By Farooq Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi The progressively widening and deepening bloodbath in Zamfara State is made even wor...
By Farooq Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
The progressively widening and deepening bloodbath in
Zamfara State is made even worse by at least three narrative conspiracies that
mask the real extent of the heartrending humanitarian disaster the people there
are contending with.
The first narrative conspiracy is a media one. The
institutional news media in Nigeria lack ready-made, stereotypical mental
representations with which to frame the conflict, so they either avoid
reporting it altogether or minimize its horrors if they report it at all. The
news media thrive on Manichean binaries, conflictual differences, and sensation.
The Zamfara mass slaughters don’t lend themselves to that.
It would have made a "better copy” if the murderers in Zamfara
were from a different ethnic and religious group from their victims. Imagine a
headline like, “Igbo Christian militia kill 200 Zamfara villagers” or “Tiv yam
farmers invade Zamfara village, kill hundreds, including district head.” Sure,
the headlines would be guilty of sensationalizing and exploiting difference,
but they are sadly the only kinds of headlines people are drawn to.
It’s easy to feel righteous indignation toward journalists
for exploiting difference as a schema for framing news events, but the truth is
that news stories are both texts to be read and commodities to be sold. They
won’t sell if they are bland, predictable, and unexciting. Plus, we have been
socialized to expect news to be displacement of routine.
In Zamfara, the villains and the victims share common
primordial identities—or so the news media think. Nevertheless, it is the same
set of people that the news media have (mis)characterized as “Fulani herdsmen”
when they slaughter farmers in the Middle Belt and in the South that they
simply call “bandits” when they murder men, women, and children in Zamfara.
A headline like “Fulani herdsmen kill farmers in Zamfara”
won’t excite passions and might even be dismissed as counterintuitive in some
parts of Nigeria since Zamfara farmers are a mix of Hausa, Fulani, and Hausa-Fulani people. A popular Yoruba quip
says, “Gambari pa Fulani ko lejo ninu,”
which roughly translates as “If a Hausa person kills a Fulani person, there is
no case,” implying that the Hausa and the Fulani are indistinguishable and that
their internal strife is no outsider’s business. This predisposition has partly informed
the reporting on the continuing Zamfara bloodbath.
Nevertheless, a far more insidious strain of this attitude
is the conspiracy of silence by the direct and indirect victims of the violence.
Several people in Zamfara actively work to suppress news of the mass murders of
innocent farmers because they reckon that publication of such tragedies will
lengthen Buhari’s catalogue of failures, weaken his estimation in the country,
and make him “look bad.” As incredulous as it sounds, people actually fast and
pray in the North so that news of mass massacres don’t make it to the news
media because of their “love” for Buhari!
In fact, everyday folks who share news and photos of mass
slaughters of men, women and children in Zamfara on social media have been
threatened by unpaid, unappointed defenders of Buhari in the state. Scores of
people from Zamfara inbox me periodically on Facebook and entreat me to help
publicize incidents of mass slaughters that have been kept away from the media.
I have taken a personal decision not to allow people who are too cowardly to
come out in the open to tell the truth about the tragedies that happen in their
communities to ride on my coattails. In any case, defenders of the government
will always question my locational bona fides to impeach the credibility of
such stories.
It is precisely the same scenario that is playing out in
Borno and Yobe states. The vocal minority in these states are so hypnotized by
their “love” for Buhari that they cover up Boko Haram attacks, threaten people
who publicize them, and lie to the world that everything has been hunky-dory
since Buhari became president. There is no precedent for this depth of mass
stupidity in Nigeria.
Even after the Shehu of Borno told Buhari on November 30 that, “the people of Borno State are still
under Boko Haram siege,” that “Nobody can dare move out of Maiduguri by 10
kilometres without being confronted/attacked by Boko Haram,” and that “Quite a
number of farmers are being killed and kidnapped on a daily basis,” several
people from Borno still go on social media to lie that Boko Haram is now
history in the state.
When people who are the direct victims of an unending
sanguinary fury don’t want anyone to acknowledge their pain because of their
misguided “love” for a president who swore to protect them but who is either
unwilling or unable to do so, others can’t be blamed for honoring their wishes.
An African proverb says the most difficult person to wake up is a fully awake person
who is pretending to be asleep.
The last narrative conspiracy against the mass murders in
Zamfara is government propaganda. The Buhari regime is deeply invested in its
mendacious, self-absorbed narrative that it has recorded “tremendous success in
the area of security” in spite of glaring evidence to the contrary. So
government actively suppresses or minimizes any news that has the potential to
give the lie to its claims of success in security.
A Premium Times reporter by
the name of Nicholas Ibekwe revealed on Twitter recently that a government
minister invited journalists in Abuja, bribed them with N1 million each (he
said he rejected the bribe) and pleaded with them to suppress news stories
about Boko Haram butcheries in their papers.
Government certainly also encourages the suppression of news
about the Zamfara massacres. Government is so invested in the narrative of its
“success” in security that President Buhari regurgitates it like a preprogramed
robot even when he is commiserating with people who are mourning the loss of
loved ones. For instance, while on a forced sympathy visit to Taraba State in
the aftermath of one of the bloodiest communal upheavals in the state in March 2018, he said, “Today, even our worst enemy can attest to the fact
that the APC-led federal government has done well in the area of security.” It
was one of the worst examples of a tragic presidential dissociation from
reality.
The Blamer-in-Chief
Buhari is the ultimate blamer-in-chief. After his election
at 73, he blamed his age for his slow start. At 74 and 75, he blamed Goodluck
Jonathan and "16 years of PDP misrule" for his awful missteps in
governance that precipitated a devastating recession. At 76, he has now shifted
the blame to the "system." The man is an expert at shifting
cultivation of blames.
The "system" forced him to wait six months to
appoint ministers and to not replace ministers who resigned or died. It made
him wait three years to constitute governing boards of government agencies and
to appoint dead people into them. Several are still unfilled as I write this. The
“system” made him to not prosecute Babachir David Lawal, “budget padders,”
Maina, etc. The “system” made him to unduly delay forwarding Walter Onnoghen’s name to the Senate for confirmation
as Chief Justice of Nigeria until VP Osinbajo saved the day while he was away
in London.
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