Those movie gangsters of New York are just as dreadful as the religious gangsters of northern Nigeria to whom those of us who call for a cultural revolution are seen as pathetic deviants – they want to “rumble” with us today for standing in their gangster ways. I remember that movie from my late childhood today because I'm a stranger to this new world of religious extremism, being unaware of our differences in those days we used to enjoy our movies and laugh together. I remember this today because our reactions to sensitive issues of and around our region, religion and future are being done with our brains turned upside down. We had evolved from those innocent kids who marked both Christmas and Eid to sophist adult advocates of religious differences. We had lost what used to bind us: love. That community in that living room comprised Muslims and Christians, Hausa and Igbo, Musa and Moses, Minority and Majority... It was the symbolic representation of Nigeria in my childhood, one that remains in my dreams. Sadly, these days, I’m now learning to understand the way of our Islamist Bronx.
We
used to be beautiful. We were a beautiful people until 1999 when an
individual from faraway Zamfara State suddenly pioneered a political
ideology that highlighted our differences; a flawed ideology that led to
the deaths of thousands of Nigerians who engaged one another to contest
the powers of their religions. We lost friends and families, many of
them, innocent people, in those explosions of madness over the
(il)legitimacy of shariah. Senator Ahmed Yarima, then the governor of
that part of Nigeria urgently in need of developments, ought to be
congratulated for introducing shariah legal system. Only that his was a
joke to which laughter was, and still is, impossible. Introducing a
system that exposes the poor to constant harassments of a taskforce
charged with penalising "legally" recognised criminals and sinners while
the major thieves of which Yarima himself is a member under-utilise
public trust and misuse public funds is not only a crime against
humanity, but an elitist oppression taken too far. The joke of our
reality is that these leaders who play God in the name of politics,
manipulating aspects of religion that portray them as defenders of
faith, are uncritically embraced by the same people they cheat.
Yarima
gets away with his tricks simply because he happens to a part of the
country in which people are hoodwinked to see politics as sort of
philanthropy, in which sentiments around religions and ethnicities and
regions are stoked to gain political influence and in which possible
resistances to their mismanagements of our resources have been smartly
stopped by their ability to convince the people that they actually are
just for Allah. Even when, in the name of the same Allah, they do
nothing to redeem the destitute “Almajirai” – those products of
institutional oppression whose oppressed nature is deliberately obscured
by the false belief that they are getting an education, whereas the
sociology of this century requires more for survivals and true
representations of Islam; they build mansions in Abuja and Paris and
London and Maryland and Dubai, while the same supporters are left to
wither under the thatch roofs of mud-built houses; they rush to India
and Germany on constant medical tourisms while ordinary malaria kills
their supporters; and while their children are studying for a certain
future at Red Brick, Ivy League and similar Euro-American-esque elite
schools, their unschooled and unemployed supporters till depleted lands
by hand at the countryside or rush to the cities to add to the
sufferings of the urban dwellers. In fact, I believe that in the midst
of the religious crises these gangster elite instigate, they flee to
their castles overseas to laugh at our folly. All in the name of Allah.
The
creators of this cycle of deceits and deliberate underdevelopments have
taken care to also create a brand of robots that perfectly fit their
intentions – countrymen who fail to see that Yarima’s latest move,
calling for legalisation of underage girls as constitutional adults on
grounds of marriage, is another cheap fraud aimed at establishing
himself as the undeserved “Yariman Musulunci” – Prince of Islam – which I
gather is now his appellation. In our rash of debates, we failed to
highlight that Yarima, who married an underage Egyptian, couldn’t do so
in the bride's country because the law there has outlawed child
marriage. And Egypt is over 80 % Muslim! Our abhorrence of child
marriage is simply to redeem northern Nigeria whose fortunes have been
destroyed by misrepresentations of Islam by these undesirable elements.
If some western countries set low age for marriage, that’s because it
poses no threat to their economy and healthcare. We are all stakeholders
in this; the Ulama can never impose their consensus on us unless we’re
consulted, not just because of the flexibility of this religious
stipulation, but because we are what they are not: our backgrounds in
the sciences are to be sought in the planning of a dependable society,
where the benefits of medicine, pharmacy, aviation, computer science,
geology, geography, physics, chemistry, biology, zoology, name it, are
maximally utilised by Muslims. Every honest thinker knows that this
Bronx of ours needs to implement policies to check our devastated human
capital, and discouraging child marriage, yes, constitutionally, is one
of these!
The
least we want from Yarima is to not bellow the fire of religious
tensions that have possessed us, especially the barely enlightened or
illiterate northerners who lack the ability to see through his
sophistries. This has been my frustration, I've been possessed by anger
and disappointments in which the manner this man manages to hoodwink
even the supposed intellectuals. I don't think God gave us brains, to
understand and decide, for no reason. Yarima is a dangerous man; I lost
two childhood friends in a crisis initiated by his political folly and
I'll forever be emotional and unequivocal in these condemnations of any
attempt at turning this potentially beautiful country into a fertile
ground of fascist theocracy. We're trying to build a sane Arewa, and yet
our people actually dance to this tune of exclusions. I do believe that
stopping people like Yarima from making it to the front rows of Islamic
advocacy is itself a form of Jihad. May God save us from us!
By Gimba Kakanda
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of LA2LAGOSREAD MORE: http://news.naij.com/42335.html
READ MORE: http://news.naij.com/42335.html
No comments:
Post a Comment