by Abimbola Adelakun

At first glance, Boko Haram’s “caliph”, Abubakar Shekau, and Nigeria’s Minister of Education, Mallam Ibrahim Shekarau, share nothing in common. They ought not to. The former is a theocratic death cult thug whose chief ruse is a censure of western education whilst the latter got his sea legs in education management. An objective appraisal, however, throws a kink: Both are annihilators; pornographers of violence.

At one point or the other, both men have exhibited an authoritarian streak that bodes disaster for whomever and whatever that do not align with their ideas and ideologies.

Shekau, a murderous megalomaniac–who lately swore allegiance to Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Sunni-leaning butcher of Mesopotamia- is a myopic traducer whose mania exudes an agenda of violence and terror. In his videos, his monologues exhibit hollow understanding of history, culture and civilisation. Yet, ignorant though he is, stupid he, definitely, is not.

He knows that the hold terror has on a populace is the ability to produce and reproduce fear. If he can generate (and sustain) as much moral panic as Ebola, he can stamp himself into public consciousness such that minding his business becomes Nigeria’s business. So, now and then, Shekau puts out snuff videos of barbarous acts perpetrated against the soul of Nigeria. The triumphalism he embodies when airing the forcible conversion of abducted schoolgirls to Islam; how his thugs captured a military barracks and, how men of the Nigerian Army “tactically manoeuvred” themselves into Cameroon when overran, are homologous to his destructive mission.

Shekau makes and distributes those films because he, essentially, is a pornographer. He gets off on violence and the very act of showing it to the world is significant. He needs to induce fear in us for his maniacal tendencies to be further titillated. Watch it, Shekau whose videos have aped al-Qaeda’s in the past might soon take a leaf from ISIS.

If Shekau’s deliriousness can be blamed on his apparent cerebral dislodgement, what accounts for Shekarau’s views on printed texts and morality?

Shekarau, by training, is an educationalist who rose to become the president of the professional body of principals of all secondary schools in Nigeria called ANCOPSS. If there is someone who was expected to rise above the base propaganda of religionist politics, it should be him.

As Kano State governor, 2003-2011, he dominated headlines for some of his anti-progressive initiatives that bought into public paranoia. He suspended polio immunisation on the charge that it was a plot to sterilise Muslims. With the aid of his community-policing unit, the Hisbah Guard, he repressed a peaceful protest by women who wanted to march against Sharia divorce laws. His heavy-handedness and religious meddling wounded “Kannywood” (the former bustling Kano film market) and the various artistes making a living from it. And there were several instances of destruction of alcoholic drinks –in public.

His assault on the fabric of Nigeria did not stop at these. He took it upon himself to determine which and which books are immoral and “pornographic.” A public orgy of burning immoral books was thereafter initiated.

What is, perhaps, more shocking about Shekarau’s attitude to libricide is his recent defence of such a vile act even as the Minister of Education.

After he left Kano Government House, his political obituary was already being drafted before the Federal Government dug him out of political wilderness where he was consigned to following his misadventure in the All Progressives Congress and named him Education Minister. If Nigeria were a country that takes itself seriously, a man with a bibliophobic past should never have been made an education administrator; not even in a country battling a terrorist war is largely founded on ideological intolerance.

Worse, Shekarau mobilised the resources of Nigeria –part funded by VAT on alcoholic beverages- to repress others’ voices. It is painful that a man like him harbours demagoguery in his bones and even as minister of a sacred culture like Education, he still won’t purge himself of such an haemorrhagic attitude.

Heinrich Heine, a German artist, once wrote, “Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” It was perhaps unsurprising that a century later, Nazi Germany burnt Heine’s books and was guilty of the Holocaust. When analysts look at the rise of insurgent groups like Boko Haram, they tend to blame its existence on socio-economic-political reasons. Those factors are valid but any society that stages a public lynching of books also cultivates a ground for future violent insurrections.

Shekarau, if he knows what is expected of him, should be disavowing his biblioclasm; making public apologies for his past while building libraries across Nigeria. In a country where we should be organising reading competitions as against the many trite “reality shows” on TV, an education administrator who defends book burning as a punitive measure against materials he regards as “morally decadent” is no different from Shekau.

As Education Minister, it is important for Shekarau to consistently renounce his past actions by venerating books in public; not continue to justify libricide on shaky logic such as subjective ideals of morality.

What defines morality, by the way, does not begin and end with sexual culture or pornography. If he does not know, pornography is not all about sex but also about a blatant display of power. Publicly burning books that make you uncomfortable for whatever reason is an attitude typical of repressive regimes and feeds into notions of violence pornography.

Book burning has come a long way in various eras of the world but one thing has never changed: it is, and has always been, a question of power. The burner wants to suppress the voice and choice of the burnt book author because s/he has the power to do so. Shekarau and his gang of libricidists try to induce impose their own standards on other people’s choices in the same way Shekau is doing when he tries to force his Islamic fanaticism on Nigerians.

Yes, Shekarau argues that they were trying to preserve their culture but that is too wishy washy an argument for a man of his learning. There is nothing static about “culture” and basic anthropology readings would have indicated that sex was as much a part of African societies as the food our ancestors ate. Those who argue that sexual culture is an imposition of colonialism and western modernity only betray their knowledge of pre-colonial African societies.

Worse, Shekarau mobilised the resources of Nigeria –part funded by VAT on alcoholic beverages- to repress others’ voices. It is painful that a man like him harbours demagoguery in his bones and even as minister of a sacred culture like Education, he still won’t purge himself of such an haemorrhagic attitude.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija