Busuyi Mekusi

My engagements with psycho-social experiences of human beings have copiously revealed the many contradictions that plagued both social engineering and transcendental interactions with super/supervisory/supernatural agencies. The physical and emotional parts of human beings still left a vacuum to be filled, owing to the quest to resolve very many ordinarily inexplicable matters and, therefore, the need to identify the constituent authority that prescribes human trajectory, which may be inalienable or unalterable

This explains why people believe in one form of spiritual authority or the other, while some few others believe ‘nothing’. Notwithstanding what one believes, spirituality continues to contrast with science and technology, and the gap between the mundane and divine gets widened by the day. Someone’s fate is inextricably linked to the recognised super-head for whom the person has submitted to. Therefore, acts of worship should remain personally relatively sacrosanct, while religion is undoubtedly opium!

Given the multiplicity in human physiological, socio-cultural, emotional, and spiritual configurations, people have been individually and collectively pigeonholed through the instrumentalities of race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, social and economic privileges, etc. As it has been reinforced in identity and citizenship studies, relating to people with the foregoing elements would create both inclusion and exclusion, at the same time, with the results of such a compartmentalisation mostly evidently faulty and redundant.

To this end, most human agencies enter into human interactions with needless pride of ownership, correctness and perfection, without realising that such self confidence is nothing but a punctured balloon after all. For instance, the suspicion about an outsider or stranger is, to some extent, unfounded, as such strangers are allowed to transgress personally constructed borders as soon as contractual dealing of love relationship is triggered. Note that with the cocoon you have built for yourself, you automatically have some strangers to contend with, while you also become a stranger to others.

With the variations found in the origins of man, and the physical alterations that the environment could impose on humans, the Jew-Arab compartmentalisation that predominantly threatens world peace has been biblically traced to the lack of discretion by Abram and Sarai, who had to abridge the sequence of procreation emplaced for them by Yahweh, through the commoditisation of the latter’s house-help, Hagar, by which a distinction came by reason of Ishmael. Needless to also stress that the Jewish migration and annexation of spaces remain typologies and taxonomies for rural, urban, continental and transnational occupations of others’ spaces today; from community invasions in Africa to Jihadist movements in Africa; from European explorations and invasions of colonies to the movements of slaves and indenture labourers to service capitalistic growing industries during the industrial revolution. The pillaging of the dark continents by Europeans, having ‘hearts of darkness’, nonetheless interfaced with the abolition of Slave Trade and cultural annihilation through missionary expeditions. The New World, and later America, typifies how endemic subjugation could birth enduring liberation. Unfortunately, African Americans are still in chains!

The death by stoning and burning of Deborah Samuel, the ill-fated 200 level student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto accused of unfounded blasphemy, reminiscent the various religious hiccups and intoxication Nigerians are suffering from. Worsened politicised religious and ethnic mistrusts have seen people mowed down at very little provocation, as commoners are made to pay for the sins of the rich political leaders and elites each time emotions boil over. The cities of Kano and Lagos remained epicentres of religious crises until banditry, terrorism, cultism and political rascality altered the narratives.

There have been increased concerns about the armies of unguided northern youths that grew up on the street, courtesy of the Almajiri system, who have become ubiquitous instruments of destruction in the hands of selfish politicians and illegal gold miners. With huge number of out-of-school children, and the ideology of Boko Haram that western education is forbidden, one would want to commend the school mates of Late Deborah for being students of the College, but for the fact that their studentship, just like the case of many well-educated extremists, did not separate them from the wicked pack.

Although the 1999 Nigeria Constitution (as Amended) mentions Sharia and Customary Laws, the former became a political instrument to jolt the Obasanjo-led federal government, as the then Governor of Zamfara, Ahmed Yerima, gave a force to the Sharia Legal System, and punitively got the court to order the cutting of the hands of people found guilty of criminal acts. Since the era of this ‘political Sharia’ commoners have deficiently and recklessly tended to enforce some of the likelihoods of the religion they adore so much in mob actions. Curiously, none of the thieving elites have been taken through the Sharia Legal System, either for atonement or retribution.

About the time Deborah was made a devil to be stoned by impoverished misfits that could not make Hajj, Dave Sunday Imoh, a sound engineer, was killed in a mob attack during the scuffles he had with some Okada riders.  Beyond the banning of commercial bikers in some local government areas of Lagos State by Sanwo-Olu, the Okada riders remain a thorn on the flesh of other users of Nigeria roads. Nigerians and people in other climes are now like Buffalos, hunted by people that have been hounded by the establishment! The tempests across the nation are palpable!

Racialised spaces like South Africa and America continue to struggle with both past attributions and present complications of white supremacists. The subjugation and dehumanisation of Blacks in South Africa have been sufficiently documented, particularly through the Goldstone Commission, which was meant to unpack the shenanigans of apartheid-era South African Defence Force for causing violence in black townships in the 1990s, and the Desmond Tutu-led Truth and Reconciliation Commission, emplaced to help South Africa relate to its violent burdened past. Of particular note was the confession made to the TRC by former members of apartheid Strike Force that they burnt some activists in the bush, and made a Braai and smoked cigarettes while the burning lasted. Further revelations have been given by Paul Eramus, a former apartheid police officer, in his book titled Confessions of a StarCom Hitman, detailing the brutality they carried out, as well as the torture, beatings, killings and assassinations they perpetrated.

As the nation struggles to blur old fault-lines and foster deliberate inclusions, old white supremacists continue to inculcate self-preservation ideology in ‘born-free’ white younger generation to retain old compartmentalisation and evoke new exclusions. Amidst new shifts and contradictions, the place of whites in South Africa remains fluid, even as majority Blacks turn psychopathic due to sustained marginalisation.

United States commitment to de-emphasising race has not deterred white supremacists and separatists from carrying out hate crime and race-based attacks and killings. Unequivocally speaking, different attacks in America have reinforced the fact that blacks are targets for hate crimes. With worrisome percentage figures, relative to other groups, the murder of George Floyd in 2020, which caused huge outrage, and the conviction of three white men for federal hate crimes in February, relating to the chasing down and killing of Ahmaud Arbery because he was African American, did not stop another race-vampire and white supremacist, 18-year old Payton Gendron, from recently shooting and killing 10 people, all African-Americans, at a Buffalo grocery store in New York.

The white Buffalo attacker was said to have driven 200 miles from his hometown of Conklin, New York, to Buffalo in form of an expedition (an enterprise against some enemy or into enemy territory), to look for a predominantly Black neighbourhood. He was reported to have been armed with semiautomatic rifle and a white supremacist ideology, referred to as replacement theory. Replacement theory is a far-right belief that the white population is at risk of being replaced by people of colour and immigrants, and, therefore, the need to eliminate them.

This devious act was preceded by a 2015 shooting in a church in South Carolina, where nine parishioners were fatally wounded by an avowed supremacist, Dylann Roof, during Bible study in Charleston. Apart from the hegemonic construction of race, gunmen with biases against religion and sexual orientation have also carried out targeted violence in the US, as evidenced by the shooting at a San Diego synagogue in 2019 and a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in 2016. Racially-motivated onslaughts are countless!

Humanity remains shackled by politicised race, ethnicity and religion, as the condemnations by critical stakeholders for hatred and killings are mere verbose, meant to cover-up the hypocrisy that resides in the hearts of many. Indices for differentiation are not fixed, but coincidental and accidental, and should not be allowed to continue to define us. Nigeria’s secularism is being tested by religious bigots and profiteers, and we must check their antics so that the agitations by separatist groups would not be justifiable. It is madness to kill for God and colour!

The Federal Government must sort out university-based unions strike actions now; not to suggest that western education is evil as well.