Between Badenoch, Trump and Buhari

Dialogue With Nigeria By AKIN OSUNTOKUN

Unlike Professor Wole Soyinka’s Idi Amin caricature, my image of President Donald Trump is very much like Robert Holt’s portrayal of Henry V111, “who started with everything and squandered it all, who had the physical and mental fortitude to endure a lifetime of gratified greed. We recognise in him an archetype, one of the champions of our baser nature, and are in him, vicariously indulged”. Yet, in spite of it all, we still dare say, his intervention, though bearing his trademark aptitude for megalomaniac exaggeration, is of shock therapy utility. Truth is I never imagined that the day would come when I could find myself in something of a common purpose with the leading fascist and racist of the contemporary world.

I experienced the onset of a depressive episode in the early hours of November 7th 2015, the day Donald Trump was elected the president of America. For nearly a year thereafter, I avoided any news of America because I didn’t want to see or hear anything concerning the Trump presidency. I ended the abstinence when all started going awry for him and all looked set for the termination of his presidency four years to the date he was sworn in. My friend, Kunle Awojobi, was with me the night the first Trump tragedy befell America and the world. At the time, the Cable News Network, CNN, star commentator, Fareed Zakaria, metaphorically remarked that ‘Trump is a cancer on American democracy’.

When Kunle, whom I hadn’t seen for quite a while, rather fortuitously, wandered into my residence on the night of the American presidential election on the first Tuesday of November 2024, I had a premonition that here comes the Trump harbinger again! In subsequent confirmation of my misgivings, Trump went on to win the reelection.

Already, his second term has surpassed the first in the audacity of its assaults on the foundations of American democracy.

About a year ago and in somewhat a pleasant surprise, the Nigeria born British national, kemi Badenoch assumed the position of the leader of the Conservative Party in the United Kingdom, UK, after a disastrous outing of her Party at the general elections. Perhaps, in a bid to act more British than King Charles, she fashioned herself as a conservative right wing ideologue in the mould of the American president.

With specific regards to her politics, I had earlier written that ‘I’m not a fan of right wing politics, let alone the neo Trumpian extreme right radicalism posturing. They generally tend towards bigotry and there are the pseudo ideologues, the demagogues and sundry political mercenaries who without real ideological convictions merely employ the platform as a tool for political gain’.

Hitherto, and with the subtlety of a thunderclap, she had launched a verbal grenade on the Nigerian political status quo. She said “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, Boko Haram, where Islamism is. Those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people”.

Cut of the same wool and shopping for distraction from the republican party electoral woes at home, Trump zeroed in on Nigeria and bellowed “If the Nigerian Government continues to allow the killing of Christians, the USA will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria, and may very well go into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing,’ to completely wipe out the Islamic Terrorists who are committing these horrible atrocities,”. In their affectation of radical ideological/sectarian posturing, Trump and Badenoch will find a political soulmate in the late President Muhammadu Buhari

The difference between Badenoch and Trump is that as incumbent president, the latter is in a position to put his ideas into effect while the former as shadow prime minister is not. In the proclivity for stirring the hornet’s nest, they epitomise the Yoruba saying that ‘oro ti ologbon ba so ni koko, enu omugo ni a ti ngbo’ (what the wise and circumspect says in privacy, will be ranted out by the talkative fool in the openness of the street). Their propositions constitute a dangerous simplification of the Nigerian problem which, nonetheless, is validated by the historical context of Nigeria, a history in which Islam (in the North) appears to be inherently bound to violence.

This interpretation is borne of such recent pedigree as the impunity of the murder of Deborah Samuel in Sokoto for an alleged blasphemy of prophet Mohammed. The impunity was compounded by the consequent abdication of the Nigerian judiciary to Islamic terror, inclusive of the fear-induced withdrawal of the public admonition of the murderers by Vice-president Atiku Abubakar. You will recall the adjournment sine die of the case by the presiding judge in the face of the mob bearing down on the court the day some of the murderers were arraigned before the Judge.

Giving a historical perspective to this pedigree (by going all the way back to the era of the slave trade), Iliyiasu Gudu persuasively argued that “the point about the brutal historical experiences of the minority ethnic groups in the hands of Hausa-Fulani in the pre-colonial and colonial periods of our history is incontestable. It has been historically documented that the area under reference suffered immensely from the slave raiding activities of rulers and agents of the Fulani dominated Sokoto Caliphate”.

Before the Trump intervention, there has been an increasing normalisation of the tragedy of the regular slaughter of the

long suffering Christian minorities of the North. Having now found a trump card in the arrival of ‘the man on the horse back’, they would be clueless not to maximally milk the cow. For Nigeria, it presents a once in a blue moon opportunity for a course correct.

Prior to Donald Trump and in a unique internationalization of the crisis the British House of Lords once clarified the fraught situation as follows: ‘many thousands of civilians have been killed in attacks led by Islamist Boko Haram and Fulani militias in Northern and Central-belt states in a targeted violence and the perpetration of atrocities against predominantly Christian communities’. (British House of Lords, 2018).

For those who thrive on dealing with the symptom while ignoring the underlying malaise, I find no better characterisation of the Donald Trump threat than the megaphone of Reverend Hasan Matthew Kukah that the American president is ‘merely the sympton of the big elephant in the room namely the persecution of Christian minorities in Nigerian politics’. This underlying disease has several manifestations.

They are substantially captured in the coincidence that nearly all incendiary eruptions with an underlying tone of religious intolerance, (as between Christians and Muslims), had been initiated by sectarian partisans of the latter. I do not know the categorical doctrinal position of Islam on blasphemy, but many violent religious outbursts have been attributed to provocative blasphemy against prophet Mohammed. While I do not condone profanity or sacrilege, I cannot recall any such reciprocal culture in modern Christianity that encourages violent retribution for blasphemy against Jesus Christ.

The spatial proclivity for the degeneration of religious sensitivity to militancy is similarly skewed, as in the conspicuous instance of the Zango Kataf inter ethnic crisis (between the Hausa settlers and the indigenous Atyap people who were banned from trading pork and beer by the settlers). There is always this impression that the Christians tend to suffer the fate of the underdog. There is equally the religious chauvinism implied in the Muslim/Muslim ticket of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu

No Nigerian leader is more circumspect and sub nationally value-neutral (in his comments on Nigeria) as President Olusegun Obasanjo, yet he was driven to such an extent that he could not hold himself from expressing fears of ‘Fulanisation’ and ‘Islamisation’. The case of General Theophilus Danjuma is particularly striking. Here was a man who busted into national prominence as a pivotal figure in the July 1966 counter coup imposition of ‘one North” hegemony, turning around to lead Middle Belt buyer’s remorse at the latter stage of his storied life. He is today the godfather of the Northern Christians revolt against the dominant Islamic partner of Northern irredentist politics.

In exasperation, he once typically and loudly remonstrated “The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba State and other parts of Nigeria. otherwise, Somalia will be a child’s place. I urge all of you to be at alert and defend your country. defend your territory, defend your state,” he said.-(24th March 2018)

At the other end, none has personified the Jihadist variant of Islam in Nigeria than President Muhammadu Buhari, the Al Turabi of Nigerian Muslims. In and out of office, by omission and commission, he is, without doubt, the most symbolic representative of militant Islam in Northern Nigeria. Among his iconic orchestration and incitement of sectarian violence are:

“An attack on Boko Haram is an attack against the North”

“I will continue to show openly and inside me the total commitment to the Sharia movement that is sweeping all over Nigeria. God willing, we will not stop the agitation for the total implementation of the Sharia in the country.” – Buhari (News24, August 27, 2001)

“Muslims should only vote those who will promote Islam. We are more than the Christians if you add our Muslim brothers in the West.”- Buhari (Liberty Radio Kaduna, 2003). “Why should Christians be concerned when Muslim cut off their limbs? After all, the limbs that are being cut off are Muslim ones and not Christian. So why should Christians bother about it?? – Buhari (Liberty Radio, Kaduna 2003)

I hereby adopt the following excerpts from the pedagogic contribution of a Nigerian media icon, Muyiwa Adetiba, as concluding remarks “We have seen the declaration of Fatwa on people whose words and actions have made some religious hardliners uncomfortable. Worse, we have seen people actually being stoned to death on the streets and in broad daylight on grounds that they desecrated Islam. In these cases, the State had been silent and the leaders mute. No line in the sand had been drawn, no culprits apprehended.

It is this silence that smirks of complicity on the side of State and northern elites. And in doing so, have played into the hands of pro-genocide advocates. There is also no denying that Boko Haram, ISWAP, ISIS and Fulani Herdsmen are Islamic groups.”