YNaija Analysis: Why is this government deliberately creating another potential terror group?

It is not the bad things that happen, but the absence of learning from those bad things, that is the tragedy. Even if a society will not learn from the problems of others, we can at least learn from our most recent history. The ongoing Boko Haram insurgency is not quite over yet. A bomb just went off in Maiduguri a few days. That group got violent after its leaders, Mohammed Yusuf, was killed along with hundreds of his followers by the police in 2009. In their place came a terrorist that proceeded to wreak havoc on Nigeria for 5 years, before being pushed back in the last one year. The situation of internally displaced people as a result of that conflict is still ongoing, and will continue for a long time yet. 21 Chibok Girls were just returned after over 900 days in captivity.

The Nigerian state is not interested in learning the lessons of the Boko Haram insurgency in order to prevent it happening again, that is what explains the handling of Kaduna’s Shiites. After a few of them blocked the path of the Chief of Army Staff’s convoy last December, little did they know that only a few days later, hundreds of them would be killed and their leaders, Sheik Ibrahim Zak-Zaky would be taken into custody. Till now, he has not been charged in a court of law, as is his right as a Nigerian citizen. Also, despite the inquiry into the massacre in Zaria concluding that there was an indiscriminate use of force, no one has been held accountable for it.

We have seen this same script play out in the South-East as well, when several peaceful protesters were killed at the end of May while marking the anniversary of the declaration of the state of Biafra. Once again, despite credible reports of widespread human rights abuses by our security forces, no one has been brought to justice either.

Back to Kaduna. To add insult to injury, the Kaduna State Government declared the group’s activities illegal two weeks ago, and the home of a Shiite cleric was attacked by youths and burnt to the ground last week. Also, there have been crackdowns against the Shiites in Katsina, Kano, Kebbi, Jigawa and Plateau States.
There is more than a hint of a rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran in these matters, as they engage in proxy wars of influence across the world. The Saudis lavishly promotes Sunni Wahabbism across the world, while Iran promotes the Shiite wing of Islam. By failing to accord its citizens the right to fair hearing in a court of law and freedom of association and religion, Niigeria has probably made itself a proxy battleground for Saudi Arabia and Iran.
This will not end well, because Nigeria is currently beset by multiple internal pressures: an economic recession, high unemployment and inflation, and the ongoing challenge of Boko Haram and the internally displaced persons left in their wake. On top of this, the conflict between Fulani herdsmen and farmers across the country, while it has receded from the headlines, still needs to be solved definitively, and there is nothing to say that agitations for Biafra will dissipate on their own.

To open up another source of conflict, whether or not there is any affection for Nigeria’s Shiites, is very much against Nigeria’s interests. We can ill-afford to be a plaything of the Saudis or Iranians at this or any other time.

Most importantly, we are talking about Nigerians here. If there are troublemakers in Zakzaky’s Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN), they should be brought to justice alongside the soldiers who killed over three hundred people in cold blood. Not to do so is to further drive home the point that an example that indeed, Nigeria has not changed, and that the only language that gets anywhere is violence.
Nigeria urgently needs to become a nation of laws, where due process is followed and everyone is accorded their rights. Those rights cannot and should not be trampled on, depending on who is in power.
Can we really afford another insurgency?

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail