By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
The mindless xenophobic violence against Nigerians and other
African immigrants in South Africa is igniting social media conversation about
what one might call global Naijaphobia, that is, the mass resentment of
Nigerians in many parts of the world. We are now increasingly stereotyped
worldwide as rude, boisterous, tastelessly showy, domineering, and criminally
inclined.
From Euro-America to Asia, from Southern Africa to East
Africa, and even in other West African countries, many people judge Nigerians
by the attitudinal excesses and moral indiscretions of a minority of us. Nevertheless,
amid the righteous indignation that this admittedly unfair reality provokes in
us, we need to realize that we are also culprits of internal xenophobia within
our national space.
In Nigeria, moral transgressions are habitually territorialized
and ethnicized. Northern Muslims are routinely stereotyped as terrorists.
Nigerians from the East are pigeonholed as inescapably prone to fraudulent
schemes like 419 and drug trafficking. Nigerians from the West are typecast as
a cowardly, traitorous lot who are given to ritual murders and credit card
frauds. Northern Christians and southern ethnic minorities are branded as lazy,
good-for-nothing drunkards. And so on.
To be sure, unkind stereotypical generalizations about people are conventional
parts of the human perceptual process. They are not necessarily always
activated by premeditated ill will. They are just a part of our visceral,
unschooled perceptual guidelines that psychologists call our schemata. The
untutored human mind has a cognitive need for what is called chronically
accessible constructs, which help us make snap, effortless judgments about
people. Nevertheless, the body of stereotypes we build about people through our
chronically accessible constructs can be—in fact often are—faulty,
over-generalized, and primary reasons for the distortion of reality.
Negative, inaccurate cognitive schemata become particularly
problematic if they formally inform public policy. For instance, about the same
time that Nigerians were justifiably hyperventilating on social media over
xenophobic fury on their compatriots in South Africa, the Lagos State
government arrested 123 Nigerians from Jigawa State who relocated to Lagos in a
truck with their motorcycles in search of better economic opportunities.
The Lagos State government accused them of the non-existent
crime of “illegal mass movement”! In an August 31 tweet, the Lagos State
government announced the "Arrest of illegal mass movement of Okada riders to
Lagos from the North jointly coordinated by the State Commissioner for The
Environment and Water Resources, Mr Tunji Bello and his Transportation
counterpart, Dr. Abimbola Oladehinde."
Ignore the monstrous grammar for a moment. What law of the
land justifies what the Lagos State Government did? Chapter4, Section 41 of the Nigerian Constitution states that, “Every citizen of
Nigeria is entitled to move freely throughout Nigeria and to reside in any part
thereof, and no citizen of Nigeria shall be expelled from Nigeria or refused
entry thereby or exit therefrom.”
So what was the legal basis for the Lagos State government’s
initial arrest of the Okada riders from Jigawa? A newspaper editor from the South
who supported the unconstitutional arrest and detention of the 123 Jigawa Okada
riders argued that the action was justified in light of the rampant terrorism in
the Muslim North and the crippling anxieties in the South about the creeping
incursion of this virus into their region. There are three fundamental problems
with this reasoning.
One, that assumption rests on the notion that the South is
an unblemished, crime-free El Dorado. It's not. Criminals from the South also
go to the North. Some crimes are more prevalent in the South than they are in
the North. The fact that one region has one sort of crime and not the other is
no reason to engage in invidious stereotypical generalization of one or the
other. No crime is more acceptable than the other is.
Two, if state governments in parts of Nigeria can invoke the
crimes prevalent in other parts of the country as justification to violate the
constitutionally guaranteed right to movement of some Nigerians, what moral
right do we have to resent being negatively stereotyped and violated abroad on
account of the crimes of a minority of our compatriots? It’s the same logic.
Three, the 123 people the Lagos State government illegally
arrested (and later released) putatively on suspicion of being terrorists are
from Jigawa State. Since the Boko Haram insurgency started in 2009, there are
scarcely, if any, terrorist attacks in Jigawa. The North is not one monolithic,
undifferentiated region. The fact that there is terrorism in the northeast is
no reason to assume that every Northern Muslim, including one from outside the
Northeast, is a terrorist. That’s ethnic profiling.
Incidentally, the Lagos State Government appeared to have
inadvertently admitted that it indeed “profiled” the Okada riders from Jigawa. Gbenga
Omotoso, Lagos State’s Commissioner for Information & Strategy, in a press
statement designed to dispel the impression that the 123 Hausa travelers who
were arrested by the Lagos State government were targeted because of their
ethnic identity, said, “The arrested suspects have been moved to the State
Police Command where they are being profiled."
When law enforcement officers “profile” people, it means
they are judging the people because of their ethnicity, race, religion, etc.
instead of their actual conduct. I’m not sure that was the meaning Omotoso
intended to convey because it contradicts the core claim of his press release.
Was it a Freudian slip or just plain ignorance? Or both?
Well, a friend from the South who is close to Lagos State
government officials confided in me that the arrest of the 123 men from Jigawa
was just political theatre carefully calculated to purchase and win back lost
political capital for the Bola Tinubu political camp in the southwest. This was
necessitated, he said, by Tinubu’s insensitive and impolitic “where are the cows?” remark in the aftermath of the brutal murder of Afenifere
leader Rueben Fasoranti’s daughter, which has caused Tinubu to be seen in the
Southwest as a shamelessly thoughtless lackey of the Fulani.
If this is true—and I have no reason to doubt that it’s true—
how is this different from South African politicians playing up negative
stereotypes of Nigerians to stir up xenophobic violence against Nigerian
immigrants in South Africa?
Interestingly, the Naijaphobic hysteria in South Africa and
the Hausaphobic profiling of poor Okada drivers in Lagos are fairly coextensive
with another enduring strand of Nigeria’s many bigotries: religious
intolerance. Inaccurate reports that alleged that Rivers State governor Nyesom
Wike had destroyed a mosque in Port Harcourt also helped to magnify the Muslim
North’s own hypocrisy and unflattering record of religious intolerance.
Tearing down of churches and refusal to grant permits to
build churches is a persistent problem in the North’s so-called Sharia states.
Ironically, it’s precisely the people who have destroyed churches, who have
refused to grant permission for churches to be built, or who have cheered the
persecution of Christians that are taking umbrage at the unusual news of the
demolition of a mosque in Port Harcourt.
A Kano-based Facebooker by the name of Ibrahim Sanyi-Sanyi
captured the hypocrisy and duplicity of the arrowheads of the Northern Muslim
anger brigade against the “demolition” of a mosque in Port Harcourt when he wrote:
“When Shekarau was the Governor from 2003 - 2011, billboards warning visitors ‘Kano garin Sharia ne' [Kano is Islamic
Sharia state] were erected at strategic locations leading to Kano Metropolitan
City. Furthermore, churches were razed down including Christ the King Church
(CKC) in Naibawa, Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) in Giginyu and HEKAN
(Combined Churches of Christ) Church in Rogo Local Government Area (LGA).
“Now, Malam Shekarau, out of political expediency and with
obvious intention to ride on general sentiments, has lashed out on Governor
Wike for saying 'Rivers is a Christian State' and for 'demolishing of mosque'
which are similar divisive stuff that happened under him as a Governor.”
Similarly, even when predominantly Christian universities like
the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, have had spaces for mosques on their
campuses almost since their founding, federal universities in Kano, Sokoto,
etc. that are funded by oil wealth from the Christian South have no churches.
That’s unacceptable Christophobia. So while
we condemn Naijaphobia abroad, let’s also reflect on our own local phobias at
home.
