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Bishop
of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah
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On Chibok Girls,
Kukah said “I want to believe the government and our military are doing their
best, given the seeming cynical, hypocritical posturing of some of our
international friends who love our oil and care about milking us more than they
love us. Whatever it takes, whenever they are free, we want to see them alive
and hopefully healthy. Their healing is another project, but I do not believe
that their predicament is the result of the lack of will on the part of the
government or the military agencies.”
READ FULL INTERVIEW AS CONTAINED IN THE PUNCH
The
Bishop of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sokoto, Matthew Kukah, tells TOBI
AWORINDE that the foundation for
the Boko Haram crisis in parts of the North was laid years back by leaders of
the region
It’s
over six months since the abduction of the Chibok schoolgirls. Should the
Federal Government/military have taken more dire measures by now?
I
know that we are anxious and, like every citizen, the feeling of hopelessness
is numbing and even humiliating. But what is most important to the girls, their
parents and us all is their safety, sanity and life. I want to believe the
government and our military are doing their best, given the seeming cynical,
hypocritical posturing of some of our international friends who love our oil
and care about milking us more than they love us. Whatever it takes, whenever
they are free, we want to see them alive and hopefully healthy. Their healing
is another project, but I do not believe that their predicament is the result
of the lack of will on the part of the government or the military agencies.
The
military has become the subject of many scandals these past few weeks. One of
such scandals is the beheading of one its pilots, which it denied, despite a
number of confirmatory reactions by family members and friends proving Boko
Haram had killed him. How would you react to the military’s response to the
development?
These
are life-and-death issues and they should not be the subject of politics. I am
saddened that, in pursuance of our obsession with self-flagellation, we prefer to
believe Boko Haram propaganda or any propaganda that makes our military look
bad. Each and every one of us is a soldier, a security agent. We are all in
this together and we shall either hang together or hang separately.
No
country behaves the way we do. I know that our public officers have not
inspired us and that they have left too much to be desired, but no one abuses
his father, husband or wife in public. I have been a critic of the military,
politics and all aspects of national life. But these are not normal times. As
they say, you have to drive the hawk before you scold the chickens. This is not
President Goodluck Jonathan’s war. He is here today, gone tomorrow, and Nigeria
will be here. We cannot make the issue of the tragic death of a patriot a matter
of speculative cheap talk. He has a family, he has died for our country and
what his family needs is emotional support. We are in a war and misleading
propaganda, lies and half-truths are the subject of every war. Why should the
military be allowed to fight Boko Haram and then turn around to defend itself
against a cynical populace?
I
recall a minor incident in 1970 just after the war. We were playing football
when a soldier passed. One of my friends was laughing at something and the
soldier thought he was laughing at him. He started pursuing the boy, who ran
and ran until he vanished. The soldier came back panting, cursing and we heard
him say, ‘Bastard, do you think I sold this eye in the market for money?’ It
was then we realised he had one eye, he had obviously lost one in the war and
he assumed the boy was laughing at him. I have not forgotten that incident. But
that is how painful these things are.
Not
a few have called for the beheaded pilot to be honoured as a national hero. Do
you agree?
Anyone
who lays down his life for his country deserves the highest honour. We have
sinned against our heroes, whether in sports, the military or any other area.
You see how much premium is placed on the ceremonies of a dead American,
British or Italian soldier. The fault is in the government and the military
itself. But you media men and women should do more; much, much more.
Again,
the military was listed among perpetrators of torture in Nigeria, according to
an Amnesty International report. What is your take on the allegations against
the military?
This
question is annoying, very annoying. You know human rights are at the top of my
agenda. But please, why has Amnesty International not done a report on human
rights in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Kingdom, Italy or the United States
and so on? Why did they not do reports on Guantanamo Bay or on waterboarding or
the wars in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and and so on? When the big powers make
human lives look like nothing, they are not interested. Human life and human
rights are a leveller.
When
you are facing life and death, what do you expect soldiers to do? There are
rules guiding war, as contained in the Geneva Convention, and these are what we
should be focusing on. But everyone knows that when difficulties of war set in,
no one goes around waving these conventions.
What
is more, the United States knew about all these rules and it still found its
way by changing the international and national vocabularies. (American
politician and businessman) Donald Rumsfeld’s memoir, ‘Known and unknown,’ has
a chapter dedicated to how the United States literally suspended, twisted or
broke every rule in the game to clear the way for its fight. The section is
called Law in a Time of War; that is, law as warfare in a time of war. His
accounts are fascinating but they cleared the way for the kind of terrible,
gross violations that Amnesty International should have been concerned about.
First,
to avoid the United Nations Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, the
Americans invented the idea of referring to Al Qaeda suspects as unlawful
combatants. And secondly, to clear the way for them to get away with bending,
twisting and breaking the law, they took their case to a legal no-man’s land
called Guantanamo Bay, where the only laws were the ones they made or invented
as they went along.
Please,
read me right and read me carefully: I respect Amnesty International and I
admire the great work they do. However, I worry that flogging poor countries
has become their pastime and they are setting one law for the big boys and
another for the lesser mortals. War is the final breakdown of respect for life
and under those circumstances, too many bad things happen to poor innocent
people. But our military must be held accountable by the laws of war, so as not
to create the impression that we are in a tea party. Why is Amnesty
International oblivious to the lives that Boko Haram is destroying? I have
spoken out against the unacceptable mistakes and excesses of our soldiers as it
concerns innocent civilians, women and children and we must keep condemning
them. But we must not behave as if these are normal times.
According
to Amnesty, Nigeria is among the group of countries that signed a pact about
seven years ago to denounce torture as an illegal act. As a country, are we not
to be worried that, according the report, Nigeria, as well, uses torture as a
means of carrying out investigations?
Read
my book, ‘Witness to justice.’ I have a whole long chapter on torture. There is
the ticking-bomb theory in torture, which argues thus: Imagine that a man has
planted a bomb somewhere and it is timed to go off. You are holding the man and
he refuses to give you information, what will you do? Should you respect his
right not to be tortured or should the right of those who face impending death
trump his own life? We have seen from the stories of kidnappers and payment of
ransom that some of these arguments are really academic. There is overwhelming
evidence now that some western countries that pay ransom under the table have
inadvertently been funding Boko Haram, and Boko Haram has realised that white
people have more economic value. So, again, it depends on what side of the
fence you are sitting on. There are no moral absolutes and these issues are not
as easy as they seem.
What
is your take on the recent trend of mutiny in the military?
Which
mutiny? They are being tried. But, I do hope that the military is merely going
through the process. These young men are victims of a bad war already. We are
fighting a fratricidal war and not fighting outsiders. It is bad and sad enough
that Boko Haram has set us against ourselves. The military high command must
know that we will confront them with our moral guns if they attempt to kill
anyone. Let them serve some punishment, be retired and sent home. But death?
Forget it.
Many
feel that the Boko Haram insurgency is all about eliminating Christians in the
North. What do you feel?
This
is a tough question and it is the subject of a book or a Ph.D thesis. I will
try and summarise my views for you. Please, be patient because I will give you
a very long, short answer. Those of us who are far away from the scene can be
romantic about our theories, but Muslims in Nigeria have to deal with many
problems themselves. They have to address questions about perception of their
religion and how they left the door open. They have to deal with the level of
honesty about their relations with Christians or, should I say, non-Muslims
beyond the moral platitudes.
As
we are talking now, it has been reported by the Catholic Diocese of Maiduguri
that about 185 churches have been burnt by Boko Haram. I am in touch and know
the painful stories of the church under crucifixion. The question is not how
many mosques, if any, have been burnt. So, how else can we remove a religious
dimension to this? But this is only half of the story because it raises other
questions: Why is this happening only in northern Nigeria? Muslims in the
South-West of Nigeria have not gone around burning churches and killing people
or destroying the properties of Christians. Northern Muslims must answer why
this ugliness is peculiar to their region and their version of Islam.
There
are immediate, short- and medium-term explanations and I may not be correct,
even in my analysis. However, I believe that there has been too much hypocrisy
in northern Islam, based on how the elite have used the religion to deceive,
belittle even their own people. Secondly, some of their leaders have thrived in
pretending to place Islam over and above their nation, not to talk of other
minorities within their enclaves. When you deny Christians chances to go on
pilgrimages; when you build hundreds of mosques and deny Christians lands; when
you deny non-Muslims places in the bureaucracy or in public life, what are you
saying to your children? When you privilege one group and make the other feel
inferior, you are opening the window and the young people growing up can see
the difference between Cain and Abel. When you pretend that we are children of
the same father, and you openly discriminate against me, one of us must be a
bastard. Years of this apartheid have sown the seeds of a feeling of
superiority and that is why these youths treat Christians and properties with
seeming contempt. When our churches became objects of target practice, all
these years, the leaders merely looked the other way or stayed in silence or
fear. The children of Boko Haram have been fed by this sour broth of hate. This
is what has bred the bitterness that the northern Christian minorities feel,
and time is running out. There is need to discuss these issues for the survival
of the region, but where is the leadership with courage to summon us to the
table?
My
brother and friend, the Sultan, has shown courage and I have known him for some
time. But, like all religious leaders, he has only a moral voice and there are
those who do not necessarily support his openness and courage. He has spoken
out on some of these issues, the real challenge is for the politicians to wake
up and walk the talk. The President has to do more to protect minorities and to
ensure their constitutional rights, especially in the area of religious
liberty.
What
will you say concerning the issue of the insurgency being reduced to politics,
especially between the All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic
Party?
Even
if we are powerless, God will not forgive anyone who uses our tragedy for
politics from whichever side. This country has been so severely wounded; our
future depends on fixing it and Nigerians must distance themselves from anyone
who offers any simplistic solution to this problem. In moments of crisis, real
politicians adopt bipartisanship. I have said it over and over, we have to have
a country before these cowboys can have access to loot the treasury and head to
Dubai for their sickening orgies. Tragically, we have no political class. All
we have are men and women who are out like vultures circling around the carcass
of the Nigerian state.
Does
it really matter if we have a Muslim-Muslim or Christian-Christian presidential
ticket in the country?
Having
a ticket is not enough if you have no idea of the destination. We are the ones
who continue to hoist this nonsense by constructing dubious identities. What
difference does it make if the Muslim-Muslim or Christian-Christian tickets are
bandits out to kill you. Should you simply sit and be killed by someone because
he shares your church or mosque? You would wisely say you want your life and it
does not help if you are killed by your mother or an armed robber. You are
dead—finish!
Some
have called for devolution of powers. Is that really the country’s problem?
Whenever
we run out of ideas, we simply drop one more word. The words are both imprecise
and they never say anything new and then Nigerians grab it and present it as a
solution to our problems. Power-shift, rotation, zoning, true federalism, and
so on—all absolute nonsense—because even those who use them have not spent time
reflecting on them. When anyone of these expressions becomes popular, they are
bandied as the solution to our nation’s ills.
The
issues of how best to resolve our problems is the subject of far more serious
reflections requiring deep mental acumen, which our politicians do not possess
and are not predisposed to deal with. We imbibed the culture of dreading long
grammar, which is another way of saying we do not wish to be called to account,
to submit to logic and deep thinking. We thought merely expanding the political
space through state and local government creations was a solution. But we have
come to a dead end and are looking like the mother who thinks she can solve the
problem of family greed by simply giving the children more empty plates rather
than food.
What
will you advise people of various faiths, as 2015 elections approach?
I
am not a bishop of various faiths. I am a citizen of Nigeria first, who happens
to be holding an office of a Bishop of the Catholic Church. My choice as a
citizen should be far more important than some narrow consideration. We
continue to use religion as an excuse for not doing our duties as citizens.
Regarding
the controversy surrounding $9.3m, what would you say are the effects of this
on the average Nigerian?
I
have neither seen the money, the plane nor the arms. How should a mere $9.3m
affect an average Nigerian, when billions lost to fuel subsidy have not killed
us? If cancer did not kill you, why should a boil kill you? It is the least of
my worries now.
There
has been a lot of backlash against the President of the Christian Association
of Nigeria, Ayo Oritsejafor. How do you feel about the criticisms?
I
am not Pastor Ayo. After all, as the Hausa say, you cannot eat onions by
borrowing someone’s mouth. If his back is lashed, how can I answer for him?
Some
want the Catholic body to completely pull out of CAN. Do you support this?
There
is no one in the Catholic Church called ‘some.’ The Catholic Church existed
before CAN and it fathered and mothered CAN. We do not look at the direction of
the wind to take our decision.
With
the 2015 elections around the corner, do you think the heavy militarisation of
the last elections of Ekiti and Osun could serve as a positive reference point
for Nigeria’s democracy?
I
have not monitored elections in a long time and I was neither in Ekiti nor
Osun. I am not sure they necessarily affected the outcomes based on what I
heard from those who were there.
Many
see 2015 as being a critical factor of Nigeria’s unity. How important are the
2015 elections to Nigeria?
2015
is a date on our calendar. It will come and go. People will die and others will
be born. People will win and lose elections and so on.
How
do you see the electorate having a voice in deciding the leader they get?
By
going out to register. The ballot paper is the voice. So, no ballot paper, no
voice.
What
would you consider to be the recipe for conducting a peaceful, free, fair and
credible 2015 election?
Ask
my friend, Professor Attahiru Jega, who is paid to ensure that.
Culled from The Punch
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