The garbled official responses to the many satirical writings and the several allegorising treatments of the myths of the Tinubu presidency will make Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels or George Orwell’s Animal Farm poor playbooks in a long playlist of satires.
The current situation of the threat by Mr Trump of a probable U.S. military intervention to bring an end to what he has angrily referred to as Christian genocide has elicited a laughable reaction or silly rebuttal from the Nigerian leadership. An uncoordinated, most times, bizzare body of responses to the Trump challenge has exposed the country’s apparatchik as a troublingly complacent, indifferent and negligent leadership.
One such starkly naive response to Mr Trump’s promised blitzkrieg is the claim that even as President Tinubu is a Muslim married to a pastor, the charge of genocide against Christians is fallacious or misplaced. Tinubu whose family members respectively brandish the intrinsic values and sacerdotal teachings of two of Nigeria’s most popular religions may not be agreeable to an official policy position targeting Christians for genocide, Tinubu’s sidekicks have speciously argued. They seem oblivious or ignorant of the reality that the discerning public is not unaware of the wiles of politicians or of their foresighted calculation regarding political expediency.
Nigerian government apologists have failed to provide a deeply flawless answer to Trump’s allegation which allegation has the victims and survivors of the unceasing carnage as living witnesses. Another baffling riposte to Mr Trump’s claims is that Muslims too are victims of the genocide which Trump cites. By some devious turn of advocacy, they say Muslim victims are even more in number than Trump’s “cherished Christians.” Their position is however defeated by our lived reality.
There has been no record of an uproar or expressed outrage from the Muslim community regarding alleged genocidal attacks of Muslims by bandits or terrorists. Further, the attackers have generally been identified as Islamic extremists or fundamentalists whose main objective has been expressed to be a duty to spread Islam particularly among unbelievers or arne everywhere they are found.
Thankfully, the sense of victory of these fundamentalists is not shared by the generality of Muslims who just desire to worship according to the tenets of their religion and are not enamoured by the unsolicited macho fighting mien of those who misrepresent the ordained or cherished ethos of Islam.
In the history of religions, the question of the authenticity of pious frauds has tended to take more than a fair share of the discussion time of a particular religion under review. It has however provided valuable impetus for further investigation. We will not allow ourselves to be detained here. It is for us, at this juncture, to conclude that the Islamic fundamentalists ravaging Nigeria have in their pouch more than their expressed objective.
A land-grabbing agenda has been deduced from their operational methodology. A systematic study of their modus operandi is pointing in the direction of the violations of elementary conventions. This has betrayed their professed authenticity or their fidelity to the tenets of the religion they tout.
Unfortunately, these charlatans have bona fide defenders (such as Sheikh Ahmad Gumi; a man of considerable learning) who are not without merit in the study of Islamic research. Also by her inexplicably ineffectual denunciation of and the tepid response to the violent Islamists’ challenge, the Nigerian state has been deemed complicit respecting the charge of genocide.
The Nigerian government had appeared helpless and unable to turn the heat against Boko Haram, ISWAP, and the marauding bands of Fulani militia that have been on the rampage in Nigeria despoiling lands, murdering innocent citizens, and generally foisting, through their vile ideology, a situation of unease, uncertainty, and instability.
Many have wondered why the Nigerian military has not received the marching orders from their C-in-C for mauling or taking out the terrorists. The wearied, hackneyed response of Nigeria’s political leadership after each carnage bespeaks complicity.Victims after victims are tired, not knowing where to turn for succour. Their spirit has however been revived by Mr Trump’s assurances that he would not leave them comfortless. He has assured he would take their molesters head-on and make the nuisance of the abusers of their freedom history. Trump has given the Nigerian government time to address the ugly situation or he would by himself reset the clock.
Some have identified the curious contradiction between Trump’s avowed determinism or the ethical judgement which stands against him even in his personal carriage and his Nigerian intervention on behalf of Christians. They have proffered reasons other than the expressed humanitarian gestures of Mr Trump. Their criticism is self-righteously centred around the implied or latent implications of American interventionist efforts in history or of Trump’s bohemian persona.
Whichever way it is viewed, Mr Trump’s intervention is timely, humanist, and follows the general outlines of a semi-religious position even in a secular world. Trump is entitled to a grandiose conception of his mission. The Nigerian people who crave for peace are the true beneficiaries of Mr Trump’s initiative. The transition from the tepid, hollow but mouthful support of the Tinubu presidency for the victims of its poor governance model to the predicted ‘swift and sweet’ intervention of the American government is foreseen to be challenging.
One thing is however clear. Mr Trump is today acting as a predictive agent of the beleaguered and traumatised people of Nigeria whose government needed assistance to establish itself as a going concern but is success-shy or failure-enamoured. Now, help has come to it from Macedonia!
To whom it may concern.
We conclude this rather ‘long essay’ with the model of brevity offered in Mr Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament in England:
“You have stayed in this place too long, and there is no health in you.
In the name of God, go!” -Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658)
Rotimi-John, a lawyer and commentator on public affairs, is the Deputy Secretary-General of Afenifere.
He can be reached via:[email protected]
