Opinion: A lethal combination of amnesty and amnesia

by Wole Olabanji

The reality however is that giving every region its own quota of amnesty only assures one thing, an endless and increasingly more vicious cycle of uprisings.

The calls for granting amnesty to members of the Boko Haram Islamic sect have been sounding for a while now and has been largely ignored but when no less than the Sultan of Sokoto who is the spiritual leader of about half of Nigeria’s population recently lent his influential voice to the call, it became necessary to stop ignoring such calls, and to take a reasoned approach to responding to the suggestion.

It would serve us no good to dismiss the suggestion off hand as some have been doing. Neither will it help to grow confidence in the peace building process if we deride the opinions (however ill-formed we think them) of influential persons who have shown the level of moderation that makes it reasonable to hope that if persuasion shall play any role in resolving, or at least containing this conflict, they are the persons who are most likely willing and able to help.

However much we may loathe to consider it, the reality is that one strategic front in the push back against the ideology of Boko Haram and other Islamic extremist groups is the stance of moderate Muslims. There is therefore danger in silencing and alienating the sizable number of Muslims who do not agree with the methods of Boko Haram for proselytizing their faith because we are then left with no easily acceptable ideological counterweight; invariably strengthening the recruitment capacity of Boko Haram which can sell its ‘powerful’ version of Islam to fringe moderates who feel more and more powerless and alienated.

In responding to the Sultan and other people who have raised the suggestion with any modicum of a honest desire to end the crisis, we ought rather to effectively and perhaps quietly engage (not by headline-making derision), to demonstrate why granting amnesty is not a good option for resolving this crisis. It is indeed quite possible to be firm without seeming intransigent as well as to disagree with an opinion without deriding the one who opines.

More can be achieved if we clearly and firmly present the argument with ample examples from our experience as a nation that as a thinking people, we cannot surrender to the impotent idea that granting amnesty is the silver bullet that solves all of our problems, or even that it is a viable solution in this particular instance. Unfortunately, it does appear that while experience is employed as the best teacher in other climes, he is part of the unemployment statistic here; we just don’t seem to learn from him.

To be factual, as a nation, we have a long and rich history of granting amnesty in situations where we ought to insist that the law take its course. I daresay that our most famous beneficiaries of amnesty are not the Tompolos, and Asaris but the IBBs, Objs, Atikus Bankoles, Odilis, and Orjis who having stolen this nation blind, have in some cases never seen the insides of a courtroom much less neared the gates of a prison except perhaps to grant amnesty to prisoners who have served long terms – the cheek and irony of it. To be factual still and perhaps slightly sarcastic, the only suitable analogy that one can find for when our ‘leaders’ who themselves should probably be in prison talk about granting amnesty to anyone is Fela’s timeless lyric: “animal wan dash us human right”.

To be clear, as a professing Christian, I completely embrace the idea of forgiving those who wrong us, but I also completely believe the part of the scripture that teaches that where there is no law (King) – every man becomes a law unto himself (Judges 17:6). In my personal life therefore, it is required of me to continue to forgive everyone who wrongs me, but as a society, it is required that people live within the confines of the law; the alternative of course is anarchy.

Unfortunately, in this case of forgiveness (or amnesty) as in many others, we fail to respect the God-drawn boundaries and established imperatives that separate our personal principles from the principles that ensure sustainable societies; the same principles which in the larger scheme of things make clear to us that separating religion and the state is a necessity since it is the very nature of religious worldviews that they are ultimately irreconcilable.

Beyond the fact that amnesty is not always the right answer however; our situation is compounded by the fact that our major challenge as a people is an acute and mostly self-inflicted case of collective amnesia. We take the ideal of forgive and forget too literally and having forgiven the offender, we also promptly forget that there is a need to put in place structures to prevent future occurrences. That is why an Obj can ‘mismanage’ $16billion just a little over a decade after an IBB ‘mismanaged’ $12 billion and both men still bestride their hilltop mansions from where they regularly assault our collective intelligence (or lack of it) with hypocritical interventions on statecraft. It is the same reason why having granted the Niger Delta militants amnesty, nothing concrete has been done to improve lives in the region which as is reported is leading to another arms build up.

Rather than pursue a more realistic and sustainable approach to dealing with crime in our society, the deep fault-lines which separate us as people ensure that every tribe and group protects its own criminal against collective justice. No saga illustrates this sad madness more clearly than the Oghara People’s shielding of James Ibori from arrest; the argument is that since someone from the other group who did the same thing the last time wasn’t punished, why should our son be punished? It’s the same logic that is sadly applied in asking for amnesty for Boko Haram; since the militants in the creek got amnesty, those on the dunes deserve the exact same treatment. When the absurdity of it grows as it will, we might hear arguments for sending Shekau and his boys to Egypt and Qatar to perhaps learn how to grow date palms.

This kind of reasoning germinates from our political system of turn-by-turn-o-cracy which essentially grants concessions rather than moderate healthy contestation for offices, and has ingrained a culture of entitlement and mediocrity that completely stifles a robust testing of ideas. In the same vein, our principle of federal character means that not only do we allocate responsibility of public office simply by the happenstance of where someone comes from, but that we are also obliged to forgive one criminal here to balance the other one that we forgave who comes from there.

The reality however is that giving every region its own quota of amnesty only assures one thing, an endless and increasingly more vicious cycle of uprisings. Approaching our problems this way would be akin to someone believing he could pay off his debt by being regular on his interest payments without ever paying down the principal, or employing ten people with mop sticks to keep the floor dry rather than one plumber to fix the leaking faucet. Granting amnesty as shown by our myriad experiences clearly never addresses the malady but simply masks the symptoms for a short while.

The problem here is the ideology of Boko Haram which seeks to impose Sharia on Nigerians who do not freely subscribe to such a worldview. To believe that Sheik Shekau and his cohorts can be talked out of this idea is perhaps wishful thinking not different from believing that Osama Bin Laden could have been talked into embracing democracy, and more importantly subjecting the institution of Sharia to the dictates and vicissitudes of the democratic process. Farfetched!

Amnesty may mask some of the symptoms for a while but it is not the solution we need. Combined with our collective amnesia, the two will form a lethal combination which will ensure that in a short while, a far deadlier group will emerge.

What has to happen if we are going to win this war in the foreseeable future is that the security agencies must continue to combat the group while avoiding collateral damage and alienating local communities, while a robust ideological war is also launched to effectively counter and whittle down the influence of the group’s ideologues.

Read this piece on Citizens Platform

 

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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