Describing the religious extremists in Northern Nigeria as aspiring to be like the Taliban in Afghanistan is almost an insult to the Taliban themselves. And this is no attempt to deodorise the Taliban’s terrorism, repression and atrocities.
At least they emerged from a history of resistance to Soviet occupation and a devastating civil war, initially as a movement of former fighters and religious students who claimed to be restoring order to a country ravaged by warlords.
That history explains their origins without justifying their crimes. But what comparable historical circumstances can these brutes in Arewa, with empty spaces between their ears, invoke to explain the barbarism that makes them dance on the graves of those murdered for their dissenting views on faith?
What we have isn’t just a demographic that has largely made a virtue of rejecting formal education and intellectual inquiry, but generations trapped in the consequent ignorance and poverty, and conditioned to regard questions about their religious beliefs as provocations. We have cultivated an extremist culture in which the most familiar language of dissent is violence, and where the inability to defend a belief through reason is compensated for by the willingness to terrorise those who challenge it.
This problem predates 1999, but the return to democracy that year gave these religious demagogues a political instrument to pursue their invidious agenda. They sought to create a state within the state, exploiting religious sentiments to acquire political power and impose their interpretation of faith on everyone else.
They have not completely succeeded, largely because Nigeria’s complex multicultural arrangement has provided some resistance to their ambitions. Unfortunately, we have also produced generations of political leaders who are terrified of the electoral consequences of confronting these extremists and their sympathisers.
As far back as 2017, in my essay Why I’m Afraid of Nigeria’s Break-up, I argued that Nigeria’s competing cultural hegemonies have paradoxically helped to hold the country together. The political competition among the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba and Igbo, alongside the broad religious divisions between the Muslim North and Christian South, has created a crude system of checks and balances that prevents any single cultural or religious bloc from exercising unrestricted domination.
I argued then that our multiculturalism was our most underestimated stabilising factor. It remains one of the reasons Nigeria has not completely degenerated into the kind of sectarian autocracy that religious extremists would gladly impose if there were no competing centres of power to restrain them.
We can blame politicians for our predicament, and rightly so. But our fellow citizens in the South are governed by the same political class. Millions of them also practise Islam, and many do so in societies where religious diversity and intellectual disagreements are part of everyday life.
The question we must ask ourselves is why the extremists among us have made religious disagreement a justification for violence. Why have we allowed a culture to flourish in which questioning a cleric, challenging a religious interpretation or expressing a contrary belief can become a death sentence?
Poverty does not compel anyone to become a terrorist. Neither does ignorance absolve anyone of responsibility for violence. And no religious doctrine gives anyone the right to terrorise another human being. If your most eloquent response to being challenged in a conversation about your sectarian beliefs is violence, there should be no iota of doubt that you are the one in the wrong.
Gimba Kakanda
