Are Christians being persecuted in Nigeria? The answer is, no! Are humans being slaughtered indiscriminately in Nigeria, the answer is yes.
For the past 20 years, human life has meant absolutely nothing in Nigeria, so thank God it took the phoney narrative that has been doing the rounds for President Donald Trump to intervene and probably reset the brain of the Nigerian ruling class.
It has been my considered opinion that there is no plan to Islamise Nigeria. I don’t believe in it. There are opportunists using the cloak of religion to create a narrative that one religious group is out to exterminate the other.
It is true that the Saudi have increased their sponsorship of extremist groups in Nigeria for a very long time the same way American Evangelicals were the purveyors of pentecostalism in our country. When the State fails, that is when religion takes over.
In countries where states function, religion is a personal thing. I know that because Niger Republic, very close to us, is predominantly Muslim, but until the so-called insurgents entered that country through Nigeria, you did not hear of persecution or extremism. Indeed, after Juma’a prayers on Fridays, the night clubs in Niamey, the capital, and other towns are filled up with revellers.
What happened in Nigeria is that political opportunists lean towards religion to mask their failures. Creating that gap, they allowed extremists of all hues to thrive and created a leeway for buccanneers striving to take over land and its resources.
Nigeria has a thriving security force and I have written epistles on the failure of security and its agencies. Nigerian security forces have long abandoned their statutory role for the glamour and glitz of the siren immunity. The insurgencies created by the laxity of the Nigerian security aparatchik to successfully police the state has turned into big business by high profile security chiefs.
They take the budget, split it among themselves, turn the other eye and let the murderers go to town and unleash mayhem. When community leaders say they alerted security agents about impending attacks without commensurate action, that is all we need to know that making money is better for them than protecting life.
When the insurgency first started, yes, they targeted churches and their supporters clapped or kept mute. Then, they moved to the mosques too and by then, even the remaining Christians and animists couldn’t help. When a student is accused of blasphemy and a mob attacks them, that is not insurgency, that is criminality. You excuse one criminal behaviour and it becomes a norm.
If our security forces quell riots, wait for tempers to cool and go for perpetrators, the message will be out there that you cannot take laws into your own hands. Islamic clerics say there is blasphemy law, but a mob is not the judge of such matters, it continues because the secularity of the nation doesn’t come in with justice.
I have said it times without number that if Nigeria could stop a civil war in Liberia and Sierra Leone and keep peace in The Gambia, after bringing down a civil war on its own shores, who are mere murderers to stand against them?
Trump works on briefings. He is NOT a Christian. Unlike Nigerian leaders, you can’t point to a church that Trump attends on Sundays. His church is his politics and his politics is money. Everything else is huffing.
I don’t think Trump will deploy troops to Nigeria. Such an action will not work well for Christians, it will only endanger them. Because the moment America, in its emergent Christian state, takes sides in Africa’s most populous nation, that will be an invitation for all fundamentalists of the other faith to see Nigeria as a theatre of religious war.
Except America wants to completely finish what it started in Somalia, Sudan, the Congo and most recently in Libya, it will not put boots on the ground in Nigeria.
But, if the Nigerian ruining class continues with business as usual attitude, of course the long plan of recolonising Africa for its minerals and its other resources could begin in our motherland.
I hope that President Bola Tinubu, a Muslim married to a professing Christian pastor from a naturally integrated south, will wake up the security aparatchik in Nigeria, beyond just changing service chiefs. Nigeria must not fold its arms and let America use its territory for whatever agenda the Western world has for Africa.
It is obvious that flag independence was a huge mistake. If Africa grants the opportunity, it will be recolonised, and for ever. I saw video evidence of a new onslaught against the bush rats operating around Kaduna over the weekend. If that style continues, the forests of Sambisa or Owo would be so scorched that we will forget in months that there was insurgency here.
When that happen, we will stop singing Bob Marley’s song, Oh why can’t we roam,
This open country?’ Anything less, then we would have given our dog a bad name just to slaughter it. The ball is in Tinubu’s court.
