POLITICIZATION OF RELIGION AND THE ORIGINS OF FUNDAMENTALISMS IN NIGERIA
(Part 3 of 3)
By
S. ’Jide Komolafe
Toward the Third Republic: The Babangida Era, 1985-1993
Look at the OIC meeting which Christians were shouting and bragging that it should not take place, was it not done?. . . . Fellow Muslims, what do we want Babangida to do for us? Whatsoever we asked him, he has done it for us. He stood firm [on] Islam [being] preached in this nation, Nigeria; therefore we must support him.[65]
Babangida inherited the old and common goal of both Christianity and Islam; in particular, the political exploitation of religion to control the state. Although a Muslim and northerner, Babangida appeared less concerned with the clash of incompatible religious interests. Instead, he showed himself to be a reformist with a mandate to return the country to civilian rule. The Third Republic, according to his plan, would be a departure from the “old party alliances and patronage networks” that corrupted Nigeria’s First and Second Republics. Instead, it would operate under a new “political class” that “would emerge with a more contemporary and sophisticated political culture.”[66]
At first, he seemed to be serious, banning from partisan politics all former senior-ranking politicians going back to the First Republic. This, indeed, was a false start for Babangida concealed a great deal. He was “an evil genius—affable and cunning . . . a master of double-speak, deceit, and ambiguity.”[67] His insight became twisted into religion so that he became the very flagship of northern Islamic interests. The distinctive characteristic of his regime was the rejuvenation of Islam as the only viable political force for Nigeria. It should not be too surprising, therefore, that he dismantled the machinery of civil society by annulling, on June 12, 1993, the election results that would have installed Moshood Abiola as president of Nigeria’s Third Republic.[68] Although acclaimed as the undisputed winner of the presidential election, one of Abiola’s “sins” was being a southerner whose type of Islam was at variance with the north’s vision of “true Islam.”
The scandal of Babangida’s regime, therefore, was the uncanny ambivalence of his so-called “directed democracy.” This involved the governing of Nigeria under responsibility or deference to one group, the Muslim north. In view of these many contradictions, any claim to authenticity and fairness in religious matters by Babangida, is self-conceiting. For during Babangida’s tenure, Islam shored up the claims of the Muslim north to sustain a monopoly on power and political dominion. We only have to take a brief look at some of his activities to see that his regime harmed the Nigerian politico-religious psyche more than any before it.
Nigeria and the Organization of the Islamic
Conference (OIC)
My analysis at this point of the politicization of Christianity does have significance for understanding the violence of the late 1980s and beyond. So far, I have stressed that the issues of Sharia and secularism have provided substantive context for Christian-Muslim conflicts. Yet, given the fact that both had been brewing for decades, the controversial way by which Babangida pushed Nigeria into a full membership of the OIC in 1986 was a radical exacerbation of an already volatile religious environment.
Nigeria’s association with the OIC dates back to 1969 when the country was first invited to attend the meeting of the then four-year old Islamic organization. The decisive purpose of the organization was to propagate Islam and acquaint the rest of the world with the faith, its issues and aspirations. However, the position espoused by all pre-Babangida governments was that of an observer status, a possible compromise that was acceptable to most Nigerians.
Many theories have attempted to explain why “Babangida, like a thief in the night, had handed his country to the OIC.” These have remained mere speculative conjectures. The consensus, however, is the surreptitious way by which Babangida actualized his plan without the knowledge of his deputy, Commodore Ebitu Ukiwe, the Ministry of External Affairs, as well as top functionaries within his so-called Armed Forces Ruling Council (AFRC).[69]
True to his controversial nature, Babangida denied any substantive claim to a systematic Islamization of Nigeria. Instead he formulated his arguments around the economic significance of upgrading the Islamic credentials of Nigeria to international standard. “Despite its name,” he declares, “member nations of the OIC are distinguished more by their identity as third world nations than by religious affinities. Its business is strictly international cooperation and the struggle for economic development and self-reliance.”[70]
The Christians and non-Muslims could not be persuaded otherwise. To them the government’s action demonstrated that Islamization was a political prerogative and as such the state cannot be trusted in matters of moral truth and civility. Even more unsettling for the Christian community was Babangida’s indifference to the role of the state as a fulcrum for balancing competing religious interests. In their view, “[t]here is no conceivable way by which full membership of OIC can be effective without using it to promote, canvass, or impose Islam on Nigeria.”[71]
Therefore, to take the country into an organization that was distinguishably “religious in ideology and orientation was a direct violation of the secular status of the Nigerian constitution.”[72] Recognizing that too much was at stake in the survival of the state, he hand-picked a committee and charged them, among other things, to create a permanent forum as “a clearing house for ideas on how religion can best serve the national issue, struggle for economic recovery and independence as well as for political cohesion and stability.”[73]
Although this had an appearance of “democratic liberalism,” Babangida has always held a utilitarian political view of religion. And in view of the utter inadequacy of his regime, religion became the anchor upon which to secure his despotic powers and bolster his partisan northern interests.
Political Appointments, Authority, and Legitimacy
Whatever one’s attitude toward the policy issue regarding Nigeria’s membership of the OIC, there is no question that Babangida pursued a type of religion-based political ideology. Under his regime, the Muslim life endured and thrived simply because the muscle of a self-conscious Muslim ruler could be harmonized to consolidate and preserve the status quo. And because of his concern with regime legitimization, Babangida utilized Islam to bolster his position and to appeal to northern interests. This he achieved through indiscriminate and judicious appointments of influential Muslims and northerners into major government and military positions. As a result of these appointments, Babangida provided for himself a natural rallying point for deflecting criticisms from domestic economic failures.
Examples of the dominating influence of Muslims in national politics are numerous. However, what perhaps stands out most clearly was his cabinet reshuffle of December 1989, and the widespread apparent absence of Christians in it. CAN’s reaction was predictable indeed, vigorously decrying the inequality of a government dominated by about eighty percent Muslims, with the remaining twenty percent occupying inconsequential offices. Samuel Salifu, the self-described “fanatical Christian” secretary of the Kaduna branch of CAN was even more specific. According to him, of the total number of thirty-five ministers, twenty-seven were Muslims, five were Christians, and three did not declare their religious affiliations.[74]
The condemnation of the lopsided character of Babangida’s cabinet reshuffle made headlines in the mainstream media. The African Guardian, for example, reported:
Reaction to the December 29 changes followed predictable religious, sectional and ethnic lines. Christians, especially in the North, sought to draw attention to the fact that as a result of the changes, virtually all of the most important offices in the land: President, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, Army Chief of Staff, Inspector General of Police, Head of the Secret Service, Chief Justice of the Federation, Defence, External Affairs and Petroleum resources Ministership are now held by Moslems.[75]
If the mainstream media could react in this way, it should not be surprising, then, that CAN perceived Babangida as a powerful and unapologetic instrument of northern Islamic interests:
Since the Babangida administration came to power it has unashamedly and in utter contempt for national unity manifested its naked discriminatory religious posture through overt and covert acts of patronage and preference for Islamic religion. One is therefore left with no alternative but to conclude that the Babangida administration is the principal agent for the Islamization of Nigeria. This administration, more than any before it, has built up religious tension in this country of a dimension that is capable of obliterating the foundations of our corporate entity as a country.[76]
Those were strong accusations and not mere idle words. The obliteration of those foundations of “corporate entity” manifested in the religious violence of the late 1980s through the 1990s.
Violent Faces of Religion: The Muslim-Christian Clashes (1980s-1990s)
Just like the political associations which preceded it historically, the state is a relationship of rule (Herrschaft) by human beings over human beings, and one that rests on the legitimate use of violence (that is, violence that is held to be legitimate). For the state to remain in existence, those who are ruled must submit to the authority claimed by whoever rules at any given time. When do people do this, and why? What inner justifications and what external means support this rule? [77]
The renowned sociologist, Max Weber, has observed that the stability of any form of rule, or any legitimation of it, depends largely on the condition that the ruled submit to be ruled. And in order to restrain impulsive conduct against any inequality in the distribution of power, any form of rule must justify itself and seek legitimacy. Confined to a state of silent isolation and political passivity, these legitimating doctrines are generally accepted by the ruled. But “when the inherent inequalities of social existence become visible, legitimating ideas are questioned, with intense and possibly violent struggles as a consequence.”[78]
Although many of Weber’s critics may not completely agree with his concept of “legitimacy,” this, more apparent than real, is a problem of interpretation.[79] But when his concept is applied to our context, Nigeria, it is instructive to reflect on the many violent clashes between Christians and Muslims as a corrective mechanism to the political quietism of the former. The ideological proximity of the Christians is the perceived imbalance between religion and the high politics of the state and their resolve stretches beyond revealing the intrinsic weaknesses of a Muslim-dominated body polity to a complete modification of the status quo. The use of state apparatus by the Muslims to protect Islamic interests has burdened the Christians with spectacular ethical commitment to unseat their rivals and wrest the control of the state itself. This inflexible resistance to perceived political and religious superiority of the Muslims has naturally jagged up extreme determination to justify their continuing domination. The result, of course, is that violence has been woven into the fabric of mainstream religio-political orthodoxy.
Consequently, the proliferation of religious clashes has become rather inevitable. In Weberian term, therefore, the onus of responsibility has been mostly on the Muslims to assert control and relevance. As Enwerem has rightly argued:
It is usually when Muslims fail to realize their objective—be it through diplomatic avenues or constitutional debate—that they resort to force. For, it is not an accident or mere coincidence that all the religious riots in modern Nigeria took place in the North, and most of them—in fact the major ones—took place after a significant failure by Muslims to realize a particular objective.[80]
It has been almost two decades since Enwerem made this observation. Yet, the agitations for Sharia under former President Olusegun Obasanjo and the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan, both Christian southerners, have validated his claim quite prominently. From the 1980s, and especially with the compounding of the persistent religious problems of Nigeria by the Babangida government, Christian reaction has been quite radical. In those circumstances their resolve has been a dramatic shift from prayer and fasting, and between ideals and compromise. Instead, their implicit appeal has been to the reprisal aspect of the law of Moses—“an eye for an eye.” Nowhere was such decision expressed more eloquently than in the statement by the Christian students of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU, Zaria) in the aftermath of the 1988 riot: “For too long [we] have been pushed to the wall…both cheeks have been slapped and there is no third cheek to slap.”[81]
Several years after these statements were uttered, Nigeria’s political landscape remains characterized by extremely high levels of religious violence. The flagrant disregard for peace and civility by the Boko Haram sect in the Christmas day bombings of Christians and subsequent murderous attacks early in the New Year have, once again, provided the rallying ground for Christian leaders to demystify perceived monopoly to superiority and coercion. The national president of CAN, Ayo Oritsejafor, and the Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, Anthony Olubunmi Okogie, have both renewed their call for self-defense. According to Oritsejafor, the latest killing (December 25, 2011),
Has aptly confirmed what we have been saying that Christians should defend themselves since it has become obvious that the nation’s security agencies are either overwhelmed by the terrorists or the hoodlums have infiltrated their ranks and therefore lack the capacity to do their duty of protecting lives and property of innocent Nigerians. I will not subscribe to the notion that Christians should quit the North because of the ceaseless attacks; rather I will urge them to be vigilant and be prepared at all times to defend themselves, their family members and their churches, including their businesses with whatever is available to them.[82]
Understanding that psychological or religious subservience is best perpetuated in a climate of intimidation and fear, justification for Christian ecumenism is encouraging a curious hybrid of Christian coalitions and alliances that seem to be moving beyond polarities that know only the categories of “Protestants,” “Catholics,” and “Indigenous” churches. These developments have the realistic possibility of exacerbating an already volatile situation. Unfortunately such a conjunction of crises and the failure of governance are equally bound to accentuate primordial ethno-religious tension, political sloganeering and systemic decadence. It is already inflaming suspicions and compounding over-rigid dichotomies between Christians and Muslims, between north and south, between us and them, and between competing socio-economic interests. Consequently, the defensive impulses on the part of the Christians are not only seen to be rational or merely formal, but are set to become rather normative and self-referential.
Sharia in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: “The Open Sore” of a Failing State
Nigeria’s preference for democracy culminated in the Fourth Republic on May 29, 1999. It started amidst great hopes and promises of good governance. It also brought with it the realization of unwritten agenda between the various factions of the hegemonic elite “to repossess power from the military, and a geopolitical power shift from the North to the South.”[83] The choice and electoral “victory” of Olusegun Obasanjo was, therefore, a convenient attempt to placate the South and to project an image of national cohesion and forward momentum. But this was a false premise. The discontinuity created a political vacuum at the center for the North and a dislocation of religious superiority. It also introduced pervasive tensions between Christians and Muslims, presenting the latter with the challenge of liberating Islam and the north from the presidential clutches of a Christian southerner while, at the same time, adjusting to the constraint of the moment. The introduction of Sharia by twelve northern governors in their respective states just a year into Obasanjo’s administration was in part a response to this challenge and a political tool to maintain relevance of history, heritage and hegemony.
The political imperatives of fragmenting the Nigerian body politic along religious lines are clear precisely because they consolidated the governors’ positions as political custodians and protectors of their people, their faith and way of life. They presented a missionizing appeal; an idealized governance as evidence for the feasibility of attaining the goal of a corruption-free north thereby ending decades of pillaging by previous regimes. Also, Sharia would bring extensive social change and fresh Muslim responses to issues of sufferings and poverty. Their ideology was by nature exclusionary and held up the northern Islamic perspective as a model for the rest of Nigeria. The utopia that this aspiration envisioned was one of boundless optimism and unsullied confidence in the ideological and purifying power of Islam.
Civic solidarity for Sharia was further motivated by a perceived state of lawlessness and general disenchantment with crime, corruption and armed banditry that affected mainly the poor. By so doing, the governors attempted to reorder their world of concept and Islamic practices in response to the less effective secular legal system often characterized by bureaucracy, corruption and elitism. Although the introduction of Sharia in the twelve northern states occurred in different contexts, its trajectory resonates with its use for administrative convenience, security of tenure and legitimacy prompted by democratic change at the center. The words of Jeff Haynes strike an interesting note here:
“The goal of those involved in the hegemonic quest is to create what Williams calls a‘unified moral order,’ in which ‘a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society’.”[84]
It is appropriate to infer, therefore, that the imposition of Sharia, with jurisdiction over civil and criminal matters, provided the double-edged sword of accent to a “moral order.” On the one hand, it created among citizens a new mode of imagining the self and community in terms of consent rather than coercion. On the other hand, these new forms of identification and community formation fed the political needs of the governors in their active pursuit and retention of power. At the center, Obasanjo was powerless against the sentiment that was growing in the north. He saw it as a political landmine and avoided it all together by merely giving his presidential sanction as “political Sharia” that was bound to disappear.
His prediction has proved partly right and partly wrong. Partly wrong because rather than disappear, Sharia remains and provides ready example of the manipulation of religion by political players to create exclusive and polarizing sectarian identity constructs. Failure to address or deal decisively with the “political Sharia” mischief during his administration has morphed into the kind of egalitarian Sharia of the Boko Haram sect with more devastating consequences far beyond the political and intellectual capacity of the incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan. But Obasanjo was partly right, too. The conservative power structures have not delivered the much-anticipated utopia. Rather, the mosaic of human suffering in the non-Islamic Christian south pales in comparison to the socio-economic conditions of the north characterized by wide-spread illiteracy, unbridled poverty and existential hopelessness. In the words of Ahmad Al-Khanawy, a reed-thin filmmaker,
“People want Sharia. But not this kind of Sharia. The most visible signs of Islamic law are new censorship rules banning dancing and singing in movies. Sharia-promoting politicians want to cover their failure by making noise about fighting immorality. That is it.”[85]
The implementation of Sharia law has concentrated on the harsh aspects of Islamic law by abolishing the business and consumption of beer and sex work, and by segregating both sexes in the public space. While many have been sentenced to death for various offences, several others have been commuted to amputation and flogging. In some situations, many were tried without adequate legal representation while others were convicted on confessions extracted under police torture and sentenced by judges who were improperly trained. But it has largely ignored the Sharia principles of generosity and compassion. It is equally prejudicial and in deference to the rich and powerful. Such a lop-sided execution informed the view that this form of Sharia, much like the democracy that brought it, has turned out to be another broken political promise. In the words of Salisu Saidu,
“Sharia is about justice. Where you have sharia, you have development. Nothing has changed. If one relied on tap water, one would die of thirst.”[86]
The above view was shared by another northerner who, despite being a Christian community leader, declares:
“To us, sharia is a religious injunction laced around the strings of love, tolerance and respect for human dignity.”[87]
These words are representative of pedestrian views, fuelling a growing disillusionment that has weakened public faith in democracy and governance in general. Despite the vast endowment in natural resources, Nigeria has been and continues to be cannibalized by rapacious and predatory cabal of high ranking military personnel and politicians that demonstrate the networked nepotism characteristic of Jean-François Bayart’s The Politics of the Belly.[88] Almost thirteen years after the return to civil rule, the political landscape is yet to show any evidence of transparent and good governance. Instead of the so-called “dividends of democracy,” elections continue to be controversial, public institutions are increasingly manipulated in favour of debauched and misbegotten booty-hunters, and the generality of the citizens impoverished even more. These crosscutting conditions have weakened public trust in the apparatus of government, and the net effect is an appeal to the religious realm for interpreting the purpose of life.
It is within the stricture of this prevailing socio-economic and political psychology that the pervasive tensions of Boko Haram have to be examined. The incipient agitations for the Islamic notions of justice and equality have become the driving force behind the religious militancy of the sect and what they perceive as their own brand of authentic egalitarian Sharia. This reordering of Sharia might mean the radical and absolute repudiation of aspects of elite-serving political Sharia that are losing credibility, but it might equally mean reorienting the old toward a relationship to the new in ways that defy the former’s criteria for orthodoxy.
This is an important dimension in understanding Boko Haram and the whole Sharia issue. Though an extremist group, evil and condemnable in the strongest of terms, but Boko Haram “transcends the traditional extremist victimization of Christians in pursuit of grander anarchic ambitions.”[89] Instead, “its war is with the Nigerian state and western education which it perceives as a vector of the corrupting influence of modernity.”[90] It regards the Nigerian state as “a kufur system” being run by hypocrites and non-believers, even when the country had a Muslim president in the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. Consequently, restoring the religious integrity of authentic Sharia in a theocratic state would correct pervasive moral lapses and promote “justice, discipline, good morals, love and care, peace and progress.”[91]
Most conspicuous among the defining elements of a viable state is the performance of certain minimal functions for the security and well-being of the average citizen. But Nigeria is a climate characterized by severe economic hardship and despair thus making religion a suitable alternative for interpreting purposeful living. To this extent, Boko Haram’s message of a just and egalitarian society finds ready audience among the dispossessed, unemployed, unschooled and unskilled able-bodied young men who find “a sense of purpose and mission as warriors for the cause of God ordained to cleanse the society of moral impurities and establish an alternate order.”[92] Unfortunately, such a radical perversion of a purposeful life has become a theological innovation in the hands of the Boko Haram sect. Its recruits become members of a new dynamic community of God for whom the possibility of martyrdom and suicide-bombing guarantees a robust and opulent afterlife far exceeding anything Nigeria can ever offer.
Failure of government is synonymous with a breach of public peace for survival. Boko Haram is the terrifying face of this reality in Nigeria. Governments fail and lose legitimacy when they can no longer deliver positive political goods to their people. In the case of Nigeria, it is not exaggerating the obvious that regimes after regimes have floundered in virtually every area of measurable yardstick including economic development, income distribution, security and political representation. The persistence and growth of other informal political networks elsewhere in the federation such as MEND in the Niger Delta, MASSOB in the south east and OPC in the south west constitute negative spillovers that cast some light on our institutional failings. Boko Haram does represent a potent if erroneous critique of our delinquent state and its dysfunctional leadership culture.[93] Consequently, its criminalization of the state and the recourse to the use of violence are clear signals that the Nigerian state has lost the monopoly to violence. And by so criminalizing the state, Boko Haram is attempting to create a mechanism through which political power is disseminated and wealth re-distributed.
Although it is possible to assess these contestations as representing a breakdown at the core level, they equally have the potential to be developmental if properly managed. Military operations and coercive use of power have the semblance of success but this can only be temporary at best. Holistic approach to a lasting solution goes beyond the type of temporary white-washing responses that have become characteristic of Nigeria’s inept leadership. An aggregate index of responsible and intelligent approach must necessarily involve a reworked and depoliticized state security apparatus, enhanced intelligence gathering, and improved operational conditions and capacities for law-enforcement agents including the police, the army and other paramilitary establishments. Also, our elite-serving and exploitable legal system must be overhauled to deal transparently and expeditiously with cases of corruption including those pertaining to sectarian violence and terrorism.[94] There is no other better time to heed the perennial calls for redefining our collective identity than now. Boko Haram and other insurgent groups across the nation provide the meaningful challenge that empowers us to determine citizenship along inclusive and mutually-benefiting constructs.
Corruption is so pervasive in Nigeria that it has turned public service into a kind of lucrative criminal enterprise. Appropriate policy formulation and effective implementation geared toward improving the standard of living of the average Nigerian and of the development of the country as a whole become paths for collective success. Such socio-economic and political reengineering must necessarily be seen to deliver rapid economic growth and create employment rather than perpetuating powerful elite factions. Reworking the social contract between government and the people this way will legitimize the state while delegitimizing insurgent groups like Boko Haram. Of course, attempts to remove corrupt influences from governance will not be easy. It will expectedly be fought by the political elite that is benefiting from the current arrangements. But without such state resiliency, its ability to maintain control over coercive power, administrative authority and popular allegiance becomes increasingly compromised. It can only last for so long under the weight of self-induced fragility before finally falling or even collapsing.
[65] Yusuf Sambo (the secretary of the Mullahs in Kaduna), “In Support of Babaginda,” June 18, 1990. See also Iheanyi Enwerem, A Dangerous Awakening (1995:146).
[66] Andrew Apter, “IBB = 419” (1999:280). Apter’s work is, in my opinion, the best academic analysis of any work on Babangida’s economic, political, and religious policies.
[68] Apter (1999:267-307).
[69] D. Olojede, “Trip to Fez” (1986:7).
[70] Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, “Address to the Inaugural Meeting of the Committee on Nigeria’s Membership in the OIC” February 3, 1986.
[71] Christian Association of Nigeria, memorandum no. 41 (1986).
[72] Matthew Hassan Kukah, “Christians and Nigeria’s Aborted Transition” (1995:225).
[73] Toyin Falola, Violence in Nigeria (1998:99).
[74] Iheanyi Enwerem, A Dangerous Awakening (1995:122).
[75] African Guardian, “Editorial on the Cabinet Reshuffle,” January 29 (1990:12).
[76] Sunday Tribune, “CAN on the Cabinet Reshuffle,” April 23, 1990.
[77] Max Weber, Political Writings. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds. (1994:311).
[78] Peter Lassman, “The Rule of Man Over Man: Politics, Power and Legitimation” (2000:91).
[79] For further discussion about Max Weber and his critics, see David Beetham, The Legitimation of Power (1991).
[80] Iheanyi Enwerem, A Dangerous Awakening (1995:147).
[81] Enwerem, (1995:150).
[82] (http://www.vanguardngr.com/2012/01/oritsejafor-okogie-adeboye-renew-call-on-christians-to-defend-selves/). Accessed on January 13, 2012.
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