The tragedy is not just that Isa Pantami did it. It is that he will get away with it, and with Buhari at the helm. It is not that he will get away with it. He has already. The bigot with fantasies of blood and death is our minister. Live with it.

He decides the lives of good Muslims and Christians as a steward of the constitution. Whereas the good Muslims and Christians don’t regard him as belonging to civilization, he will stand atop the dais and point the way.

Surely, rather than bring a coalition of both faiths against the man, even this matter is separating Muslims and Christians. It is bifurcating faith and tribe. The Muslims (even in the south) are, at their best, mute. The ones in the north, at their worst, are repackaging him. Even as we caught Pantami with his pants down, we are covering him from the eyes of shame.

Here facts do not matter. It does not matter that he wants unbelievers dead and gloats over it. It does not matter that he lionises Osama Bin Laden as a superior Muslim over him. Osama is the radical of his dreams. That means he might have wanted to stage a feast of human blood, a feat of pious massacre, to stand as vanguard with Ak47 and his troops behind, ramming triumphant into Christian and other non-Muslim yards and taking persons down, slaughter after slaughter. That makes the Sunday Achi incident a puny experiment.

That is why we say he is a sympathiser? But he is not a sympathiser. How can we call him a sympathiser when he hates to be a bystander? He was an imam when he and his mosque issued a Fatwa on Sunday Achi at the Tafawa Balewa University in Bauchi. To issue a fatwa is not an act of impulse, but calculation. Like that on writer Salman Rushdie. Between the fatwa and the execution takes, at least, hours. So he violated our law as a co-existent nation, capsized the constitution and ordered a lynch mob on a fellow citizen. Was he not grinning for fulfilling his vision of a sanitized theocracy? In any society, Isa Pantami would not be attending a meeting of the Federal Executive Council but languish in the court answering to charges of murder in the first and second degrees. Achi’s ghost, like Shakespeare’s Banquo’s, woke up a few weeks ago. It will walk the night and day beside Pantami whispering in his ears. But he thinks he is immune.

He is not only in the scented tyranny of an exalted office, he is part of the governing elite. He is sitting under the aegis of the presidency in the federal executive council whose minutes are anointed by the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. He will take a seat among administrators and politicians, when he should keep company with Bin Laden’s dregs. He will wear babaringa or western suits, when he should don the tunics of apocalyptic daydreamers. He is invoking language registers like development and unity in a lie since his comfort zone consists of words like “kill” and “eliminate” and “burn”.

For those who say he has repented, let them look for someone lame to convince. He first denied and attacked a newspaper. A man of repentance would show remorse, not aggression. He should show proof and not take us for fools. He seemed to recant in his statement, but he did not seem to have regretted it. He did not condemn what he said. He merely excused them, even justified them. The statement was written with the cunning of zealot and the artifice of a Pharisee.  He was caught, and said he was too young. Too young when he was past voting age? Young when he was old enough to be a senator or minister or CEO of a company? He was not 18. He was in his 30’s, older than when Gowon became head of state.

It was even alleged that he beamed a programme of his ministry on a dedicated Islamic channel. Is that true? It is like Osinbajo beaming the Anchor Borrowers programme on Dove TV.

Between when he grinned over a lynch mob and roared his will to attack Shendam, and now, what has he done to show a change of heart? No evidence. We cannot trust leadership on speculation. But facts have meant nothing in this matter.

It has meant nothing to the presidency, hence Garba Shehu’s glib remarks. He wrote to praise him, not to upbraid him. He wrote to accuse critics, rather than face the facts. He wrote to defend a bigot, not calm a bewildered nation. He wrote to tell Nigerians to go to hell.

Some have said the security agents knew about the facts but shielded him. The senate, at the time of writing, has not said it had any facts. That is why we must worry. The senators are paid to research, and dig. The security agents are paid to do same, and the man fell through the cracks? Some said he did not. Garba Shehu did not address this. But as for the secret service, they have failed too many times to track bandits and militants, and allowed them to roam the country with their human loot without information. So, there is no incompetence they cannot exhibit.

Persons like Pantami will continue to erupt and defy, and get away with murder. Men like Pantami are the most dangerous bigots. They go to school, speak like the highbrow, learn a lot of western theories about liberalism, put on a veneer of urbane society. They embrace the ideas of democrats like Locke and Rousseau and parrot the grand theories of civilization. But their acts mock their learning. Some of the great theories of racism came from men who learned and traveled. Trump has a master’s degree. Such men read to reinforce their prejudices.

Pantami has been to the UK, and has lived and enjoyed the trappings of western civilization. He might even enjoyed their movies. But these beauties are the seed bed of his hate. He loathes himself for loving them. After all, he has a PHD, and he learned a technology steeped in western inventiveness. Like in Romeo and Juliet, he says in his heart, “my only love sprung from my only hate.”

Pantami is afraid of modernity, a zealot with fear in his eyes. Hence he loves Bin Laden. But he is the hypocrite. He feeds on modernity so he could suffocate it. Sane societies heal themselves by providing a reckoning for them with public disgrace. They resign, or are fired. They slouch out of sight, end up in jail or out of the limelight. Younger ones imbibe from the public ignominy the lesson that actions have consequences. But with Pantami off the hook, his legacy is clear: Inspire hate, grin over a lynch mob and you can become a minister of Nigeria.

From being a model zealot, this administration is making him into a role model for future leaders.

 

Keeping schools safe

The kidnap tales from Kaduna schools show that the state is showing naivety in the face of danger. Why are schools still left open for the marauders? Is it not time to change the model of security? When the matter was hitting its fatal stride, Sokoto State Governor Aminu Tambuwal developed a strategy. For public schools he first merged them, so the ones close to borders were properly monitored and guarded. Then he decided later that boarding was out of sync with reality. Now they have day schools, redesigned to make students attend schools close to their homes. It is better to be safe than sorry. Any school that is vulnerable should not be open.

This is no time for risk taking. Lives are more important than policy.

Credit: Sam Omatseye