By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Northern Nigeria’s cascading descent into the abyss of
anarchy, particularly with the ongoing indiscriminate abductions of moneyed
aristocrats in the region, has stimulated a flurry of prognostications that “the
revolution” will start from there; that it foretells the nascence of a revolt
from below; that the forgotten, despised, and hungry almajirai are striking back. That’s wishful, erroneous thinking.
The emerging picture of the demographic profiles of the
kidnappers that have been tormenting northern Nigeria does not square with the
image of distraught, economically disaffiliated almajirai. They are former herders, from within and outside Nigeria,
who have lost their cattle for any number of reasons, and who have taken to mindless,
avaricious, and self-interested banditry. Anyone who expects the seeds of a
revolution to sprout from the thoughtless brigandage of these sorts of
insensate philistines must be clueless about what revolution entails.
Disparate strands of resentments might coalesce into a mass
resistance, then blossom into a protest, and culminate in a rebellion without
ever achieving the status of a revolution. In a revolution, a vanguard takes
ownership of the rebellion and uses it as a ladder to climb to substantive
power. The kidnappings in the far north are not a mass resistance. Nor are they
a self-conscious, systematic protest, or even a rebellion. So they have not a
snowball’s chance in hell of ever transforming into a revolution.
The northern hoi polloi who bear the real brunt of Buhari’s
cruelly strangulating and escalating incompetence won’t resist, protest, rebel,
much less revolt, because they have been socialized into accepting their
economic suffering with equanimity. The only thing that rouses their passions,
that animates them to mindless violence, is religion.
You can smolder the Northern masses with economic asphyxiation,
as Buhari is doing now, and they would make peace with their fate with listless
acquiescence, but blaspheme their religion, or even icons of their religion,
and they would rise up in arms and murder indiscriminately. Appeals to religion is the easiest way to
ignite the raw emotions and solidarity of the northern masses. The region’s
elite know that intimately and habitually exploit it to perpetuate themselves
in power.
With a few honorable exceptions, the region’s clerical
elites, known as the Ulama, are in bed with the political elites to keep the
masses perpetually in a state of suspended animation. Amid the inexorably
intensifying breakdown of security in the region, compromised clerical elites
are also intensifying fraudulent theological rationalizations for the rise of
kidnappings— and, of course, exculpating Buhari of responsibility for this.
Many people were scandalized when the Chief Imam of the
Presidential Villa, Sheikh Abdulwaheed Sulaiman, was reported to have said, on May 8, that the widening and deepening of
insecurity in the North was a “test from God.” The imam didn’t implore Buhari,
who sat by him, to devise creative ways to contain the insecurity that has made
people prisoners in their homes; he instead shifted the burden to the very people
who are traumatized by a problem that is aggravated by the president’s incompetence.
He beseeched beleaguered Northerners “for repentance and prayers to avert the
current security challenges confronting the nation.”
The Aso Rock Imam’s exasperatingly bald-faced theological
fraud is unfortunately the template the vast majority of the Ulama in Northern
Nigeria deploy when they protect leaders who feather their nests. And it’s
intended to keep the masses in check and to anesthetize them into not just
accepting the incompetence of their leaders as an inescapable divine design but
to bear responsibility for it.
In other words, Northern masses are fed the sterile,
mendacious theological staple that the avoidable tragedies that befall them are
not the consequence of the ineptitude of their leaders but a product of divine
punishment for the iniquities of the masses. So in addition to the trauma of
living with the disabling dysfunctions created by their elites, they are
blackmailed by cold, calculating, conscienceless clerical aristocrats into
internalizing moral guilt for their conditions.
My good friend Sheikh Dr. Ali Isa Pantami is now the object
of Twitter attacks by young educated northerners who remind him that his cold
detachment from the horrors that afflict northern Muslims today is such a
disconcerting contrast from his erstwhile persistent, shrill, and lachrymose
attacks on former President Goodluck Jonathan from his pulpit. In a widely
circulated audio tape, he tearfully told Jonathan that, as president and
commander-in-chief, he should take responsibility for the daily mass murders of
Muslims in the North.
Today, more Northern Muslims are dying and being violently
kidnapped than at any time in Nigeria’s entire history, but Sheikh Pantami
hasn’t placed the blame for this on Buhari in whose government he now works as
DG of NITDA. He defended his curious silence by pointing out that because he
has access to the president, he routinely reminds him, in private, of his
responsibility to secure the lives of people he swore to protect.
I don’t doubt the Sheikh whom I have known to be an
embodiment of righteousness and honor. Nevertheless, he has rendered himself
vulnerable to charges of weak convictions. It means, at best, that his earnest,
impassioned harangues against Goodluck Jonathan were actuated by his lack of
access to the man. In other words, if he had had access to Jonathan, as he does
to Buhari now, he wouldn’t have expressed any public outrage over the mass
murders of Muslims in the North.
While that reality diminishes his moral standing, I can
understand it. Access to people in the corridors of power tends to blunt revulsion
toward them. That is why people who want to stay true to their convictions
should avoid dalliance with wielders of power. Power does not brook opposition
within its reaches; it coopts, contaminates, or neutralizes.
Since 2016, at least three prominent people have arranged a
meeting between Buhari and me, and I politely declined. I also refused to speak
with Atiku Abubakar and spurned his emissary’s invitation to meet with him when
he visited the United States in January 2019. I make no claims to being an
unblemished, nonpareil moral superior, but nothing is more important to me than
my independence of thought. When you gain privileged access to people in power
whose feet you hold to the fire, you can’t sustain your independence because
they will strategically coopt and silence you.
Now, if the revolution can’t come from the North because the
masses of the people there are under the grip of a corrupt clerical
establishment, is there hope from other parts of the country? None that I can
see. Much of the rest of Nigeria is beset by a different iteration of the same
problem in the North.
The deeper the nation descends into the nadir of despair,
the more fatalistic, superstitious, and pre-scientific many people tend to
become. Nigerian Christian Pentecostalism has particularly predisposed many
people in the South to believe that they can “pray” all their problems away,
that they don’t need to take their destinies into their own hands. It’s akin to
what anthropologists call cargo cult mentality, that is, the superstitious
belief, first recorded among pre-modern tribes in Melanesia, that all the goodies
of this world will magically and effortlessly appear because people wish it
into existence through staid rituals.
That’s not the way the world works. Any society where the
vast majority of the people recoil in fatalistic resignation while their
oppressors have a field day will be stuck in protracted infancy. Revolutionary
tremors are good for every society every once in a while.
