The story headline itself in Sunday’s edition of This Day was somewhat reassuring. It quoted far-right US Congressman Riley Moore as saying his country and Nigeria are close to reaching a strategic security agreement. But that was where the assurance ended. The body of the story, quoting the many statements that Mr. Moore made after a [pre-determined] “fact finding” visit to Nigeria, reminded me of one episode in Nigeria Television Authority’s [NTA] 1980s soap opera Village Headmaster.
In that episode of particular concern, the school headmaster Mr. Garuba plotted how to shave the dreadlocks from the head of a pupil. A teacher warned him that the boy’s hairstyle had religious connotations, but Mr. Garuba pressed ahead. Since the school lacked scissors to do the haircut, the headmaster hit on an idea, to ask the child’s parents to donate scissors for a school project. “That way, we will kill two birds with one stone.” The teacher protested, “But that will amount to deceit Mr. Garuba.” The headmaster however said, “It is not deceit. It is strategy!”
Mr. Garuba was eventually hauled before a Customary Court judge for shaving a child’s head against the religious wish of his parents. The judge found Mr. Garuba guilty, and as the child’s family members were celebrating the court judgement, Mr. Garuba sat morose in one corner and muttered to himself, “This is a kangaroo court!”
Hot on the heels of his assurance that Nigeria and US are about to conclude a security pact, Moore added the line that it is “aimed at addressing terrorism and genocide against Christians by radical Fulani Muslims in the Middle Belt.” In other words, he has already brushed aside all the briefings made by Nigerian government officials, security experts and religious leaders, that indeed there is insecurity in Nigeria but that it is not of a religious nature. “Radical Fulani Muslims.” The almost daily school shootings that take place in the US, did Moore ever describe them as genocide by “radical Yankee Protestants” against “Catholics in the American Rust Belt”? Did he call the shooting of Charlie Kirk in Utah a genocide against Yankees by radical Mormons?
According to the report, Moore arrived in Nigeria on Sunday last week at the head of a five-member Congressional delegation on “a fact-finding mission over allegations of Christian genocide.” They visited “internally displaced persons, survivors of terrorist attacks, Christian communities and leaders, as well as traditional rulers in Benue State. They also met with the National Security Adviser Malam Nuhu Ribadu and Attorney General of the Federation Mr. Lateef Fagbemi (SAN).” They apparently did not visit IDP camps in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states, or spoke to survivors of attacks in Zamfara, Sokoto, Katsina, Kebbi, Kaduna and Niger states, which would have given them a more rounded idea of the scale of the terrorist and banditry problem at hand and its religiously multi-purpose nature. Their visit was Mr. Garuba-style kill two birds with one stone; appear to investigate the situation but merely reinforce a predetermined narrative.
Moore said in his X post that “the delegation travelled across parts of Benue State in armoured vehicles due to security concerns and met Catholic and Protestant leaders, bishops, and community heads to gather what he described as ground truth.” If they had tried to visit some parts of Nigeria, such as Sambisa Forest, Mandara Mountains, Lake Chad islets and the bush redoubts of Bello Turji in northern Zamfara State, they would have needed more than armoured vehicles; Apache helicopters, Abrams tanks and F-16 fighter jets would be more like it.
Mr. Moore told truly heart breaking stories that he heard from victims in Benue State, of atrocities committed by the attackers. He said while in the Middle Belt state, he met “dozens of Christians who were driven from their homes and subjected to horrific violence and now live in IDP camps.”
According to him, those he spoke with described attacks that left entire families dead and forced survivors to flee their villages.
“They told harrowing stories that will remain with me for the rest of my life.”
Terrible though those stories were, they probably did not tell the whole story of either scale or causation of the terrorist problem. If he had paid even a brief visit to North Eastern IDP camps and spoken to international NGOs there, he would have heard of millions of people displaced in the last 16 years, who suffered equally horrible atrocities in the hands of terrorists, but which they could not easily attribute to an inter-religious genocide campaign. Department of State Security chiefs said in private briefings that the violence in Benue State is attributable to two major factions that emerged out of the late Terwase Akwaza, aka Gana’s violent robbery gang. After soldiers killed him in 2020 AD, his men split into camps and continued their trade. These gangs are locals, and some of their robbery and cattle rustling activities elicit so-called reprisal attacks, which unfortunately affect hapless innocents. Religion has nothing to do with it; it is many-sided criminality.
Moore said President Donald Trump had tasked him and the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Tom Cole, “to compile a comprehensive report on the situation,” which he expects to brief Trump by the end of this month. The question is, did he compile a comprehensive report of the situation, or a politically one-sided picture of the Nigerian insecurity situation in order to feed a predetermined religious right constituency at home? In my many years as a newspaper reporter and editor, I learnt that one must examine very carefully the stories told by victims of atrocities, especially because they are suffering from trauma. When Boko Haram gunmen assassinated Sheikh Albani in Zaria in 2014, a man who was inside the Sheikh’s vehicle later said twenty assailants opened fire at their car from all directions. Police later confirmed that there were only two gunmen, but you must forgive the man who was inside the car for thinking there were twenty of them.
In 2019 or so when Boko Haram sacked a village in northern Borno State, displaced persons who were walking their way to Maiduguri told reporters that more than 1,000 terrorists attacked them. The army later said it was a small band of about ten.
Congressman Moore said in his Saturday night X post that the framework agreement being worked out with Nigerian security officials would focus on combating extremist groups operating in the North-east, including Boko Haram and ISIS-linked factions.
The talks, he said, also covered violence in the Middle Belt region, which he said is “genocide against Christians by the radical Fulani Muslims.” In other words, his visit to Nigeria only reinforced his pre-determined conclusion as espoused by his President Trump. “The report that I will present to @POTUS outlines paths to work with the Nigerian government to end the slaughter of our brothers and sisters in Christ.”
Not to help Nigerian authorities to overcome many-sided insecurity in the country, fueled by the flow of weapons from Libyan arsenals that the Western powers created by bombing Muammar Gaddafi’s regime and ignoring the stern warning of the African Union that it would cause insecurity all over the continent. We are back to Square One; this proposed American intervention could worsen, rather than ameliorate our problems because its sole aim is to appease a right-wing domestic constituency. Mr. Moore’s mission to Nigeria was not open-eyed fact-finding. It was what Mr. Garuba once called a Kangaroo court.
