Yar’Adua: Lost but found

By Reuben Abati

“HALLELUYAH oh. Somebody shout halle-lu-yah o. Ha-le-ha-le-hale… I praise the Lord o…ha-le. “Somebody, e yin oluwa logo hale…”

“What’s the matter with you?”: You don drink?”

“Yes o. I am drunk with joy. Halle-hale-halle…, “halleluyah, halle…”

“I have been telling you. Take it easy with the bottle. What a man eats is his path to the grave”.

“Hey. Professor. Spare me the lecture. I am not drunk. I am just happy that our missing President has been found. Lost and found President Yar’Adua. Halle lu yah o”.

“The missing President”.

“For over 50 days this country was without a President but now, we have found him. He is alive… He is ali-ve… Yar-Adua is – ali-ve-. A a-men I say: He is – a li-ve. Yar’Adua is ali-ve. Oh, oh, oh, he is alive. A a-men”.

“I am not as enthusiastic as you are”

“A nation that prays, stays together. Obviously, God has answered our prayers… It is good to pray”.

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. What do you mean I am sure? The President spoke on BBC. He told Nigerians that he is alive and well, and that as soon as his doctors say he is fit enough, he will return home. In the meantime, he wished the Super Eagles well in the Nations Cup in Angola”.

“He is well. After 50 days! And he doesn’t think he should talk to us through a Nigerian medium. He had to choose the BBC. We have been praying for him and Nigeria, and then, he finds his voice, he thinks the BBC is the best platform. What contempt!”

“A man is ill. He recovers. It doesn’t matter which platform he speaks from. I think we should be happy that the President is alive and that he has been found”.

“Of all things, he had to talk about the Super Eagles and the Nations Cup. Useless Super Eagles and Coach Amodu who if I have my way should be sent to Cabinda. The President didn’t apologise to Nigerians. He didn’t wish us a happy New Year. He didn’t say something to inspire us. In fact, I don’t believe it was him that spoke. I dare say the BBC must be embarrassed conducting such a shoddy interview”.

“Shoddy?”

“Yes. Shoddy. The local media would have done a better job. At least, the reporter could have asked one or two intelligent questions. The BBC using its platform to conduct what was obviously a stage-managed interview does little credit to its own reputation?”

“Hey man. Dogs should not eat dogs. Don’t get carried away.”

“Let us tell the truth and let the devil be ashamed.”

“I see you have been listening to Lagbaja. I know where that line is coming from”.

“You know I don’t even believe that it was President Yar’Adua that spoke to the BBC. The BBC should be careful not to be seen to be part of a conspiracy of deceit. Besides, the President spoke in Hausa language. I object to that Hausa bit. He is President of Nigeria, not President of the Hausa-Fulani”.

“Oh come on. When a man is ill, and he recovers, I don’t care what language comes out of his mouth. In any case, the man also spoke in English”.

“All of this is political”.

“You are a doubting Thomas”.

“Yes. I am. To convince us that the President is alive and well, let his spin doctors put him on NTA Television. With a 3-D scan of the President”.

“Channels, please. Or AIT. I don’t trust NTA”.

“After 50 days of absence, if the President is well enough, we expect him to show up on national television and address all Nigerians. And I don’t expect him to talk about the Super Eagles in Angola. There are more important issues. Is he handing over to his Vice President, for example? Will Goodluck Jonathan now be in charge? Or the country will remain without a leader?”

“The court has settled that, I think”

“The court has not settled anything. If you are talking about the Federal High Court ruling which says the Vice President can take over, I am sorry, it looks like that judgement merely states a principle. It is not executorial. There are no clear-out orders”.

“The Attorney-General of the Federation says there are. The Vice President can now sign anything and act as President”.

“Only in a delegated capacity. The President has not delegated anything to him, so, we are still in the clouds”.

“But a man of courage will hold on to that same ruling and act courageously. The ruling is in one sense about the character of the Vice President. Will he seize the day? Will he step up to the big moment. He has a chance now to stand up. This is all that he needs”.

“You are asking Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to become a suicide bomber? Is that what you are saying?”

“You are speaking in tongues. I don’t get it. I am saying there is a court ruling which offers both Jonathan and all Nigerians a window of opportunity”.

“And I am saying the court ruling has only worsened the situation. Judges should be careful what they say at moments like this”.

“Don’t blame the Judge. The law is a social modulator. The court has ruled. Will Jonathan step forward?”

“My own take is that nothing is that straight-forward in Nigerian politics. Vice President Jonathan will not like to be seen to be ambitious. You know the man is a lucky Deputy. Any man wey the man deputise, something must do am. Alami go jail. Yar’Adua go hospital.”

“That’s mumbo-jumbo. No be Jonathan fault. The matter is simple. Let the President return home. We get hospital for Nigeria too.”

“On doctor’s advice?”

“No. We can no longer wait for that. You know some newspapers have been insisting that the man is clinically dead”.

“But a man that is clinically dead cannot speak Hausa and English on BBC”.

“Suppose it was an actor that spoke…”

“No. It was Yar’Adua”.

“Fine. Let him appear on NTA, then”.

“All of this is just so tiresome. The whole world is laughing at us. How can the President of Nigeria be a missing President?”

“Nothing ever works in Nigeria”.

“At least we now know where our President is. In Haiti, their President is homeless. He now sleeps on the streets. We should thank God here. Now that the President has spoken, naturally every government official would wish to go to Saudi Arabia to greet him. Traditional rulers too”.

“No. That should be discouraged. Whoever wants to see the President should await his arrival. Nobody should turn the President’s ill-health into an opportunity to make quick bucks”.

“Too late. I understand members of the House of Representatives are already on their way to Saudi Arabia. Seven of them. They have all collected their tickets”.

“Jonathan should stop them”.

“The lawmakers claim they are performing their oversight function. They need to go to Saudi Arabia to oversee the President”.

“They shouldn’t bother. The President himself should come home. When Saudi Princes fall sick, they go to America for medical treatment. What is our President doing in Saudi Arabia?”

“No. You are wrong. Why is our President not in a Nigerian hospital. That is the question?”

“He should answer that question himself. And not through BBC. It has to be a Nigerian channel. And in English not Hausa”.

“May be you have a point. English is Nigeria’s official language, not Hausa. The crisis has just begun.”

“Don’t misunderstand me though. I am not saying that this is a North-South debacle. No. That is not my view, I just want the President back home, if that is possible. And I ask: who will come home first- Yar’Adua or the Super Eagles?”

“It is even more than that. If the country continues to drift, what do you think will happen? I am praying for Goodluck Jonathan”

“What?”

“Where do you think all this will lead to?”

“A greater future for Nigeria. I can see God’s hand in it all”.

“No. I don’t see God’s hands. I see failure of leadership. I see selfishness. That is what I see”.

“You probably have a point. Today is January 15″.

“No. No. No. Don’t go that way”.

“What way?”

“What I think you are thinking”.

“I am not even thinking. I am just saying that the only way forward is forward”.

“Better”.

“You should be careful. These are difficult times. Watch what you say. You could step on the wrong toes.”

“Okay I wish the President quick recovery, and all the people that drove the rabbit out of the hole, American Chronicle, London Telegraph and their local conspirators a happy 2010.”

“That your mouth will get you into trouble soon.”

“Wetin I talk now?”

January 16, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Reuben Abati  Comments

What’s God Got to Do with It?

by Ijeoma Nwogwugwu

Ever since the United States listed 14 countries, including Nigeria, which it perceives as either “sponsors of terrorism” or “countries of interest”, a lot has been said and written locally and overseas in reaction to the development. Of particular interest are those reactions from the Nigerian citizenry and officials in government. The general consensus was that the US acted out of political expediency by hastily including Nigeria on a watch list that would subject its citizens to profiling and intensive security screening each time they travel to the US and possibly other parts of the world.

For many of these commentators, one isolated incident involving the alleged botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to blow up an American airplane on Christmas day was insufficient to have warranted Nigeria’s inclusion on the list. Attempts have further been made to show that the young Farouk is not a made in Nigeria product and was radicalized in the United Kingdom where he mingled with radical elements in mosques and other similar associations where they met. The most curious arguments put up in defense of Nigeria are that Nigerians by their very nature are not “suicidal” and are happy-go-lucky people with an innate love for life and living.

I am inclined to disagree with this line of argument for a number of reasons. First, it would be rather simplistic to think that the US government included Nigeria on a sub-list of “countries of interest” just because Farouk Abdulmutallab was misguided into attempting to blow up the Detroit-bound Delta Airline plane. This country has a history of sectarian violence linked to religious tensions and resentment which the state has not been able to contain for decades. Indeed, more Nigerians have been maimed and killed in religious-related clashes in northern Nigeria than in all of the countries along the West African coast with an equal representation of Muslims and Christians dispersed between the south and the north of those countries put together.

Starting from the Maitatsine riots in the 1980s when members of that sect led by one Muhammadu Marwa shot their way to notoriety, killed thousands and proclaimed their brand of Islam to be superior to every other one, including Christianity, to the Boko Haram crisis last year, the Nigerian state has never been able to curb the mounting threat of sectarian violence in our midst. Yet, aside from the extra-judicial killing of Mohammed Yusuf and his cohorts a few months ago, none of the religious zealots who preach hate and jihaddism against the “infidels” has been arrested and tried by the state for their involvement in the riots. Instead, the norm has been to set up dozens of commission of inquiries after which no action is ever taken even when some of the people behind the clashes were known.

Even after the 9/11 attack on American soil, a few misguided young Muslims poured out into the streets celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the plane that went down in northern Pennsylvania. To add salt and pepper to the wound, shortly after the attack, more than a few families named their new born sons, Osama, signifying their endorsement of the mastermind behind the plot to extinguish the “Great Satan” as the US is known by such extremists.

As recently as 2006, religious clashes were also triggered after a group of Muslims converged in Maiduguri to protest the drawing of an offensive cartoon by a Danish newspaper. According to Newswatch magazine which in October 2009 chronicled the history of sectarian violence in the country, that incident led to the destruction of property belonging to non-Muslims, and the attack and death of more than 50 Christians including Michael Gajere, who was identified as the Catholic priest in charge of St. Rita’s Catholic Church. The Maiduguri incident led to reprisal attacks in Onitsha by Igbos. Incensed by the sight of their kith and kin that were brought home for burial, some Igbos went in search of Muslims in the commercial town, and ended up killing more than 30 of them.

Realistically, listing all the cases of religious-related clashes would require more space than this page would permit. But the point being made is that Nigeria in the last three decades has shown more than a passing inclination for religious extremism, and by extension is the prefect breeding ground for elements willing to sacrifice their lives to further their cause. That in my estimation is not a good portrayal of happy-go-lucky people. Rather, it is one that portrays intolerance and a propensity for violence in the name of God.

Besides, it would be erroneous not to classify the trigger for most of the clashes linked to religion in the north, as acts of terror. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines the word terror as “extreme fear” while to instill terror is “the use of extreme fear to intimidate people, especially for political reasons”.

Terrorism, on the other hand, is defined as the “use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims”, while the verb to terrorize means to “create and maintain a state of extreme fear and distress in (someone)”. Going by these very basic definitions, I do not see how the sustained acts of religious violence in northern Nigeria over the last three decades do not constitute acts of terror. Terrorism is not merely limited to the bombing of US targets and like interests. It is the act of instilling extreme fear through violent means and through whatever form, including the use of machetes, swords, horsewhips, sticks and stones that can inflict grievous harm.

When an overzealous man or groups of people rise up in arms against their fellow human beings and decide to kill them for the simple reason that they have divergent religious beliefs, that constitutes an act of terrorism. It is an incontrovertible fact that thousands of non-Muslims from the south have been forced to flee the north for fear of being killed. They were terrorized into relocating to their homes and communities in the south. The same is applicable to the kidnappings of oil workers and innocent citizens in the Niger Delta as well as the destruction and bombing of oil facilities. No matter how justified or aggrieved the perpetrators of such dastardly acts feel, they are nothing more than terrorists trying to instill extreme fear for political capital. Extremism in all its forms can never be justified in a plural state, particularly in a government that talks about law and order.

Moreover, we would be making a big mistake if we think that Al Qaeda has not possibly established a foothold in the Nigeria. Since 9/11, Al Qaeda has grown into an amorphous organisation with franchises all over the Middle East, and certain parts of Asia and Africa. Today, Al Qaeda has simply become an “idea” that binds Islamic extremists who believe in the same cause and press home their message by replicating acts of terror on America, western interests and their allies. The recurring philosophy among its adherents is “the enemy of my friend is my enemy”. It is for these reason experts on terror and the spread of Islamic extremism all acknowledge that the Al Qaeda band of terrorists started and led by Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan has no relationship with Al Qaeda in the Middle East, Al Qaeda in Somalia or Al Qaeda in Indonesia.

If we must be honest with ourselves, Nigeria is only a secular state in name. For all intents and purpose, it should be renamed the “Chrislamic Republic of Nigeria”. Religious extremism is as pervasive in the south as it is in the northern part of the country. Nigerian Christians do not have to wait for a replay of the Branch Davidian Christian religious sect that barricade itself in a ranch in Waco, Texas for 51 days until it was raided by the FBI and resulted in the death of 54 adults and 21 children, before realising they are heading along the same extremist path.

As a people, we have lost all sense of rational thought and logic, and attribute everything to a higher being. The most embarrassing aspect of our over-religiosity has been made more glaring in recent weeks by our refusal to invoke the 1999 Constitution, preferring instead to pray for an incapacitated president whom we don’t even know if he’s alive or dead. My common refrain to this sickening prevarication is “what’s God got to do with it?”

In my candid opinion, that we have been listed by the US as a country of interest should be a wake up call for all of us. We would be running away from the truth by pointing at the United Kingdom and other countries whose citizens have been caught in the past for terrorist acts. We forget that America and the UK have sustained a “special relationship” across the Atlantic that is centuries old. America sees the UK as its foremost ally in Europe and would therefore never do anything to jeopardize that bond, certainly not because of a Richard Reid, the British shoe bomber. Even where religious elements begin to grow and fester in those countries, they clamp down on them decisively and deport foreigners back to their countries of origin. They most certainly do not pander to meaningless sentiments like we do in Nigeria.

Instead of burying our heads in the sand, we should see our listing as an opportunity for the Nigerian state to uphold its secular constitution as supreme and take decisive security measures to discourage and contain extremism, be it Christian or Muslim.

January 11, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Ijeoma Nwogwugwu  Comments

We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet

by Simon Kolawole

A young Nigerian boy, named Farouk, went to the UK to study engineering. The chap started attending mosques where radical preachers, rather than concentrate on propagating Islam and exhorting Muslims to love their neighbours, spend most of the time denouncing the West and the Great Satan (commonly known as the US). UK did nothing about the preachers of hate on its own soil. Subsequently, the young boy got radicalised and went into a mental state that alarmed his father. He quickly got in touch with American authorities to report his son. The US did nothing about it.

Then on Christmas day, the boy hid explosives in his underpants and tried in vain to blow up an American airliner. What happened next? The US blacklisted Nigeria as a “country of interest”. Pronto, Nigeria was classified alongside Afghanistan, Algeria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen as countries whose travellers will face “enhanced security screening”. In simple English, it means if you hold a Nigerian passport and you are travelling to the US, you will be singled out for humiliating checks. To even get the US visa will now be one difficult assignment – and you may no longer be given more than a single-entry or six-month visa.

Let’s face it: this is ridiculous. Plain ridiculous.

The Yoruba will say: “Kila gbe, kila ju?” What is the crime? What is the punishment? The punishment is far more than the “crime”. How can the action of one boy out of 140 million Nigerians become a yardstick to punish all of us? It is all the more ridiculous when you realise that the boy was obviously radicalised in the UK, not Nigeria. He received his suicide training in Yemen, not Nigeria. He received the explosive in Yemen, not Nigeria. The father reported him to US authorities. The boy was on the US watch list, yet he was not watched. He bought a ticket to Detriot. The US authorities cleared him to fly. So what’s Nigeria’s offence? It seems the US was just looking for the slightest excuse to pounce on us.

What exactly did we do wrong to deserve the victimisation? Let us examine a couple of hypotheses. The first says Nigeria was blacklisted because of Al-Qaeda activities in the country as evident in the religious riots in the North. Nigeria is seen as a breeding ground for fundamentalists and terrorists who could threaten American interest. The US, in trying to protect itself, had no other option than to blacklist Nigeria in the wake of the AbdulMutallab saga. Those who peddle this hypothesis include some top government officials. But I do not buy into this. There is yet no concrete evidence that Al-Qaeda has any cell in Nigeria – and, for goodness sake, AbdulMutallab was not radicalised here. He was made in the UK. So where do the dots connect?

We should not confuse religious conflicts with terrorism. Religious conflicts, like ethnic conflicts, have been with us for ages. I have heard people talk about Boko Haram as terrorism – but the best information we have on them so far is that they were religious zealots who were up in arms with politicians.

They may share similar beliefs with Al-Qaeda – particularly their anti-West message – but there is a thick line between what they stand for and what Al-Qaeda stands for. Terrorism, the only mode of operation of Al-Qaeda, is a systematic use of violence (such as bombing) to make a political statement, under a religious guise, against targeted interests. The victims are never carefully selected – so even Muslims could be victims, as we saw in the September 11 attacks and other cases around the world. In the Al-Qaeda thinking, even if the aircraft is filled with Muslims, as long as an American is killed, the operation is highly successful.

Now this is different from the religious conflicts that we experience in Nigeria. They are usually sparked off by an incident at a particular point in time, given that the atmosphere is permanently tense and polluted with hate, mistrust and resentment. Terrorism, by contrast, is a sustained, systematic campaign. Even if the US based its action against Nigeria on religious conflicts, how come India is not on the list? India experiences religious conflicts regularly. Egypt experiences conflicts between its minority Coptic Christians and the majority Muslim population all the time. Why is Egypt not on the list then? Those pointing fingers at Boko Haram are pointing in the wrong direction. There is more to the US action than Boko Haram.

Let’s even say US believes Nigeria harbours terrorists. So far, AbdulMutallab is the only Nigerian to have experimented with suicide bombing. Meanwhile, there are convicted terrorists who are American and British citizens. There are Al-Qaeda cells in the UK. The July 7, 2005 attacks on London underground trains were plotted on UK soil by UK citizens. They struck and killed and injured dozens of people. Why is the UK not a “country of interest”? Hamid Hyat, convicted of terrorism in 2007, is an American. Richard Reid, a British citizen, is serving a life sentence in the US for his failed shoe-bombing of December 2001. Terrorist attacks have taken place in Egypt, India, Indonesia and Spain, yet US has not classified these countries as “countries of interest”. So there is more to the US action than AbdulMutallab.

Let’s move on to the second hypothesis – what I call the “Yar’Adua Diplomatic Disease”. As THISDAY reported during the week, Nigeria’s foreign relations have weakened over the last three years. Generally speaking, Nigeria seems confused on its foreign policy – whether to be pro-West or pro-East. My advice is that we should weigh the pros and cons of whichever we want to choose, and then pursue it with commitment. We can’t sit on the fence. Sadly, we’re fast disappearing from the international scene.

For a country that has only oil to sell to the world, it is not in the country’s economic or political interest to make itself unimportant in the scheme of things. President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua has attended the UN General Assembly just once; the rest, he sent his foreign minister, not even the Vice-President, to attend. Automatically, we’re relegated. There are some levels that a foreign minister can never operate. That’s the truth.

Nigeria has not had an ambassador in the US for most of the 30 months of the Yar’Adua administration. The US government is expected to be dealing with a Charge d’Affairs. In international relations, I don’t know how politically wise this is. When the AbdulMutallab saga broke, there was no person on ground for US President Barack Obama to discuss with. Our president was somewhere in Saudi Arabia, incommunicado. Such high-level discussions are usually held at presidential level. If Vice-President Goodluck Jonathan had been constitutionally empowered to speak on behalf of Nigeria, Obama would have been able to discuss meaningfully with him.

What we needed was to make a case for ourselves. Ironically, we were waiting for the Americans to call us before putting them through to Yar’Adua – or whoever was going to impersonate him. With nobody to make a case for us, it was all too easy for the Americans to rush to blacklist us for an offence we did not commit, for an offence we were in no way culpable, for an offence that the US has at least 99 per cent of the blame. In fact, Obama has taken full responsibility for the failure of the American intelligence system. Yet Nigeria gets punished! Some dots are certainly not connecting there.

I conclude, therefore, that the AbdulMutallab-induced blacklisting is nothing but a decoy. The real American grouse, I suggest, is with Yar’Adua administration’s aimless foreign policy and lukewarm ties with the US. Nigeria is full of absurd political intrigues and empty of leadership. We are finally paying the price. As Americans would say, we ain’t seen nothing yet! Even Togo will soon blacklist us.

January 10, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Simon Kolawole  Comments

My Heart Goes out to Farouk

by Simon Kolawole

Let’s briefly discuss the story of a young, independent boy with religious zeal and a fertile mind, delicately torn between the two worlds of extremism and liberalism. No, I’m not talking about Umar Farouk AbdulMutallab. I’m talking about myself. I embraced the Christian faith at the age of 20 during my national youth service and I was ready to do anything – except kill – for God. All I needed to be told was “don’t do this” and I would not, “do this” and I would.

The formative stage of religious beliefs is the most critical in a believer’s life. The heart is so tender. You’re so vulnerable. Because you have not studied the scriptures enough to be able to make up your mind by yourself, you rely virtually on interpretations by others. Pray you don’t get the wrong message.

I was told I could no longer keep “unbelievers” as friends – which would include even my childhood friends and members of my family. I was told I would go to hell if I continued to listen to the music of Bob Marley.

I was told ladies who didn’t wear scarves were a few kilometres from hell. Ladies who wore trousers would perish, for sure. In no time, I was in a serious emotional crisis, desperately caught between two worlds – one of extremism which my Bible teachers told me was the best way to heaven; the other of pragmatism, knowing that I would still have to live with people who did not share my faith or beliefs. At that critical juncture of my life, I was able to resolve my crisis by personally studying the Bible, asking different people different questions and reading a variety of literature to keep a balance.

As I read the story of AbdulMutallab, the 23-year-old chap at the centre of a failed attempt to suicide-bomb an American airliner, something clicked in me: that is the familiar story of naïve zealotry. He had a heart for his God. Even though he was born a Muslim, he went deeper and deeper into his religion at a stage in his life. He was a young, independent boy with religious zeal and a fertile mind. He wanted to be upright – to stay off the vices that so easily entrap young men and women.

He wrote in one of his posts on an Islamic website: “I have no friend. Not because I do not socialise, etc but because either people do not want to get too close to me as they go partying and stuff while I don’t, or they are bad people who befriend me and influence me to do bad things.” And in another, he wrote: “The last thing I want to talk about is my dilemma between liberalism and extremism [...] How should one put the balance right?”

That is the critical juncture in a believer’s life. You are supposed to be pure but the world around you is dirty. You don’t drink but your friends drink, so should you cut them off completely or stay with them but refuse to join them in drinking? How long can that last? Is it not easy for them to drag you into drinking than for you to drag them off the bottle?

How can you be a believer and still go to disco halls? How can you keep girls as friends and not end up fornicating in a moment of weakness? These simple questions are usually difficult to handle, especially for a young believer. Of course, there is a world of difference between Christian and Islamic beliefs – but, at the end of discussion, religious beliefs leave similar traits and impact on the life of a believer.

At the critical juncture in AbdulMutallab’s Islamic renewal, he was torn between conservatism and modernism, between radicalism and pragmatism, between extremism and liberalism. How do I love my God and my “unbelieving” neighbour at the same time? How can I wear a Nike cap on top of jalabia (the Arabic clothing associated with Islam) or a skull cap on top of denim jeans? AbdulMutallab was unable to handle these questions by himself – and so he fell into the wrong hands. That, to me, was the turning point of his life. With a mind so fertile and vulnerable, the radicals moved in and took over.

The first step by radicals is to convince the believer that whatever he does in the service of God is permissible. In fact, it is the wish of God. The ultimate reward is heaven. And, yes, the believer no longer belongs to this world. He (or she) is now a citizen of heaven and should start looking forward to going to meet with God. In fact, the earthly family is no longer his family. He is no longer from Nigeria; he is now from heaven. And God is eagerly awaiting his return to heaven where he would reap limitless rewards.

By the time AbdulMutallab was sending text messages to his family members from Dubai telling them never to ask of him again, the radicals had finally succeeded. They had convinced him to do away with his earthly family. And by the time he chose to go and enlist as a suicide bomber, the radicals had completed the job of brainwashing him. They had succeeded in indoctrinating him that the ultimate good thing he can do in life is to die for his God. No form of death is better. It is better to kill yourself in the service of God than die in a road accident or die fighting for your country. God would be very pleased that you killed yourself fighting against infidels.

My heart goes out to AbdulMutallab because he too is a victim. His love for his God had made him vulnerable. At that critical point, his tender heart was filled with the message of hate rather than love, isolation rather than accommodation, death rather than life. He fell into the wrong hands. He could have asked his radical teachers: Sir, how come you are not carrying the bomb yourself?

How come you’re not giving the bomb to your children to carry? Why me? Don’t you want to die fighting for God too? Don’t you want your children to go to heaven too? Why is Osama bin Laden on the run? If he truly believes he is now a citizen of heaven, why doesn’t he join the suicide bombers so that he can go to heaven quickly? New converts to radicalism are not encouraged to ask these questions; they are simply to listen and not talk. If you ask too many questions, you’re committing a sin and God would be angry with you.

I have heard a lot of people criticise Alhaji Umar Mutallab for sending his children to school abroad, for not bringing up Farouk properly. Yet we all know that this argument is very unkind. Let’s be fair: Farouk’s father reported his worrisome new orientation to the US embassy. How many fathers can do that, knowing the implications for the child?

Of all the Nigerian children who have been schooling abroad (they are in their thousands), how many of them have become suicide bombers? The only case I know of, so far, is Farouk. Name another one. Do you now use one case to reach a conclusion? It is too simple to conclude that Farouk became radicalised because he schooled in Togo and the UK. In this facebook and twitter age, you can become radicalised anywhere you are, even in the remotest village in Nigeria.

What of children who take to drugs, cultism, armed robbery and all sorts of vices?

Did they also school in Togo? As simple as it sounds, you can live in the same house and sleep on the same bed with your child without knowing his or her mind! Only a deluded father will tell you he knows everything his son or daughter does. AbdulMutallab could have schooled in Lagos and still chosen a similar path. Most of the religious zealots we have in Nigeria who are busy burning places of worship and killing innocent people have never been to UK or Yemen.

We would therefore be deceiving ourselves by saying: “Thank God, my own children are schooling in Lokoja. Thank God, I am very close to my children. They can never be involved in vices because we live under the same roof.” We do not need to snigger at Alhaji Mutallab. We are all vulnerable to this abnormal behaviour in the society.

I know that we parents have a God-ordered responsibility to bring our children up properly. There is no question about that. We all wish the best for our children. We all want to bring up children we can be proud of. But any parent who is sincere enough will also admit that some of these things are beyond us. Ultimately, there is something called the grace of God. After all, I know pastors whose children live wayward lives. That is the irony of it all.

January 4, 2010  Tags: , ,   Posted in: Uncategorized  Comments


Get Adobe Flash playerPlugin by wpburn.com wordpress themes