How Nigeria incurred the Boko Haram

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Tuesday, 28 June 2011

The Yoruba say when a kid falls, he or she looks ahead and walks on. But when an elder falls, he or she looks back to see the cause and remove it before going ahead. How did Nigeria incur the Boko Haram?

In 1979, the fathers of Nigeria’s constitution documented it that Nigeria must be a secular state. But ever since then, many Muslim and Christian leaders insisted that the country cannot be treated as secular.

They keep covering-up with the insistence that Nigeria is a multi-religious state, and it should be regarded and operated as such. They ignored the fact that secularity is declared in a democratic multi-religious state so as to maintain religious peace and harmony in the state.

Most unfortunately, many Islamic and Christian scholars join in depicting state secularity as implying a religion-less and godless state, rather than a state in which religion is regarded as personal and private to individuals or groups of individuals on a voluntary basis. That is why respectable and peace-loving Muslim leaders are helpless when groups, such as the Boko Haram, emerge. They see the contradiction between saying Islam means peace and submission to God and the destabilising and devastating effects of Islamic fundamentalists, such as the Boko Haram, but they are helpless, because you cannot eat your cake and have it. You either allow Nigeria to strictly apply the policy of state secularity that is enshrined in our constitution,  or be embarrassed by insurgents, such as the Boko Haram.

Obviously, what the Boko Haram is asking for is unconstitutional – to make Nigeria a Sharia state and eliminate Western education, which is more or less a universal heritage. Mohammed Khatami of Iran notes that: “We may reject many aspects of Western liberalism, but we cannot deny its many achievements. As we discern the faults and strong points of the West, we must also direct this form of critical thinking at ourselves.”

Some may think I  owe my critical thinking to Western liberalism. Partially so. I grew up naturally critical in my Iwere-Ile village, Oyo State. The Yoruba would say, for instance, that “someone’s scrotum was stepped-upon and you accused him of breaking Sango’s water pot, if you were the one affected, would you not have broken that of Ifa?” I wonder what can be a greater critical thinking!

I sincerely think that it is the two absolute and dogmatic religions of Islam and Christianity that are afraid of critical thinking. The perspective is this: Our religion says we should control the state and that is it. With that type of mindset and attitude, life is impossible in a religiously pluralistic society, such as Nigeria. There cannot be unity, peace, and progress. That explains the phenomenon of Boko Haram, pure and complex. To remove that complexity, Nigeria must respect and enforce the country’s secularity status.

I happen to know that the Baptist Church had some benefits here or there, when General Olusegun Obasanjo was the president, because he is a Baptist. A section of the Catholic Women Organisation (CWO) congratulated President Goodluck Jonathan, because the wife is a Catholic. The Islamic Women in Nigeria (IWN) always look out for how many Muslims and   Christians are in government to ensure that Muslims are  not shortchanged.

As I follow this scenario, I find it unhealthy for Nigeria’s socio-political and economic progress, because the concern is no longer good governance and Nigeria’s progress, but ethno-religious representation. At the end of the day, it is certain individuals who benefit.

I appeal to Muslim and Christian leaders, therefore, to be magnanimous and patriotic, to allow Nigeria to be strictly secular, as the constitution stipulates, so that being a Nigerian will require nothing else for privileges and opportunities that should be opened to all and sundry. That is the constitutional implication of state secularity. It has nothing to do with religionlessness  or godlessness. Otherwise, if one Boko Haram goes, another will emerge as a natural rule. We are insulting the intellectual integrity of the fathers of Nigeria’s 1979 Constitution and  subsequent ones, if we continue to circumvent the secularity clause. I believe we are already paying the price in Boko Haram.

Dr Pius Oyeniran Abioje, University of Ilorin.