Pontificating about Boko Haram by a retreating senator is not unlike the proverbial preaching of a woman: you are not surprised that the session isn’t done well; you are surprised that it is attempted at all. And with such disappointing results.
And for good measure, while for some memory might have held the door wide open, for Senator David Mark, its lapse—and what a Freudian slip of a lapse it was—had tightly shut it, blocking out everything, including, as it were, some bit of self-knowledge. It all came out at the Senate Retreat in Uyo last week, where the Senate President embarrassingly forgot that he was a Northerner. Mark was later to deny it. But it could only have been after discarding his regional identity and forsaking the ranks of Northern leaders that Mark could admonish them thus: I call on the Northern elders that they should come out frankly and they should assist if they are in the position. But if they don’t, they will also break, he said. The elders in the North,
i also ask, can they really stop this menace? and if they cannot, let them say so. Because the impression at the moment is that there are some groups of elders in the North who can stop it. There are groups of elders who know what is happening.
Clearly, Mark didn’t seem to be very sure of what he was saying; because almost immediately he added: My candid opinion is that they cannot stop it, and they don’t know what is happening. If they were involved at all at some time, they are now completely out of control right now as we speak. But if they are, I think it is proper that they come out because Nigeria has to be one for Northern Nigeria to exist.
Now, if matters are really out of their control, how can these same leaders be called upon to help the situation?
And later in his attempt to prove his Northern credentials, Mark repeated the half-hearted, lukewarm charge against the elders. “Some of the Northern leaders are pretending that they know the Boko Haram leaders, and that they can talk to them. I don’t believe they know them; and if they don’t know them, they should not pretend that they know them, he said.
But if Mark knew that they didn’t know and were only pretending, how could he and others be blaming them for what was happening? And now that he had accepted and declared that he is a Northern leader, is he by any chance also pretending along with them? Or are there some particular Northern leaders who are, or who by definition should be, mentors of the Boko Haram phenomenon? Was the Senate president in effect betraying an inner conviction the Boko Haram was the creation, responsibility and therefore ultimately thee burden of only Muslim Northern leaders; and that was why he could refer to Northern leaders as they before he would think of the implications? When he finally did, he retracted.
And as Professor Ango Abdullahi pointed out, Mark is not just one among Northern leaders; he is in fact the Northern leader, second only to Vice President Mohammed Namadi Sambo. The North expects from him that he will be part of its political arsenal in fighting to get it its rights, in struggling to secure its environment, in committing himself to the welfare of its peoples and seeing to the beneficial development of its resources and attaining communal harmony. It is not acceptable indeed that Senator David Mark should look at any problem of the North from the outside as if he expected some demons or angels to drop out of the sky to set Northern matters aright.
It is clear that a lot of pain and suffering are caused Christians in Nigeria today, but they are not alone in the physical suffering, as a result of the original violence or as a result of the actions of those supposed to keep the peace; and there is the anguish that non-Christians feel for the plight of Christians. And, no doubt, Christians have exhibited forbearance to an uncommonly high degree; but that is just as it should be. If it had been otherwise they would have lost the moral high ground and would have been indistinguishable from their tormentors. But whatever it is, it has always been shared pain, undiminished even by the deliberately provocative nature of laying the complaint by some Christian leaders. This, however, is not to say this is a Muslim or Northern problem; it is a Nigerian problem.
This attitude unintentionally shown by Mark must just change, irrespective of whether it is the result of religious exclusivity, ethnic or zonal non-inclusivity, plain politics at expense of region or the result of some other parochialism. Such an attitude has been at the root of the paralysis and general wait-and-see attitude adopted by leaders at various levels; and this is simply unacceptable.
Mark also came out to defend what he said concerning violence and reprisal, saying he had no regrets preaching against the violence in his intervention to stem the spate of the vengeance. Addressing media men at the end of the retreat in Uyo, Mark said, I know it is painful to tell people not to resort to vengeance, but I will continue to preach against vengeance because that is what Christianity teaches. We don’t want people to take the law into their hands. I will continue to preach forgiveness and ask people to leave vengeance to God. But that was not exactly what Mark said in his remarks at the beginning of the retreat. Commenting on the spate of reprisals that followed the bombing of churches, Mark was not exactly preaching forgiveness; he was more of wondering for how long Christian patience would last. If things are allowed to go on like this, it will encourage disunity and religious war because there is a limit to patience. Christian preachers have been appealing, and I have been almost at the forefront of appealing to Christians brothers/Sister that they should not go for vengeance, Mark said. but how long will the people continue to listen to us; because if a bishop consistently in his preaching to his congregation, yes God said, ‘Vengeance is mine;’ yes we all hear that, but if we have no church anymore to reach out, if he wakes up in the morning, where will he preach? So, there is a limit to the patience that preachers will have to tell their people. All this brings us to the issue of those who have in the past counselled caution and urged aggrieved Christians not to retaliate. But the question is: retaliate against whom? It was not as if the Muslim community in Nigeria had got together, planned and attacked Christians. These attacks are carried out by Boko Haram or by those who hide under it name and place bombs in churches and other places. They alone were responsible who did it: no one could be made vicariously liable because he shared religion, ethnicity or neighbourhood with the perpetrators, or he simply happened to be Muslim and near Gonin Gora at the wrong time. This certainly is not a good outing for the president of the Senate; and the only good point he seemed to have made in the entirety of his intervention was to advocate the licensing of Islamic preachers; and this should certainly be done, but contrary to what he suggested, it shouldn’t be done by the government, because it will be the cause of greater future grief, but by those Mark called good Islamic scholars, after the government has done its part.
No doubt, the Ulama must take a large part of the blame for what has gone wrong, and they must bear the burden of putting the House of Islam back in order. And this is what we must all rise up in unison to do and help achieve. As Abraham Lincoln said, in a not so much dissimilar moment in America’s history, we must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly hang separately; or, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in that event, perish together as fools.