Former minister Femi Fani-Kayode is one of the most passionate activists that Nigeria has. And when we talk about activists and activism, I am immediately reminded of an unforgettable definition former president Olusegun Obasanjo once gave of activists. He once said that they are a group of patriots who speak very rapidly on issues that are of equal concern to most other compatriots. I cannot now remember the context. Whether one of the most acerbic of them had given Baba a piece of their usually sharp and piercing tongue or it came about from his accumulated experience of their intervention in public life.
I also cannot say whether this OBJ denotation of who activists are and whether his definition is an endorsement of the ‘work’ which they do or is an offhand dismissal of them all and what they do. Whatever it is, FFK is one of them. And many Nigerians have in the past taken exceptions to some of his positions in his public outpourings.
But on the issue of what is now a clearly sponsored international campaign against Nigeria by the USA and Israelis that there are targeted killings of Nigerian Christians by Nigerian who are not Christians, Fani-Kayode’s recent outing on it is spot on. He said very rapidly on this that the Americans and the Israelis are on a mischievous mission to set one set of Nigerians against the others and that their ultimate aim is to mobilize us to begin a real war against ourselves.
It is true that our nation is today ravaged by banditry, senseless murders, kidnapping and other acts of violence. But the victims are not carefully selected for a particular reason as the campaign seems to imply. The campaign going on is clearly intended to embarrass Nigerian leaders for whatever reasons the Americans and Israelis have against our leadership. Some commentators have said it is, perhaps, an answer or response to Vice President Kashim Shettima’s recent outing at the UNGA in New York where he said rightly that the genocidal campaign in Gaza by the Israelis with the backing of the USA is condemnable and unacceptable.
Except you are an American or an Israeli for whom merciless killing of human beings and the destruction of property are a sport or a hobby as well as an occupation, what is happening in Gaza is reprehensible. Anyone who keeps silence in the face of the horrible atrocities or inhumanity going on in that place automatically becomes complicit. Even God who is said to be the God of the Israelis cannot support what is going on in the Middle East.
If any knock is to be given to the political leadership in Nigeria it is that why did it have to wait for so long before issuing out the condemnation? As a citizen with conscience, I feel bottled up with anger when inanities are taking place in the world against Africans and in the case of the Middle East, against an oppressed group, and we keep quiet in the face of such man’s inhumanity to man. What type of statesmanship is it that says you should not even voice up a lame condemnation against an obvious wrong being done by a powerful force against a powerless one? Have we been spiritually castrated by our mismanagement of our affairs which has brought us to this sorry pass that we are in?
The rise in criminality in Nigeria does not discriminate between Christians or Muslims. We are all victims and we know it. We are beginning to come of age and no countries or groups, no matter how sophisticated their propaganda machinery is, will succeed in hoodwinking us to pick up our bows and arrows to wage war against one another.
We know the source of our problems. It is poor quality leadership. And from what I am beginning to hear, Nigerians themselves have come to an acute awareness of the source of our pains and as 2027 comes around in the next two years many of us are going to rise up and shake off the yoke of this poor-quality leadership.
USA President Donald Trump is not any one’s fool. He is aware that it is former USA president Barrack Obama who armed Boko Haram and supported it to wage war against Nigeria and to help bring about the fall of the Jonathan Government and the enthronement of Muhammadu Buhari in the 2015 presidential election. Jonathan said recently that the kind of sophisticated weapons and ammunitions that the Boko Haram have in their possession come from a sophisticated source. He was too diplomatic to mention the USA by name.
We ordinary folks in Nigeria who are not interested in the game of sponsored campaign against a country in revenge against a perceived injury submit that if the USA and Israelis are genuinely concerned about our plight, Donald Trump should try and reverse some of his policies that hit us so badly. One of them is the suspension of funding to NGOs that fund noble causes in Nigeria and the rest of the developing world.
I am a Christian and a very good one at that and I am not ready to join forces with other Christians or other religionists of any persuasion to start hating and warring against Muslim and Muslim organisations that are supposedly killing Christians, animists and even Muslims.
In a way, I am happy about the response which the American and Israeli dirty tricks has elicited. It has rather united us against those fake lovers of Christian humanity in our land. We have come to realise that those people want to divide us and compound our woes. This is not a small gain. It is a big one for our resolve to build our nation.
