Dear Arewa, have you seen your role models in Anambra beheading their lawmakers? Anytime someone condemns you about enabling violence and shielding criminals, your retort is that the South is doing even worse and no one is talking about it. You want to be left to your violent ways like your southern rivals. ‘Don’t call us out, don’t condemn because you are de-marketing the north.’
To many southern commentators, if what happened in Anambra (and happening in many parts of the SE) was in the north, you would have inundated our timelines with chants of ‘One Nigeria is a scam’ and how the barbaric and almajiri north is dragging the country backward. Even professional organizations like the NBA chooses which extrajudicial murder to condemn and which one to pretend it didn’t happen.
You can see now that there’s strong resemblance between bigots on both our northern and southern ends of the Nigerian spectrum. They all share in their blind aversion to truth, disregard for fairness and lack of balanced perspectives. And both are triggered by any attempt to shine light on their bigotry. To them, justice and fairness are region- and religion-dependent.
Their outrage is determined by the identity of the victim and the perpetrator. If the perpetrator is their own, they behave in a way that the perpetrators appear blameless even if the victim is theirs (southern outrage against Ipob = northern outrage against banditry). But you don’t fight injustice through selective condemnation and subtle endorsement of your own criminals. It doesn’t work and it will never work.
A country can only progress if it’s built on the ideals of justice, equity and fairness irrespective of any religious, ethnic, social or political identity. I often wonder if we can ship out the bigots on the northern and southern ends of the Nigerian spectrum to another country (like Adamu Garba’s Nigritia) so that the rest of us can live happily ever after in a peaceful, just and prosperous Nigeria.
- Husain lives in Abuja
