Mr. Nyong Jonathan Udoeyop, a retired lecturer of the University of Uyo and a Lay Preacher in the Methodist Church tells Nseobong Okon-Ekong that insecurity can be curbed if all groups who feel the Nigerian state has offended them offer peace to the country
A few years ago, insecurity was majorly confined to Northern Nigeria, now it is everywhere. What can be done to curb insecurity in Nigeria?
We first have to know what we mean by insecurity and then the cause of insecurity. You cannot actually run away from this truth that for every cause there must be an effect. There is something that causes insecurity. It is an effect of something-either something present or something absent. You can use traditional methods or use any borrowed method from anywhere, but first of all, what is the cause? We admit that insecurity is an effect of something. Something either present or absent among us. Taking Nigeria generally, the primary cause of insecurity is the absence of forgiveness. It started in the North. You could pin it then to Boko Haram, but there was something before which causes insecurity. Before Mohammed Yusuf there was Maitasine and by and large, Maitasine did not forgive or could not forgive fellow Muslims for not being the kind of Muslim he was. And the other type of Muslims could not forgive him. Then came this Yusuf with his own brand of Islam. Generally he could not forgive non-Muslims for being who they are and the non-Muslims did not forgive him for being who he was. That is at the religious level. At the political level, even before independence, in the Eastern region, we had a movement called COR State (Clalabar Ogoja Rivers) Movement. In the North you heard about the Middle Belt struggle. In the West you heard about something which led to the creation of Mid West State. In each of those instances, you had a minority versus majority-the mentality which causes the minority to be threatened.
The most dangerous insecurity is when the majority feels threatened because the majority had the power, whether military power or economic power or intellectual power to fight back.. When the majority feels threatened the insecurity problem worsens. That is what happened in the Nigerian Civil War. At the point that the Federal Government felt threatened, you had a response to Ojukwu’s insecurity and it is insecurity fighting insecurity. Here we are in Nigeria today, who is causing the causing the insecurity and what is the solution? We are all responsible for the insecurity in this country, because we feel threatened and when the superior force reacts, it is either submit or perish! I want to insist that this thing operates even at a personal level, even at the domestic level. When a wife feels insecure in the house, she will do things which makes the husband feel insecure and the husband’s response may be brutality or end of the marriage. It does not matter what instrument which you can use in response to the situation, the only solution is forgiveness and it comes from the mind. When the mind feels secure, feels invulnerable, the response is different. Look at the life of Jesus, for example. He was threatened almost all the time, for what? For His identity. He asked his accusers, for all these things I have done, why do you want to kill me? They said, we don’t want to kill you for the work you do, we want to kill because you say you are the son of God. In fact, we live by our identity and die by it.
When there is insecurity in the mind, that insecurity is projected to somebody else. Believe it or not, you are fighting that person on who you projected your insecurity because he is not who you think he should be. The Muslims fight the Christians for their identity as a Christian. The Christian will fight the Muslim for his identity as a Muslim. Wife? This is not the kind of husband I wanted to marry or husband, this is not the kind of wife I want to marry. Insecurity comes from the mind. Your perception of yourself in relation to the other. It is only when you come to the realization that you and that person are the same, from a Christian point of view, Christ had to make himself the same as all of us. With that mentality he forgave. Peter, what did he do, he drew a machete and he said put it back. It did not even end there he healed the servant of the High Priest. He forgave Peter and that man who was sent to arrest him. We have to bring our mind to the point that we can believe that we are invulnerable and we become defenseless and it is, perhaps, this defenselessness that can heal us. Look at Meshack, Shedrach and Abednego. They were threatened. They had the option-do what the kind says or die and they felt invulnerable. They said, King we don’t even care to answer you. We know our God will save us from your hand and even if he doesn’t save us, he is still our God. That is the mentality that overcomes insecurity-no matter what this man does, I am who I am.
You started by saying the solution to insecurity in Nigeria is forgiveness, what offences can you point to that the different ethnic groups in Nigeria have done to one another that they need to forgive?
The only offence is being who they are. I don’t need to go further. It comes to a point that, ‘he is Igbo’. Whether he has committed any offence personally or not, ‘he is Igbo’. Here in Akwa Ibom State, ‘he is Annang’. Whether he has committed any offence or not, his identity has already, either redeemed him or condemned him. That is the mentality.
We hear that there is tension in the military barracks, which is like what happened in the 1960s just before the war. We hear that Igbo officers and Yoruba and Northern officers can’t sit together in the barracks anymore
That is because they feel threatened. Why are they threatened? Because of the their identity.
If the treat is majorly about who I am, what needs to be done to deconstruct me to know that I am just a fellow human being?
See yourself as him. When the offended offers peace to the offender, there is a solution. Whoever in Nigeria feels offended, if he takes the initiative to offer peace-all the disciples of Christ offended him. Peter denied him. The rest ran away. And when he rose, he said, ‘peace’. He even sought them out-one by one. He went to Peter. He went to his brothers who said he was a mad man and forgave them and offered them peace.
The peace of the victor is no peace. Nigeria defeated Biafra, not so? And they signed a peace deal. Gowon came with the Three Rs. Has that driven away Biafra? Until the offended offers peace, there is generally, no peace. It is Biafra that needs to offer peace to Nigeria. It is Biafra that needs to forgive Nigeria. Not only Biafra. All those who feel the Nigerian state has offended them. You may suppress them today, tomorrow, the rise up again.
Examine the utterances of some of our leaders. They have not forgiven Luggard for the amalgamation of North and South of Nigeria. There are many today who keep regretting about what could have been. The Ibibio man keeps asking why they brought us into the Eastern region with the Igbos and so on and so forth. The offended has a big responsibility to offer peace. The peace of the victor is not always peace. They cannot erase that hatred from their mind. They are forced to accept what they are offered because they are have no option. Whenever they think they can fight back, they will fight again. That is what the Igbos are doing. Remember what Colonel Phillip Effiong said when he signed the instruments of surrender of Biafra, “we are a people defeated.” Right along the line, even in our villages, we have war over boundary dispute. Tension rise. A few people are killed. The government may step in and the army may impose some degree of peace today. As long as the mind feels I have been injured, I have been cheated, when you don’t remove that mentality. There is no peace.
In Nigeria, the smaller ethnic groups feel the oppression of the Hausa/Fulani and you said to me that it is when the majority feels threatened that there is insecurity. What poses a threat to the Hausa/Fulani today?
It is the risk of them losing power. That is it. Civil society is structured on the basis of who has power. It depends on what you use the power for. If the power is to suppress the outsider, there will be tension. There will be violence. If the power is used to bring together, then there will be peace. As long as one group feels threatened-it can be the minority, they will resist. It can be the majority that feels the possibility that they will lose power.
In a presidential system such as we have, there are levels of this power-there is the presidency, there is the legislature and the judiciary. Let us say, we have an Ibibio man as President of Nigeria. An Ibibio man will not be Vice President. An Ibibio man will not be Senate President. Ibibios won’t constitute all of the senators that we have and members of the House of Representatives. There is some degree of balance and power sharing, why would any ethnic group feel threatened under such an arrangement?
At the political level, who is Senate President is arranged. Who is Speaker is arranged. There will be agreement-somebody from this geo-political zone will be President of the Senate. This will be Speaker; you share offices. These offices go to individuals ultimately, who may not, in the end, remember their people back home. The majority of the people who they rule feel alienated even from their own representatives. Take, for instance the strike by the judicial and legislative workers-a law was passed to make local government autonomous, have the governors signed it? Even the leadership get alienated from their followers. The followers feel insecure in the hands of their governors and the governors feel threatened about the possibility of these people to rise against them. If these workers go back voluntarily. May be two years later, they will go back on strike if the issues are not resolved to their satisfaction. It is the prerogative of the President to appoint service chiefs and other sensitive appointments. Take the parastatals, there is a lot of trouble in the Nigerian Ports Authority and the Niger Delta Development Commission. The NDDC grew from what was called Oil Mineral Producing Area Development Commission (OMPADEC). But most of the contractors of OMPADEC were from the North. Will the people of the Niger Delta not feel alienated? These institutions were not serving their interest. Even when you put a man from the Niger Delta, it is the same. We heard what Kingsley Kuku did with the Amnesty Programme money. It is not just about somebody who is from my ethnic group. In my mind, what is he thinking? I am here as Managing Director of NDDC, I want to show people in my village that my father has a son who is richer than all of them. No matter what he does that mentality shows through. If he is in trouble today, he will pay people to come and demonstrate that our man is innocent, if you remove him, hell will be let loose. In general, those people have not even forgiven themselves. You go to protest purely on tribal interest, you have not forgiven yourself. You have not given yourself the image that benefits you. The sole meaning of forgiveness is to give to yourself or to give to somebody what you know is good for you. That is forgiveness. This is why Jesus said whatever you want somebody to do to you, you first do it to that person. If you want peace offer peace. This is divine justice. Do unto others as you wish them to do to you. It may be your brother that is in office and he is not doing to you what you expect if you were in his position. God put Himself in human position through Jesus Christ to know our needs and our weaknesses; to show us how to forgive.
As one who witnessed the pogrom in the North, which was the forerunner to the Nigerian Civil War, what signs do you see now in 2021 that looks like a playback to the unfortunate events of the 1960s?
Our political leaders are not representing our interests. Look out at the Igbo part of Nigeria today. There are young men today, who are prepared to swear by Biafra, but their political leaders and businessmen think first about their investment in Abuja and Lagos and I do not think that some of them who still remember the pogrom and the civil war are prepared to acquiesce. No political leader in the South-eastern states will in public condemn the activities of the Independent Peoples of Biafra (IPOB). To give the signal, ‘go out and fight, will be difficult’. The signal may not come from the leaders this time. It may come from quite an unexpected source-either the Yorubas or somewhere in the Middle-belt. The greatest threat to the Hausa/Fulani hegemony may not come from the South. We may have a situation where some of the Hausa leaders feel that the Fulanis, who are the actual rulers, the Hausa may feel that they are being persecuted unduly for the crime of commission of omission of the Fulani and then distance themselves and then they will lose the majority they have. Many people down South do not know the difference between the Hausa and the Fulani. The real rulers are the Fulanis. They even oppress the Hausas. Go round, you will not find any Hausa man who is an Emir in the North. Not one. They come from a line. As long as they can trace their ancestry to the Usman Dan Fodio. In Ilorin where the majority are Yorubas, they always have a Fulani Emir.
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The greatest threat to the Hausa/Fulani hegemony may not come from the South. We may have a situation where some of the Hausa leaders feel that the Fulanis, who are the actual rulers, the Hausa may feel that they are being persecuted unduly for the crime of commission of omission of the Fulani and then distance themselves and then they will lose the majority they have. Many people down South do not know the difference between the Hausa and the Fulani. The real rulers are the Fulanis. They even oppress the Hausas. Go round, you will not find any Hausa man who is an Emir in the North. Not one
