Abimbola Adelakun
On Monday, two suspects arrested over the killing of Deborah Samuel, a Christian student killed in Sokoto, appeared in court. According to the police prosecutor, the suspects, Bilyaminu Aliyu and Aminu Hukunci, led the mob that lynched Deborah. As for the ones that actually killed her, I suppose we have to wait to see how and when the state will take on their own case. Also, given the Nigerian Police’s history of botching the case of poor victims of Islamic violence in that region of the country (remember Bridget Agbahime?), I am hoping they are earnest in pursuing justice for Deborah. It is no simple task; arresting her killers and taking them to court is the easy part. The real challenge lies in confronting the world that emboldened her killers. For that aspect, you have to wade through a dense thicket of collaborators that include religious and community leaders, the judicial system, the clique of politicians, and even the state bureaucracy.
People do not just wake up one morning and feel entitled to take someone else’s life. They do it because they have been socialised into believing that they have the power to determine who lives or dies. That was how one lawyer in Kano, an otherwise inconsequential fellow, could write to a whole Inspector General of Police, saying if an atheist, Mubarak Bala, was not stopped for saying things he considers blasphemous, Muslims would cause trouble. In a decent society, the IG would have responded to that veiled threat with the relevant sections of the Constitution, but no. Instead, they arrested Bala and incarcerated him for about two years before sentencing him to 24 years in prison. Even that is not enough for them. Some preacher in Sokoto still wants him dead. When you read the judge’s statement sentencing Bala, you realise he is a victim of an entire conspiracy that runs from the grassroots to the IG’s office and all the way to the courts. Muslims have inordinately shed blood so many times in this country that they only need to invoke the spectre of mass deaths and the structures of political power will do anything to pacify them.
That is why we should not make certain strategic errors when talking about Deborah’s death. The first is to never characterise the actions of her killers as “fighting for God.” Doing so ascribes a noble motive to sheer criminality. No one fights for God. If God were offended by Deborah, He would have struck her down by Himself. God is too eternal to be petty. You cannot even kill in the name of a God you have never seen. What you do is claim offence in God’s name so you can arrogate to yourself the right to determine whose life is worthwhile or not. The real blasphemy in Deborah’s case was committed by those who killed her. If a religion that has existed for centuries and is currently practised by more than one billion people can be threatened by the opinion of one woman—just one woman! —you have elevated her to the same status as your God.
Second, forget about the sin of blasphemy and all the syrupy nonsense being dished about by apologists who enjoin us to respect other people’s religion. There is no law that compels anyone to respect what other people believe. We respect people’s faith practices as a courtesy and for the sake of maintaining social cohesion. You cannot demand respect from anyone as a right; it is a privilege that they can choose to accord you or not. Those blaming the victim by saying people’s religious beliefs should be respected are setting themselves up and will ultimately be ensnared by an evil that cannot be placated even if you grovel before it. Condoning those who believe that your life is theirs to take does not mean they will let you live. It is only a matter of time before they decide that even your very existence offends their God! When people have determined that they will regulate the social temperature through violence, it does not matter what you do or not. They will kill you to make a point.
We must not yield moral ground to the people who use religious violence as a weapon of social control. They are not protecting God’s dignity from humans; they are merely accruing political gains. The northern political hegemony has relied on cultivating the primal impulses of their people so that those maniacs can be readily deployed to carry out inordinate violence when required. Do not be deceived into thinking that those who control the strings of these murderous maniacs who killed Deborah have any abiding interest in religion itself. When Isa Pantami was just a local alfa, he was no different from all the rest of his kind that justifies murder. After he had made it to the federal cabinet as Minister of Communications and Digital Economy and those comments surfaced to threaten his lush appointment, he did not hesitate to renounce them. The fact that he could drop those beliefs like a bad habit to protect his privileged position shows how superficial everything he thought and taught was. But the bloodthirsty horde he cultivated are still there, writing arrant nonsense about who deserves to die.
Consider the Deputy Chief Imam of the National Mosque, Professor Ibrahim Maqari, who also justified Deborah’s murder and wonder why he has not been sacked for such irresponsible comments. Come on, was it not just weeks ago that they sacked the Imam of Apo legislative quarters, Nuru Khalid, for merely criticising the president’s glaring failures? If they could do that, why retain a man that said, “…she (Deborah) deserved death, there is no doubt about it, but who should kill her and how is the issue.” No, the issue is why such a heartless person like that has not been ostracised from decent society. Maqari believes in God but cannot even bring himself to fear God. She deserved death over what? If the dignity of Maqari’s faith relies on public opinions and people have to be killed if their thoughts crossed a line that he has drawn, it means the truth of his faith is too fickle. In a society where people have a conscience, nobody would associate with a wicked human like him.
Look, when a society is bracketed on all sides by a “professor” who thinks someone deserves death over a comment, religious leaders who openly advocate murder over supposed blasphemy, a political system that tolerates Sharia courts handing out life sentences or capital punishment for the “crime” of blasphemy, police IGs that run the errands of men who claim offence on God’s behalf and judges that help them hand out extended sentences, and worst of all, by moral cowards seeking leadership, like Atiku Abubakar who renounced his opinion on Deborah’s murder after his political constituents in the North threatened not to vote for him, then you see why the Nigerian night is a long one. Seriously, arresting Deborah’s killers is the easy part of the task ahead.
What Nigeria needs are people who believe in the country well enough to fight for its redemption. We need a leadership class that believes in protecting the principles of democratic freedom with the same passion those religious fundamentalists exercised when they killed Deborah. They need to stand up to these fanatics and remind them that Nigeria’s democracy guarantees us freedom. Freedom is worthless if we cannot use it. Freedom is not freedom if someone does not test its limits. We cannot be spending billions of naira on elections every four years while some of the most fundamental principles of democracy get flagrantly broken by people who want the world to revolve around the orbit of their narrowed minds.
Watch it, the same set of people denying Deborah her inalienable right to say what she said will become sudden believers in democratic freedoms when matters switch to Hijab in public schools. The same nuisances who say they have a red line that we dare cross at the cost of our lives will insist on their own right to religious expression. You are either a believer in the rights of humans or you are an ideological hypocrite. If you genuinely believe, you will know that nothing—and I repeat, nothing—justifies Deborah’s death. She did not do or say anything illegal. The people who labelled that voice note an insult against their religion and gleefully circulated it nationally are the ones who insulted their own Prophet. If they sincerely believed that the penalty for blasphemy is death, they would have committed mass suicide by now.
