Kaduna’s troubled waters

The pathetic drama around the comments of Dr Obadiah Mailafia, and subsequent developments represent another page in a script being written by many authors with the blood and tears of largely helpless villagers in parts of Kaduna State. The public domain has been clustered by hate, noise and outlandish tales manufactured by people too far removed from vulnerable communities. Neutral grounds are virtually non-existent. Elite ensconced far away in Kaduna, Abuja, some other northern cities and parts of the south of the country stoke dangerous fires while local villagers stay awake at night waiting to be attacked, or planning attacks. God is invoked to raise passions that seek to do what God condemns. Whole generations grow on injustices and atrocities that must be righted and redressed. Hate and fear have become the largest growth industry in an area that will qualify as one of the poorest in Nigeria.

How do you create peace without peacemakers? Every potential peacemaker is an active combatant. Geography and history have combined to create a cocktail of a community that can neither distance itself from a past basically shaped by violence, nor create a new basis of existence. It is not that the region has been frozen in time and space. In the last four decades, Southern Kaduna had undergone extensive geo-political transformation largely targeted at redressing perceived historical and cultural injustices. These have made the region neither richer nor more peaceful. Every solution appeared to have been built on a problem. The region is blessed with plenty of land and culture, yet they have become sources of conflict rather than progress. There have been efforts to build institutions and create employment opportunities within the region by many governments. Yet, this same period has witnessed some of the worst atrocities by communities against each other. Without peace, this region can only retrogress.

Now, this region faces its worst possible nightmare: a conflict that will not just take a few hundred lives and then rest until the next fight. This time, the enemy can neither be defeated nor persuaded to go away because its grievance is embedded in the foundations of every town, village and individual. Villagers see danger in every stranger or neighbour, and they hear of grand schemes to exterminate them, appropriate their lands or convert them into another religion. Hundreds of military personnel are being deployed to the region, but they cannot stop an enemy who lives in hearts, in remote villages with his weapons and grievances. The one who attacks is the enemy. When you attack, you are defending yourself. The nature of this vicious circle is lost in the generic term, ‘Southern Kaduna Killings’. Mainstream media makes huge capital from this tragedy. Politicians, including those who do theirs in the name of God, make capital out of the fear and helplessness of a million villagers mourning relations or waiting for worse. There are many groups here who are versed in stoking fires, and none that knows how to put them out.

It is possible to stop the current killings in the short term and lay the foundations of sustainable peace in this region, even if some steps have become intensely unpopular with some champions of the conflict. First, it is impossible to isolate the trigger to the current conflict from the killings that have made many Hausa-Fulani communities in Kaduna, Katsina, Zamfara and many other parts of the North West helpless victims of the evil on two wheels and an AK47 strapped on his shoulders. Not all Fulanis are bandits, but, as many communities have found out earlier, you play into the hands of Fulani bandits when you fight back. Many Fulanis are also victims, but the bandit feeds on the myth that he protects ‘his own’. A few months ago, communities in this region joined the long list of communities that were victimised twice: initially as victims, then again as victims of revenge for the temerity to stand up. It is important that these communities exercise their rights to be protected by those with responsibility to protect them, the same way millions are doing in the north. They are not alone suffering the limitations of this administration, so it is vital that they close gaps between them and design local strategies that protect themselves.

Second, so long as the communities sustain their current hostile posture towards each other, they will continue to play into the hands of those who attack and retreat, leaving them to search for enemies among neighbours. No community will sit idly to be exterminated, but this region is in danger of turning every villager into an armed fighter or a victim. Before long, the large number of boots on the ground, the State and federal governments will join the long list of enemies involved in ‘genocide’ against particular groups because they have been unable to stop the killings. How much isolation and hostility targeted inwards can the communities of southern Kaduna stand?

Three, the economic poverty of the region is surpassed only by poverty in its leadership. Today, Southern Kaduna Peoples Union (SOKAPU) has supplanted powerful ethnic associations, political and other elite and traditional rulers among the non-Muslim communities. It has subsumed the awesome powers of the Church in leading communities on matters of politics and co-existence. The non-Hausa/Fulani Christian elite of the region is deeply divided, and much of it is cowed by aggressive insistence that only militant narratives should be heard. External champions are sniffing around to make capital from people they will not help with jobs or investments. SOKAPU smells only of enemies and collaborators. An influential organisation that should be deeply involved in the search for peace is laboured by short-sightedness that creates the impression that southern Kaduna belongs to particular groups and faith, or can be made into one; conflating faith and partisanship into damaging political isolation; and a false consciousness that gives it the assurance that it alone represents the interests of Christian communities.

The Hausa-Fulani Muslim community’s local leadership is virtually non-existent, and its cause has not been taken up by leadership of its faith and kins in the North or Nigeria. It has found it difficult to adjust to the status of a political minority and a statistical majority. It cannot move beyond the horrors of past mass killings in Zangon Kataf, Zonkwa, Unguwar Rimi, Kafanchan and other places that were homes to their ancestors, yet it cannot seem to get the justice it feels it deserves. Tragically, it now has a solid victim mentality, the type that ties a community with a past and creates a mentality that seeks only restitution. It seeks to match SOKAPU in style and substance, but it lacks the latter‘s extensive, if opportunistic armour and network. It now has to answer for every killing that neighbours cannot pin on elusive killers, and it is being made to fight someone else’s battles.

The combative character of Governor Nasir el-Rufai may have had its uses, but on this issue, it merely fits the bill for groups that want to perpetuate the narrative of a people under attack without sympathy or protection from their government. It is difficult to fault the steps the government of Kaduna State has taken in Chikun and Kajuru LGAs, particularly the efforts to get communities to own and drive the processes that create and sustain peace. A governor who never leaves the trenches should know that adversaries will open up new fronts, and stretch him too thin and too wide to win the war. Long before other northern governors knew what ravaged villages looked like and the limited value of the deployment of policemen and the military in mitigating threats, el-Rufai had become a veteran from just one LGA, Birnin Gwari. In this instance, he needs to out-flank those who benefit from these killings by exploring other options to build peace.

With all his bravado, el-Rufai cannot be indifferent to efforts that seek to show him as incompetent in managing crises, and indifferent to the plight of a whole section of the population under his trust. This governor who is passionate about demolition pasts and creating his own versions of the future will be judged badly by history if he does not explore all avenues to help communities build bridges; learn to distinguish between false prophets and genuine saviours; and recognise the reality that hostility alone merely breeds more hostility. He must rise above the fray, and resist the temptation to exchange blows with minions who will write his story with more blood long after he leaves. Kaduna State is too important to be left to opportunists and adventurers to continue to exploit.