Shiites are like Buhari’s followers

Abimbola Adelakun

The explanation for the violence being meted out to the Shiites
in recent days suggests that the rationalisers think that the
victims deserve their fate because of their rebellious attitude to
authority. That line of thinking is false, a weak justification of
cruelty. In the past few days, an uncertain number of Shiites (some
reports suggest up to 50 of them) have been killed in gory
circumstances while protesting in Kaduna and Abuja. The brutal
killings of the Shiites are not new, and a lot has been said
already about their violent encounters with the Nigerian
forces.

Different government dispensations have subjected the Shiites to
unthinkable violence; they have continued to imprison their leader,
Sheikh Ibraheem El-Zakzaky, despite the court’s orders to the
contrary and killed his children as well. In 2016, a public inquiry
report by the Kaduna State Government revealed that the Nigerian
Army massacred 347 Shiites when they stood in the way of the convoy
of the Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai. Not only were they
gruesomely murdered following that incident that happened in
December 2015, but the government also reportedly conspired with
the Army to bury their bodies en masse. Then, they demolished
El-Zakzaky’s houses. The man’s health is deteriorating. With the
degree of humiliation he has been subjected to, it seems they want
him to suffer to his death. Whatever people think about their
manners, these crimes against these people merit an
investigation.

In 2015, when President Muhammadu Buhari appeared on television
for his first and only media chat ever, he seemed to justify the
murder of the Shiites. At first, he said he would wait for an
official report of the investigation of those killings before
jumping to a conclusion. Then, typical of Buhari who can never help
himself, he went ahead to judge the Shiites for creating a fiefdom
within the Nigerian state. He claimed the residents of Zaria have
been facing hell from the Shiites, and that their stoning an army
general triggered the wave of violence that descended on them. It
was apparent Buhari had already made up his mind that the Shiites
were guilty and what was wreaked on them was due justice. He is not
unique in that respect. In April this year, the Muslim Rights
Concern put out a press release to explain their stand on the
El-Zakzaky issue. They claimed that they were initially in support
of a different treatment for the Shiites until they invited
residents of Zaria to speak of the experience of living with the
Shiites. They claimed that hundreds of Muslims testified that their
lives were regularly threatened because of the culture of
harassment and intimidation by the Shiites. As a result, they
decided they would take sides with law and order even if the rights
of El-Zakzaky and the Shiites had to be sidestepped in the interest
of peace.

Here are a few points to consider: One, while it might be true
that the Shiites are a belligerent and tiresome set of people
nobody enjoys living with, their “crimes” do not merit the scale of
violence meted out to them. They might be a lawless lot, but that
does not mandate their slaughter. No matter what anyone thinks of
them, they have a right under the law to assemble and protest over
any issue including the continued detention of their leader. Two,
while the Shiites might be lousy neighbours and noisome pestilences
as the testifiers alleged, and while it might also be true that
their religious zeal threatens the well-being of the people of
Kaduna, their conduct cannot be isolated from the general spirit of
law and disorder that permeates the entire Nigerian society.

We live in a country where even our leaders conduct themselves
as above the law; a country where the Nigerian Health Insurance
Scheme boss, Prof Usman Yusuf, who was suspended from office by the
governing board, based on allegations of corruption used the police
to penetrate a public building he should be barred from; a country
where cows roam the streets of the Federal Capital Territory and
even the major cities; a country where public infrastructure barely
ever works; a country where herdsmen attack villages and massacre
people with impunity and without the fear of God while the
President vainly struggles to manufacture one excuse or the other
for them; a country where there are no enforceable instruments we
can use on our leaders to guarantee their accountability to the
public. We cannot live in a country where public service and public
conduct are just dysfunctional and justifiably claim that the
Shiites are the problem. Whatever their faults are, their conduct
cannot be extricated from the larger issues of Nigeria where
lawlessness itself is a governing ideology. The instruments of the
law exist to curtail the Shiites’ excesses and get them to act
within the ambits of decorous behaviour, but never to violently
repress them with unmitigated cruelty.

Three, of all the accusations of harassment made against the
Shiites, not once were they accused of murder for their leader.

Unlike Buhari’s followers.

In 2011, when Buhari lost an election he could never have won,
his followers went on the rampage. By the time their madness was
exhausted, they had killed an estimated 800 Nigerians. Not a single
one of them was prosecuted. Not a single one is on trial, and it is
unlikely they will ever be called to account for their sins. Buhari
himself has never expressed remorse about the fanaticism of his
overzealous followers. When they conduct themselves above the law
such as when they attacked a man for naming his dog Buhari, or
attacked Charly Boy in Wuse Market, Abuja, for protesting against
Buhari with his #OurMumuDonDo group, they are not shot for their
lawlessness. Instead, it is their victims who are blamed for
overreaching themselves. Buhari does not apologise for his
followers’ behaviour neither does he caution them. The man seems to
revel in his followers’ worship of him and the way he savours their
devotion is, frankly, quite disturbing and depressing. Over the
years that the talakawas have made him their patron saint, Buhari
seemed to have developed a god-complex. That, apart from the
ideological divergences of Sunnis and Shiites, perhaps explains his
hatred of El-Zakzaky and his equally devout followers. By crushing
El-Zakzaky, the President is not working outside the ambits of the
law to restore the integrity of the same law and order which they
claim the Shiites violate; he is a jealous god using the power of
the state invested in him to destroy a rival.

The persistent justification for treating Shiites as sub-human
citizens against whose raw flesh some zombie soldiers can use
lethal weapons is too superficial a reason in a socio-political
context where people are ruled through an incoherent law and order
enterprise. To keep claiming they are being punished for their
unruly conduct when Buhari’s followers have done worse things is a
lie. If belligerence against instituted authority is enough
condition for shooting people in the streets, Buhari’s followers
ought to have been given a similar treatment for their sins in
2011. So, why are the Shiites being represented as a singularly
volatile demographic? In 2015, one of the fears that permeated the
polity was that if Buhari lost the election, his followers would
resort to an all-out war, a fate that was thankfully averted when
the incumbent, President Goodluck Jonathan, conceded the election.
One can only hope he is kind enough to put them on a leash if he
loses in 2019. His followers have not just been triggered by
perceived offences to their religion, they have turned Buhari into
a material symbol of their religion and they will kill for his
sake. They lack restraint; they are bloodthirsty and their
tendencies to violence far outstrip those of the Shiites. Have they
been punished once? No.

So, why so much cruelty against the Shiites?