Last week Wednesday, the police announced that they had arrested and detained the Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Coalition of Northern Groups, Nastura Sharif, one of the masterminds of the protests against the spate of killings ongoing in northern Nigeria. We do not know his offence. One can only connect his arrest with the mass protests that took place in Katsina the previous day, and which he reportedly spearheaded. More protests had been scheduled to take place in other northern state capitals on Saturday too, and his arrest was quite likely an effort to thwart them. The fact that the protests took place in the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.)’s home state perhaps heightened the “crime.”
Protests are a routine part of a democratic society, and Nigeria is not exempt. Given the rate of killings and other incidences of violence in places like Benue, Katsina, Borno, Taraba, Sokoto, Kaduna, Zamfara, the urgency of the problem needed to be impressed on leaders that seem to have grown benumbed by the frequencies of the attacks. More people should even be on the streets protesting the killings, banditry, destruction of farmlands, and kidnapping until the government understands the insecurity that haunts us all.
According to media reports, the protest was peaceful. Afterward, Sharif was said to have led the CNG executives to the state’s police commissioner to deliver their petition. At the CP’s office, they told him the Inspector General of Police, Adamu Muhammed, needed to see him. From there, it was to Abuja, where he was arrested and detained. But what was his offence?
One wonders why Nigerian security agencies do not seem to have any card up their sleeve other than arrest, detention, and in some cases, frivolous trials? In this instance, why detain someone for exercising his enshrined constitutional right to speak on a salient issue such as mass killings? Is this not a brash way of proving that the issues the protesters raised are not part of your priorities? It seems that the deaths of those Nigerians have become too commonplace to bother the government, and they are far more unsettled by the dissension of the people who used to be enamoured with them. And why, despite the frequent criticisms of their methods, have they not evolved their methods beyond this worn tactic of arresting, detaining, and alleging offences they cannot ultimately justify? Is it that these people have no regard for the public they are supposed to serve, or they have deemed themselves beyond the ethics of the same law and order they claim to be enforcing?
And one more question that boggles: Why have the law enforcement agencies trained their instinct towards arresting and detaining people who do or say anything they deem embarrassing to the Buhari regime? The way they go about things is almost like Decree 4 – the infamous Decree 4 by the evil regime of Buhari during his first coming – is back. Even with his “converted democrat” credentials, they still weaponise the law to protect his public image from the vacuity of his leadership.
In February, the Presidency raised an alarm that some people were planning mass protests, and their mission was “to embarrass the government of President (sic) Muhammadu Buhari.” The main issue that those protesters were allegedly going to protest against – the failure of his service chiefs – did not mortify Buhari, but the impending protests about it did. Which should be the bigger embarrassment for the government? The fact that the President lacked competent personnel or that some people were rallying to trumpet the obvious? In the same month, Buhari travelled to Maiduguri, Borno State, and was booed by people who were tired of his inept regime. Again, if you waited for introspection from this government on why Buhari had become unpopular in his enclave, you wasted your time. They chalked it down to a calculation to “embarrass Buhari.”
This desperation to protect Buhari from the embarrassment that his government has become has turned them to despots, and the tendency towards authoritarianism has almost become a political industry in itself. Any politician or political jobber with a measure of power can call on security agencies and use them to harass the people who irritate them. Last year, we saw how they came down hard on the convener of #RevolutionNow, Omoyele Sowore, and his cohort over their planned protests. In their zeal to make an example of someone, they flouted all etiquette one would expect of public prosecutors. They even listed “insulting Buhari” among his charges. That they could do all that without being restrained by ethical compunction shows how blunt our society’s instruments of justice have become.
Recently, they also arrested and detained three residents of Katsina, Lawal Abdullahi Izala, Bahajaje Abu, and Hamza Abubakar, for “conspiring and intentionally insulting” Buhari. Again, when did insults against a leader become a crime in Nigeria? From mediaeval times, people have insulted even monarchs let alone a person who supposedly rules through democratic authority. It was not enough that they went after a journalist, Rotimi Jolayemi, for criticising the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, they also detained Jolayemi’s wife, Dorcas, and his brothers, John and Joseph, in lieu of him. How can anyone not be struck by the irony of Mohammed, a man that built a career on insulting ex-president Goodluck Jonathan, is now bellyaching over insults? At what point did he realise that insults hurt?
In Kebbi State, three family members, Jatau Nasiru Jatau, Hadiza Nasiru Jatau, Aisha Zakari, that included a six-month-old baby, were similarly detained. The crime was sending a text message to the governor demanding the unpaid gratuity of their father. Again, why should that fetch them such a high-handed reprimand? When I read that report, I took some time to wonder how the men of the DSS received the instruction to arrest someone for sending a text message to the governor. Did they, at any time, pause to reflect on the morality of that errand? When they got to the house and found a woman with a suckling child, did they ask themselves if the job they signed for as intelligence agents was to pick someone that vulnerable and utterly unthreatening? Or like zombies, they just did as they were told? Do they ever stop to reflect why their instinct to protect the government against the people is so strong that they have lost perspective?
They also arrested and detained Akwa Ibom State journalist with XL 106.9 FM Uyo, Kufre Carter, for allegedly criticising the Commissioner for Health in the state, Dominic Ukpong. If Carter’s criticism of the government was deemed libellous, why not explore the appropriate channels of reprimand? Why detain him? Journalists like Agba Jalingo and Jones Abiri spent extended time in detention despite several court orders to the contrary because someone somewhere had his ego bruised by their reports. Our leaders have become so high on their unchecked power that a governor even banned journalists “for life” as if the state was his grandfather’s fiefdom. The imperiousness is so bad that you can accuse a popular figure of rape, and you will be the one the police will arrest!
We have enthroned too many tyrants, and the country can no longer breathe.
For much of last year, lawmakers threw all their energies into debating hate speech. They even proposed that anyone found guilty of hate speech should be liable to life imprisonment or even sentenced to death by hanging. Even though none of them had died or was about to die from hate speech, they thought combating hate speech was necessary to stop the “naysayers” from destabilising the country. Today, as thousands of Nigerians face actual deaths from those who hate them enough to end their lives, they still do not want people to talk. They would rather have Sharif and his co-protesters suffer in silence. Apparently, all that noise they made over hate speech had less to do with the consequences of hate. I doubt there was even anytime they bothered about the nation’s destabilisation. They just did not want any noise to awaken their deadened conscience.
Punch