobbling all over the place, Nigeria's ruling clique responded in kind. This week, they flexed their muscles clamping down on rioting Islamists.

From this odd smelting of fundamentalist thinking came an alloy that had its own unique characteristics. Jihad, a holy war against the powers that be, is the hallmark of the militant Islamist ideology. After years of stultification, there emerged a new spirit of defiance. Determinedly contrary, the militant Islamists rose in angry solidarity with the underdog, the school dropouts and the unemployed youth.

Islamist groups are outbidding each other to bring in new blood. Nigeria is not a model for any African country to follow. This week saw a furious upsurge in religious-instigated violence precisely because social and economic conditions have become both unbearable and untenable. The main surge isn't over. As far as the Nigerian political establishment is concerned, the angry youth's induction into the militias of political Islam spells disaster. So is Nigeria getting better or worse?

In truth it is hard to say. The situation is neither hopeful nor fluid. To complicate matters, the financial markets are jumpy about the political situation in Nigeria. Foreign financiers are reluctant to invest in a country where the political future is uncertain. Foreign investment has fallen behind levels in more promising neighbouring countries such as Ghana.

Small wonder United States President Barack Obama visited Ghana and purposely ignored Nigeria during his historic first trip to Africa. At the African level, Nigeria's reputation also suffers. The opposition outmanoeuvrs the Nigerian government. The country's economy is sclerotic and its populace rancorous.

"Blood, they say, is thicker than water. Obama's gesture is intended to inform nations like Kenya and Nigeria that neither blood nor oil courses thicker than equity," commented Nigeria's celebrated Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. "The studied excision by Obama of those two nations from his itinerary -- the lack of objective self-assessment within their rulership circles."

Put like this, one can see Nigeria's new democratic dispensation not as a relief, but as an awful omen. The Nigerian electorate is more traditional than Western-leaning in its outlook. So what if Nigeria has institutions similar to the West's?

The Nigerian people are insisting on new faces too. The main political parties are running neck-to-neck and their agendas are hardly distinguishable from each other. They have nothing new to offer. In other words, Nigeria's Westernised ruling clique pay a high price for sticking together, resorting to fudges that range from the fatuous to the ruinous. Nigeria's political establishment has created a dubious political union hatched together and answerable only to itself. This isn't democracy. The mushily free-market ruling civilian elite have taken over from their military predecessors. The military were given a drubbing after a string of corruption scandals.

In the event, however, they began to fortify their strongholds. But then even this was provisional. Violence claimed the lives of hundreds of Nigerians this week. An estimated 200 people were butchered in Bauchi state, northern Nigeria. The crisis erupted in the early hours of Sunday when militant Islamists attacked Dutsen Tanshi police station in the Bauchi State capital Bauchi, chasing terrified policemen and destroying everything that lay in their path. Nigeria's Minister of Police Affairs Ibrahim Yakubu Lame and Nigerian Inspector-General of Police Ogbunaya Onovo stepped their efforts to instill a sense of serenity.

But one can see why Nigerian moderates fret about hardliners. In truth this is a circular argument. Islamic fundamentalists went on the rampage wreaking havoc on government and private property and slaughtering unsuspecting innocent bystanders in four northern Nigerian states, including Bornu, where Mohamed Youssef, a self-styled Islamist leader, preached rebellion. It has never been clear how much Youssef actually controls his militias. The point is that his followers rioted and incited others to riot.

Youssef has gone into hiding. Some say he was killed in the violence. Rumours are rife and there is much speculation about his whereabouts. His followers are dispersed throughout northern Nigeria. They vowed to "clean the system which is polluted by Western education." School dropouts and students are not the only youngsters to cross the divide. The streets of northern Nigerian cities like Bauchi, a warren of cowered alleys, are filled with an explosive mix of fanaticism and a desire for social justice. The hardline militant Islamists detest the rich cross-fertilisation of ideas in the secular Western-style university lecture halls. Multiculturalism is rejected by the hardliners.

The sects' members claim that the dangerous heterodoxy of Western secular education contradict the teachings of pristine Islam. They intend to destroy the political union hatched together by a fractious tribal-ridden and business-oriented elite.

The Boko Haram (literally Western Education is Sinful) rejects the cosmopolitan environment partly because they themselves are excluded from the trappings of modernity. According to the militants, universities and institutions of higher learning are the abodes of devilish dealings.

Boko Haram is an underground organisation with many followers throughout the northern part of the country. "The police have been arresting our leaders, that is why we decided to retaliate," Boko Haram members explained. The members are mainly university dropouts. In neighbouring Plateau State the streets of the capital Jos have been deserted, as members of the large Christian community feared the worse. Reprisals are in the offing, Christian leaders warned.

Boko Haram is holding out against what they perceive as new-fangled innovations. The true believer, the Boko Haram insist, must scrupulously avoid the pitfalls of Western education and culture.

Theirs is not a creed for the enquiring believer. They understand that Nigerian democracy is still in a state of perpetual flux. Their avowed enemies are the bourgeoisie, the educated and highly literate Nigerian savants, and the cross- cultural and multilingual privileged few.

The Boko Haram eschew what they see as the bizarre percolation of Western heresies. The have-nots are victims of Westernisation. The shantytowns of northern Nigeria have a grim and diabolic air.

These strange Islamist cults enjoy tremendous public appeal among the deprived masses in northern Nigeria. Their ideas linger on in some of the more inaccessible corners of northern Nigeria. They continue to attract the reverence of the underprivileged, but under a new militant Islamist guise. The region retains its bloody reputation.

Unsettled by all this, the Nigerian authorities still profess doctrines of democracy. The authorities in Bauchi State imposed a curfew from dawn to dusk. Bauchi police was acting in tandem with Nigerian Police Headquarters in the national capital Abuja.

The current violence has a historical precedence. The so-called "Nigerian Taliban" set up base in the town of Kanamma, Yobe State, northern Nigeria, in 2004. The military camp was dubbed "Afghanistan". Their members systematically attacked police outposts and government installations. Campaigning against Western education is a cornerstone of their beliefs. Hundreds of suspected instigators of the violence were arrested in four predominantly Muslim states in northern Nigeria.

The widespread destruction of lives and property has caused alarm in the ruling circles. Militant Islamists in Nigeria are campaigning for the imposition of Islamic Sharia law in the 36 states of the Nigerian Federation, Africa's most populous nation with 150 million. However, many of the southern and southeastern states actually have Christian majorities. Muslims in Nigeria tend to be geographically concentrated in the northern and western parts of the country and in large urban conglomerations.

It feels like before the storm, before the onset of the seasonal torrential rains, the equatorial downpours that sully the African Sahel at this time of the year.

The members of the sect were armed to the teeth with AK47 rifles, live ammunition, Dane guns, homemade explosives, and even old- fashioned matchlocks, bows and arrows. In the end they proved no match for the Nigerian police.

The militant Islamists are supported to the hilt by the jobless youth and disgruntled disfranchised adolescents who have no hope in hell for the betterment of their lives and are thoroughly demoralised. Their sympathisers rejected the Nigerian government's relief aid. "Government should go with their food," the protesters yelled. Hundreds of displaced persons now languish in makeshift camps with trepidation of an impending humanitarian catastrophe.

A Christian backlash ensued. Christians flocked to churches, missionary schools and special secret camps for displaced persons. The Christian minorities in northern Nigeria now live in a state of utter terror. They feel insecure and at the mercy of the militant Islamist groups. They are particularly incensed with the administration of Bauchi Governor Malam Isa Yuguda. "We voted him into power but he has rejected us because we are Christians," they complained bitterly. Governor Yuguda had officially switched allegiance from the opposition All Nigerian People's Party (ANPP) to the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) of Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua.

The masses are particularly indignant because of the extensive business interests of the ruling elite. The middle-aged Governor Yuguda married the beautiful 21 year old daughter of the Nigerian President Yar'Adua, Hajiya Nafisa, in January earlier this year, some suspect to cement economic ties between him and his business partner. She is his fourth wife.

"The North cannot progress politically, socially and economically when there is no peace and when the region has become an abattoir where people's lives and peace are constantly destroyed," warned the Jos-based Nigerian rights group the League for Human Rights. The organisation noted that, "the major responsibility of any government the world over is the protection of lives and property of all persons in the state or nation irrespective of gender, religion, ethnicity or political affiliation."

Religious clashes between the majority Muslims and minority Christians are rife in northern Nigeria. Muslims make up an estimated 90 per cent of the population of northern Nigeria where 12 states have officially declared the imposition of Islamic Sharia law.

"Therefore, each time an individual is killed or property burnt in the name of political or religious crises, one is at a loss as to where the government and all its security apparatus was that tax payers' money is used to fund and maintain," Nigeria's League for Human Rights issued in a statement.

Yar'Adua, a onetime self-confessed Marxist when he was an undergraduate student at Nigeria's distinguished Ahmadou Bello University, was sworn-in as president on 29 May 2007. He was on a state visit to Brazil when trouble erupted at home. He is today, unfortunately, widely seen as a representative of the "moneyed oligarchy" as Soyinka so aptly put it.

Nigeria is a country in deep trouble. The current crisis in northern Nigerian states is symbolic of a broader crisis of confidence in the political system, and disenchantment with Nigerian leadership. They live the lives of the international jet sets.

"It evokes pity for the continent as a whole, that such political leadership exists today which, sooner than retiring into their gilded holes to reflect," Soyinka lamented. He urged his country's political elite to "break with corporate patronage." And, to forgo the "cultivation of outright disdain for the elementary right of their citizens to a voice in leadership choice."

Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/958/fo1.htm