In a presentation elsewhere, I summed up my great country Nigeria in the following words: From its inception as an independent nation, Nigeria has remained a volatile country. Home to over two hundred million people……..Highly resourced, but endemically corrupt, a combination of serious governance missteps, series of military coups, years of maladministration, a culture of violence, has seriously slowed down what should have been one of the greatest nations on earth. It has left its people vulnerable to poverty, disease, violence and death. Here is the enigma: Amidst all of this, in 2014, The World Value Survey ranked Nigerians the happiest people on earth.
Today, a combination of local and global factors of terrorism have further pushed the country to the precipice. After well over ten years of battling Boko Haram, insurgency, banditry, and ethno-religious violence, our weary citizens are absorbed in self-doubt, their natural happiness clouded by deep despair. Daily news of abductions, armed robberies, kidnapping for ransom, murders and assassinations of our innocent citizens persist and citizens have become inured to these. Our sacred spaces have become killing grounds. Hundreds of worshippers have been murdered in mosques and churches across the country. In response, much of the world shrugs its shoulders and moves on. The reasons are understandable. The world is faced with existential threats to our collective survival and nations are busy mending their own fragile boundaries. Most of Africa’s injuries are self-inflicted, largely by a corrupt elite with unrestrained greed, which mistakes personal comfort for governance. Religious extremists have found in Africa, fertile grounds for the growth of their destructive doctrines.
Against this background, I applaud the foresight of the organisers of this conference, the R20 International Summit of Religious Leaders, ahead of the G20 Summit scheduled to hold here in Bali this month. It is commendable that you have had the foresight to attempt to shine a moral touch on the G20 countries and hopefully to make a case for the need for leaders of religion to rally around, so that they can roll back the threats posed by those men and women who continue to use religion as a means of inflicting cruelty and slowing down human progress. I specifically commend the goal of the conference, which according to you is to, among other things: to prevent the weaponisation of identity and combat the spread of hatred. Today, hatred feeds on the weaponisation of identity, marginalises the other, and creates the conditions for their dehumanisation, and inevitably takes us down the dark paths that justify violence and murder in God’s name. My intention here is to briefly speak to the issues, as they concern my personal experience in my great country, Nigeria, which, like your own country, is host to the greatest number of Muslims outside the Middle East.
The Nigerian story of the weaponisation of religion has been characterised by the manipulation of historical narratives between Christians and Muslims, and the setting of ethnic groups against each other over the years. Most Muslims in northern Nigeria have continued to re-echo sentiments of the old caliphate (1804-1903), which views Christianity as a foreign religion that is tied to colonialism. This has fed from a false notion that since Islam preceded Christianity into the space now known as Nigeria by hundreds of years, it had become an indigenous religion. The truth is that, of course, Islam itself originated from the Arab peninsula. Either way, the reality is that an independent Nigeria is supposed to be home to all citizens, irrespective of ethnicity or religion.
Sadly, rather than uphold the principles of equal citizenship as enshrined in the Constitution, the political elite continues to exploit religious sentiments and the further division of our people, while creating windows for religious extremists to exploit. Discrimination in the allocation of opportunities, whereby governors use state resources to favour one religious group against the other, serves to create a false sense among the favoured group that politicians can be relied upon to defend its religion.
Christians, in most of the northern states of Nigeria, feel quite discriminated against in many areas of public life. Despite the provisions of the Constitution, Christian education is not being taught in public schools in most of the states. Certificates for land to build churches are denied and constantly, Christians find their churches often earmarked for destruction on flimsy excuses. Mission schools were taken over from them without adequate negotiation and compensation. At the local level, Christian children who are indigenous to the states have no access to state scholarships and the graduates find themselves discriminated against in employment. The educational system does not promote national cohesion because students are not exposed to the teachings and cultures of faiths other than their own. The result is that generations of young citizens grow up with suspicion and fear of one another.
Outside Northern Nigeria, the situation is different. In the South-West of the country, where this a significant percentage of Muslims, there is hardly any incident of violence in the name of religion. United by very strong cultural threads, the Yoruba intermarry and live together rather peacefully. Their love for education has ensured that they do not carry the excess baggage of confusion, miseducation and ignorance that have denied Muslim children education in Northern Nigeria, on the grounds that Western education is a danger to Islam. Little wonder, Boko Haram has emerged from the rubble of this culture of fear of Western education from the womb of Islam in Northern Nigeria. In the West, the teaching of religion is considered a part of the education syllabus.
The South-East of Nigeria has no significant Muslim presence. Even at that, the Muslim population in these areas still love Western education and do send their children to school. Across the country, I can speak authoritatively for the Catholic Church and its attitude to education. It makes adequate provision for the teaching of Islam where necessary, because we have a tradition of often hiring and paying Islamic teachers as part of the staff. The culprit in all of this is the political and religious elite in Northern Nigeria, which continues to treat Christianity with suspicion. No matter how much we deny these facts, if we do not confront the realities, even if they are imagined, it will be impossible to close the portals through which ignorant youth continue to perpetrate violence. Rather than create friendships early in life at school, conditions of self-doubt, fear, and anxiety persist among children of diverse faiths. Without the deliberate political will to address these issues by listening to grievances rather than accusations, the weaponisation of religion will continue to destroy the foundation of our common citizenship.
Compounding this structural persecution of Christians in Northern Nigeria, we have witnessed a growing culture of overt violence in the name of Islam, spanning over the last decades. For over thirty years now, Nigeria has been home to the worst form of violence on two levels. First, is intra-religious violence; that is, violence targeting those among Muslim groups within Islam, on the grounds of differences in the practice of the religion. Within Islam, there has been violence among groups as Shi’ites, Izala, Boko Haram, ISWAP and a few others. The largely Sunni and Tijanniya brotherhoods have been more accommodating, while also being victims of violence. Second is the violence by Muslim extremists that directly target Christians or their infrastructure, such as churches, presbyteries, convents, schools, health facilities and even social infrastructure for public use, such as pastoral centres.
This violence has been a slow burning candle over the years, treated as localised. Now, violence by Islamic extremists has smouldered into an inferno. It is literally impossible to keep track and count of the culture of violence that has consumed the nation. Over the years, a culture of impunity has grown with Muslim extremists simply referred to by government as miscreants or defined as those who do not represent the religion of Islam. With no punishment and consequences for their actions, with governments not taking responsibility for destroyed businesses and places of worship of Christians, these so-called miscreants have become emboldened, they operate beyond the law, and continue to create the impression that they are holy warriors for God. Silence on the part of those who are in authority could be taken as subtle endorsement.
We suffered this fate most recently in my Diocese of Sokoto in the aftermath of the brutal mob-killing of one Ms Deborah Samuel, a young Christian student accused of blasphemy and publicly murdered on campus on 13th of May by her fellow Muslim students, for having complained about the forced introduction of religion into an academic study group for her class. Far from universal condemnation of this horrific act, many Islamist extremists and their Imams applauded the murder, claiming it was justified, and calling for additional violence against any who might ask for legal justice against the perpetrators. This happened in spite of the condemnation of the act first by the governor of the state, the Sultan of Sokoto, and my humble self. This is one instance in which there is a clear conflict between the protections guaranteed by the Constitution and the claims made by criminals who hide under the wings of religion. The taking of any human life, no matter the motivation, unless sanctioned by a competent court of law, is a punishable offence. When the state fails to do this, it merely postpones the evil day.
The rise in religious extremism has further opened up new levels of terrorist activities across our country but largely within Northern Nigeria. It has been difficult to label these criminals, but it is not enough to say that they are misguided Muslims or that they have not left Muslims alone. This raises the urgency of very sober and heart soul searching among the Muslim community, in terms of how their faith and kinsmen and women have had their identities hijacked. While we have had cases of the abductions of very visible Muslim clerics in parts of the North-East and North-West, the abductions of senior Christian church men have been far more pronounced, targeted and vicious.
In the course of all this, in my Diocese of Sokoto, we have had our own challenges in only one of the four states that make up the Diocese. In the southern part of Katsina State, we have had four of our priests kidnapped in one year; one was killed and the others were held for between two weeks and 33 days. Two of my Catechists and over twenty of my lay faithful have been kidnapped within the same area. Across the country, the number of kidnapped priests and religious person is close to a hundred. A total within the entire Christian communities spread across the country, including school children, will be in the thousands. We have witnessed some of the worst form of brutality in four of the states that make up our Diocese (Katsina, Kebbi, Sokoto and Zamfara). Thousands of villagers have been brutally murdered in their homes, in the markets and on the highways. These are communities with no Christian presence. At this stage, we are witnessing a country that is on freefall, where life – any life – has become nasty, brutish and short. This is the violence which we face today, one which degrades us all and robs us of our fundamental dignity as human beings, whether as Christians or Muslims.
In conclusion let me make a few particular and then general comments about the way forward as I see it for my country, other parts of Africa and the world. It should be clear from what I have tried to say that our problems are two-fold: First, is the fate of Christians in Nigeria and second, is the widespread violence in the name of Islam that has consumed the country, irrespective of social class, religion or ethnicity. It is a wakeup call. I wish to make the following appeals, locally and internationally.
First, for us in Africa, in general, but Nigeria, in particular, the weak infrastructure of the state has predisposed our public office holders to corruption on a truly monumental scale. Good governance has failed and human survival has become a casualty. Rather, governance is seen as state capture, whereby politicians share patronage on the basis of their cynical exploitation of the fault lines of religion or ethnicity. Nepotism and favouritism based on religion, region, social class or ethnicity have become weapons of choice which, in turn, deepen a feeling of alienation. In Africa, when politicians present themselves as champions of their ethnicities or religions, naturally, their supporters expect that the rewards of winning an election would mean power to their base alone. This exploitation undermines democracy and imperils the future of our people.
Second, governments should embrace a culture of constitutionalism, insisting on the supremacy of their national constitutions, given that we are in democracies and not theocracies. Religious and cultural beliefs should be sources of law but not the law in themselves, no matter the claims. In a democracy and under a constitution, innocent citizens cannot lose their lives due to cultural or religious claims that are contrary to the laws of natural justice, or subjected with impunity to spurious religious claims. So, as we see in Nigeria and elsewhere, no citizen should have the right to take the life of another or cause injury on grounds of any sort of divine claim. Decisive punishments must be meted out to those who kill in the name of faith! Religious leaders of the faith being used must put pressure on their states to follow the rule of law and not be afraid of being targeted by extremists. Silence by religious leaders can send out the wrong signal.
Third, it should be clear to us by now that all citizens are at risk in the hands of these terrorists who, first, use ethnicity or religion to destroy humanity. Whether they are Boko Haram, ISIS, or other ethnically or racially based groups, we must all stand together to insist that injury to one is injury to all. We must all accept that we are all citizens of one human nation, that no religion or ethnic group is superior to the other. Those who govern us must have the courage to stand firm.
Fourthly, a comprehensive, integrated programme of Education remains the cure for all forms of extremisms. It is not enough for leaders of faith to continue to engage in mere moral rhetoric or meaningless “dialogue” designed to appease politicians while leaving our people as victims by refusing to address the failure of governments. As I have said in Nigeria and elsewhere, the first victims of religiously inspired violence by extremists are always their own people. In today’s world, these victims are so often Muslims. In Northern Nigeria, majority of those who have died in the hands of Boko Haram, ISWAP, bandits or kidnappers have been Muslims. In the ISIS war in Iraq, despite the unacceptable brutality against the Christian minority, especially the Yazidis, the majority of victims, in the end, were Muslims. This should sound the alarm that it is not just about religion but also our common humanity. We must admit that even if mass killings of people of faith may not be an overt state policy, still we cannot ignore situations where there are people in the highest levels of government whose inaction and impunity clearly align with hidden genocidal intentions.
Beyond conferences, we must develop a coherent programme of lessons and agreed principles that we can learn and accept from one another. This cancer of the weaponisation of religion threatens us all. History shows us that empires and emperors have had their day. In the form we knew them, they are gone for good. The world will always be full of men and women with grand delusions about how they have been divinely sent to create a new world at the cost of human blood. However, we must work hard to cure them of their delusions by keeping them out of circulation by legal means. Here, developing nations must do more than merely append their signatures to international laws that protect human rights. Religious bodies, in collaboration with local and international civil society groups, must work together to ensure a fairer world for all.
Weaponising identity through dubious and false religious and ethnic triumphalism, as the world has seen with apartheid, racism, Nazism and only recently, the tragedy in Rwanda, has no future. The continued weaponisation of identities in plural societies will only make progress impossible, national cohesion elusive and development a dream deferred. Leaders of world religions must unite in the face of the forces of secularism and extremism. There is an inconvenient truth that must serve as a lesson for all believers in universal and organised religions. More and more people are leaving the faiths, some are becoming atheists because we have offered them a face of God that is, by our actions of weaponising religion, clearly ugly, inhuman and unjust. Our silence in moments of severe rupture of our society in the name of our religion offers the greatest impetus for extremism. As religious leaders, we must continue in prayer and solidarity to end religious extremism and offer the world a badly needed moral compass for a peaceful and just world.
*This is the text of a presentation delivered at the G20 RELIGION FORUM (R20), International Summit of Religious Leaders held between 2-3 November at the Grand Hyatt Hotel, Bali, Indonesia.
Credit: Matthew Hassan Kukah