WHO WILL PROTECT NIGERIA’S NORTHERN CHRISTIANS?
The instinctive reaction to the story by Douglas Murray in the Spectator, which prides itself as the world’s oldest Magazine published in English, is to dismiss it as the product of someone who wrote about a subject in which he is inadequately schooled. Yet, this reaction would be falling into a trap since the hallmark of propaganda includes a sublimity that engenders indifference to lies being told by making excuses for the peddlers of lies by imbuing them with ignorance.
It is therefore imperative that the lies, mischiefs and intent of Murray and his employers are exposed to make sure they stop serving up lies to the world and to their readers. In this particular instance, the story is replete with enough inaccuracies to raise suspicions as to whether the journalist as much as bothered to rouse from his bed before concocting the story. The first indication that gave Murray away as being out of his depth was his feeble attempt in creating a distinction that does not exist for Nigerians. He wrote of Christians of northern Nigeria as if they belong to a different faith from Nigerians in other parts of the country. This is an irresponsible move at creating a new division when the country is striving to unite the diversities of its population.
The report stopped short of claiming that the unfortunate killings by herdsmen were an hourly occurrence. It also continued the uninformed tradition of singling out victims of such attacks as only Christians. Had Murray as much as done some online research, he would have seen that the herdsmen have also killed people in predominantly Muslim Zamfara State, when they clashed with farmers or are on reprisal over cattle rustling. Even the picture that accompanied the story on the Spectator’s site sufficiently depicted the ignorance of the magazine and its staff because several girls were wearing hijabs in the Christian dominated image. This experienced reporter also managed to ignore the magnitude of the problem that transhumance constitute for the West African sub-region where itinerant herdsmen from Burkina Faso spread their reign of terror across the entire region. This is a problem that has been identified as having environmental and climatic dimensions as the herders increasingly foray further south and under pressure to claim land amid urban sprawl that has altered their way of life.
As unbelievable as it sounds, this report actually canvassed, albeit covertly, for “Christians” to be armed as if no lesson has been learnt from the anomie in Libya where there are four firearms per citizen or in the United States where gun violence has killed more people than the rampaging herders ever killed in a year.
This further made the inclusion of last month’s erroneous bombardment of an IDPs’ camp in the story regrettable. Even with the more advanced gadgetory deployed by the US and other western nations, cases of green-on-green are not uncommon with coalition forces sometimes bombing hospitals or schools.
Once he ignored issues as fundamental as these, the other serial fallacies were no longer surprising. For instance, he attributed the IDPs camps filled with persons that fled the Boko Haram crisis as the product of the herders/farmers clashes. Possibly because Murray is one of their neocon journalists that helped propagate lies used as cover for certain countries to airdrop weapons on so-called Libyan rebels in the Gaddafi era, he hallucinated and saw military aircraft dropping supplies to Fulani herdsmen and to Boko Haram. He will do well to find out what country’s aircraft were caught by Cameroonian authorities dropping supplies to terrorists.
Philip Agbese, United Kingdom