Nigerians for peace

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love.” These are the immortal words of St. Francis of Assisi, the apostle of love and compassion. His famous prayer has the presumption that hatred is the opposite of love. But, in fact, a great philosopher once declared that the opposite of love is not hatred; it is fear. Those we cannot love, we fear; fear in turn breeds dislike and hatred.

Our country Nigeria today stands at the maelstrom of fear. As the elections draw nearer, we have become ever more afraid of each other. This fear in turn is breeding a feeling of collective angst, creating an unprecedented atmosphere of gloom and anomie. So much has been this fear that as early as January many people had sent their families back to their ancestral villages. A good friend of mine has sent his family to South Africa. Others have moved theirs to Europe and America.

The pressures being put on the exchange rate leading to the devaluation of the naira are not only on account of the oil shock and the political-electoral spending cycle; people are scrambling for dollars to move their loved ones abroad. Foreign firms are offloading their portfolio investments and transferring the proceeds offshore.

According to Razia Khan, a managing director at Standard Chartered Bank in London, there may only be four states throughout the Nigerian federation that may not be touched by the purported impending violence. Foreign analysts have already factored in political violence in their risk premia calculations regarding Nigeria as an investment destination.

The question I ask is this: where is all this leading to? Is it not the case that that we fear the most we tend to bring about by the sheer gravitational force of self-fulfilling prophecy? Is there not a way we can put an end to this reign of mortal fear?

I start from the premise that the top principal contenders, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan and General Muhammadu Buhari are both not worth dying for. If Nigerians are completely honest, we would reach the sobering conclusion that both candidates are really not the best that our country can offer.

I concede that the current administration has registered some successes in infrastructure development, in agriculture and so forth. But these achievements are outweighed by the impunity and grand corruption that have continued unchecked until today. Sadly, Nigerians have very little to cheer about.

Muhammadu Buhari, on the other hand, belongs to the Old Guard. He reminds me of a man who set his neighbour’s house on fire and insists he must be allowed to take over ownership of the house in order to quench the embers of the conflagration. The northern oligarchy that started the fire of Boko Haram are now insisting that power must go to them as the only pre-condition for peace. The peoples of the Middle Belt who have been at the receiving end of atrocities by imported “Fulani” mercenaries will not vote for Buhari because he is the honorary chairman of Miyetti Allah, the umbrella organisation for Fulani pastoralists throughout Nigeria. They may not be inspired by Goodluck Jonathan, but they believe that, at least, he will not import Fulani mercenaries from neighbouring countries to come and kill and maim their children.

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Nigerians today are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. The two political choices before us are both rather unappealing and uninspiring. The influential London-based Economist has decided that, in spite of massive human rights abuses by Buhari when he was a military dictator, he is the lesser of the two “evils”. I will not join issues with the presumptuous self-opinionated conceit of the Economist newspaper. They ought to have known from the behaviour of Italian voters with regard to Silvio Berlusconi, that any endorsement of a candidate by a foreign newspaper is likely to draw the opposite reaction by voters. Just as the British would resent any foreigner deciding who is best placed to rule over them, Nigerians would look askance at any foreigner who marshals the effrontery to decide for them who should be their leader. The West has an abysmal record in deciding those who are best placed to rule Africa.

It is ultimately up to the collective wisdom of the great Nigerian people to decide who is best fit to ascend the High Magistracy of their republic come May 29^th, 2015. What concerns all of us is that the elections be conducted in a transparent and peaceful manner and that all sides have the courage to accept the outcomes without stirring up the embers of war.

We were encouraged by the meeting convened by former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to get the political parties to commit to peace and to accept the outcomes, whichever way it turns. Whilst such a compact worked in Kenya, there is no guarantee that it would in Nigeria. For one thing, it was a gentleman’s agreement without the binding force of law. Not soon thereafter, one or two of the party apparatchik were already saying that they could not be bound by that agreement.

Of late, we face an alarming situation of ever-increasing hate speechifying by the politicians. This tradition of hate-mongering has been long in the making. During 2011 General Buhari urged his supporters to bloody the nose of anyone who attempted to cheat them of their votes. He also threatened that he would make the country “ungovernable” should his party lose the elections. Thousands of people died because of such hate-speech. More recently, he spoke of “the dog and the baboon being both covered in blood”. Who is the dog and who is the baboon, he never explained.

As a result of this grim atmosphere, the polity has been heated into a hellish cauldron. We stand, once more, at the precipice of Armageddon. We in Nigeria have this alarming tendency to believe that it is OK once in a while to stare into the gates of hell, believing that once we see the flames, we would beat a quick and sudden retreat. We must stop tempting fate.

In Belgium, a local politician of Nigerian origin, Collins Nweke, has taken the initiative to organise the Nigerian Diaspora community to march for peace on Saturday, the 28^th of February. Thousands of Nigerians, including myself, will be participating in that march for peace. A few have taken the further initiative to bring together a coalition of civil society organisations to meet with European leaders and to make representation at the European Parliament and to seek their support in building confidence for peace in Nigeria.

We want the world community to rally around our people and to prevail on our politicians to act responsibly and to commit to keeping the peace and avoiding violence during and after the elections, whatever side the wind blows.

My appeal to all Nigerians is that no politician is worth dying for. We need to put together a massive show of solidarity in favour of peace. We must work for it as though our destiny depends entirely upon it. Any single Nigerian that dies in the coming elections will diminish me greatly as a person and as a citizen and a human being.

In the words of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God”.

Obadiah Mailafia