Last week’s BarkByte entitled “ITS DICTATORS WORLD…” generated a number of reactions (some of which shall be published here in due course). The tone and target of the responses varied; but they all converged on one view: there was something fundamentally wrong with the way the settlement of Darul Islam was invaded, its inhabitants uprooted and subsequently deported to various places both within and outside the country.
But one response, which the respondents made awkwardly conspicuous by omitting to label it as a response came from the Niger State government. Then again perhaps the Niger state government report was a mere coincidence and had nothing to do with BarkByte; after all, a coincidence is a coincidence only because of its uncanny timeliness. In which case what the Niger state government had to say last Monday would be one hell of a coincidence, and a very useful one too.
Aliyu Baba Barau, the genial, erstwhile anchor of the now lifeless program ‘Tuesday Live’ who is now the Commissioner for Information in Niger state was reported—on the front page—of the Daily Trust Newspaper of Monday 07/09/09 as saying that the Niger state government, contrary to allegations, had adequately compensated the victims of the Darul Islam invasion; he went on to provide figures, saying that the state government spent N77m in compensation for the victims. Inside the report, Barau then went ahead to deny every allegation and concern raised in last week’s column.
That was to be expected, and one cannot but admire the promptness of the commissioner’s reaction. The only problem is that the facts as provided by the Niger state government are challenged by the facts as provided by the victims of the Darul Islam invasion. The same medium that reported the Niger state government saying it gave its victims N77m one day, reported the victims the next day saying the Niger state government was in effect lying. And then there is also this mathematical fact: Aliyu Baba Barau said that a total of four thousand and twenty Darul Islam members were displaced; so if you divide seventy seven million naira equally among them, each would get a paltry N19,154 only. It is true that they all couldn’t have been evenly endowed; but what yardstick was used to determine who was worth how much? In a phone conversation with at least one prominent Darul Islam member, I gathered that some of them were given as little as N6,000 as compensation.
Be that as it may, what is most worrisome is that the Niger state government is missing, or evading, the point. Even by our peculiar constitution, which was scripted by the military and full of inconsistencies, Human Right is inalienable and priceless. When you violate somebody’s Right, either by taking away his freedom or invading his privacy, or in whichever way; you have taken something away from that person that you cannot replace. The best that you can do is to make atonement. And this, atonement that is, is what the Niger state government ought to be concentrating on. Our constitution, faulty as it is, stipulates that to punish someone you must prove beyond reasonable doubt that they have committed an offence.
It is very significant that hitherto, in all their long-winding explanations, neither the federal government which provided the might, nor the Niger state government which provided the excuse has been able to say which law of the Federal Republic of Nigeria the displaced inhabitants of Darul Islam had broken; even in the case of Boko Haram nobody has been able to establish their guilt, beyond the claim by the government that they had attacked a police station in Bauchi; an action the Boko Haram leaders (before they were executed) said was in reaction to incessant harassment by the police against their members. Perhaps a clarification needs to be made. Nigerians appreciate that any individual or group that poses a danger to the nation becomes an enemy until he or they are contained or until they conform to acceptable forms of behaviour. Those Muslim preachers that justified the action of government in the present circumstances did so on the basis of this provision: that the group is always greater than the individual.
But first, guilt must be established. In the case of Boko Haram, the best that one can say is that the question of guilt is disputed, and may never be resolved before the Day of Judgment since only one party (the State) remains alive to tell the tale. For all we know, the term and concept of Boko Haram might have been a creation of the Bauchi state government, because before they told us about it, nobody can say for sure that he’d ever heard of it. In the case of Darul Islam, there is no dispute about the question of guilt since no offence was committed. The federal and state governments acted on the basis of the presumption of guilt, as against the presumption of innocence.
By reversing the law of the land which insists that a person must be presumed innocent until proven otherwise, the two tiers of government have shifted the issue of Darul Islam from the spiritual to the legal. Should the action of the federal and the Niger state governments be condoned, there would be grave consequences. For a start we look to Plateau state where the governor, Jonah Jang, woke up one day drunk with prejudice and decided to expel some indigenes of the state pretty much for the same reasons that are under discussion here. Even within the same state, there had been instances when a dominant group in a particular part of the state violently threatened to expel another minority group; here the case of Zangon Kataf in Kaduna state comes to mind. Darul Islam might well serve as a precedent for all those with these and similar prejudices.
These are but a few of the likely consequences that the Darul Islam invasion could throw up in a nation famous for its ethno-religious strife. That is why some of us insist, and would continue to insist, that both the federal and the Niger state government must retrace their steps and erase the impression their action has created that it is okay to invade a community simply because that community chose to be different. This is a minimum requirement.
As for those who prefer to see the objections of this column as a political attack on the Chief Servant of Niger state, they are wrong. I haven’t been to Niger state for a long time and I have absolutely no idea what his achievements or otherwise are in the state; if anything, before Darul Islam, I find his behaviour both courageous and amusing. Courageous because of his resolute battle with very powerful individuals in his state who are said to be bent on controlling him; and amusing because he sometimes provides a comic relief from the drudgery of living in a country where nothing works, a failed state sinking lower by the day.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.