During the run-up to the 2015 general elections, the All Progressives Congress was loved and hated by millions of Nigerians depending on their ethnic and/or religious affiliations. In all fairness, there were Nigerians who defied these primordial sentiments and they voted for APC regardless of their tongue and tribe.
To his haters, retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.) and his party had an agenda to Islamise Nigeria. WhatsApp broadcast messages went viral propagandising this so-called Islamist agenda. I recall a pastor wax prophetic in a sermon that was dubbed into CD in which he harked back to the fall of Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) to Islamic Jihadism. He used Constantinople (which used to be a Christian city) as a cautionary tale of what would be the fate of Christianity in Nigeria if the electorate made the grievous mistake of voting for Buhari and the APC. To what I imagine would be his dismay, Buhari won in 2015 despite his forewarning.
But here we go again. The politicking has begun. Next year, the voting demographic will head to the polls. Already, we are seeing attempts by party minions to traduce the image of candidates of other parties. It is the season of fake news, disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, you name it.
Mallam Mahdi Shehu stirred a hornet’s nest last week when a video of him addressing a cross-section of northern Christians went viral. He became the northern version of the aforementioned pastor. In the video, he told his audience not to vote for Peter Obi of the Labour Party because nothing was in it for them. He accused Peter Obi of being sympathetic to Nnamdi Kanu’s Indigenous People of Biafra. He told them how Christians in the South see northern Christians as second-class. It’s interesting because Muslims in the South often claim that northern Muslims also see them as second-class. But I digress.
A lot of people have condemned Mahdi for his incendiary statements and rightly so. Amidst all the furore that greeted the video, it occurred to me that Mahdi Shehu and others who think like him have not transcended their evolutionary programming. In our evolutionary ancestry, fealty to a tribe was necessary for survival. Our ancestors lived in tribes and clans. Because resources were scarce, they fought in wars to occupy resource-rich habitats and outsiders were not welcome. There was just no way our ancestors could have survived as individuals living in solitude.
It is true humans are social animals. It is also true humans are exclusionary and bigoted beings. We are instinctively suspicious of people who do not look like us or speak our language or believe in our deity. This fear of others was a necessary survival mechanism our ancestors passed down to us. And much of human history is filled with community and thought leaders expressing this fear through demagoguery, even in modern times. Fascism, Nazism and other right-wing identitarian ideologies are good examples of that. In the Nigerian context, the 1962/63 census crisis, the 1967-1970 civil war and various religious clashes we’ve had were all rooted in our evolutionary programming to be tribalistic, suspicious and exclusionary of others.
While Mahdi’s video was still blowing the embers of ire and fury on social media, he shared a video clip via his Twitter handle of Genesis, a white-cassock-wearing pastor instructing his members to vote for Bola Tinubu, the All Progressives Congress presidential candidate. Preaching in Yoruba, Genesis justified his support for Tinubu because he is a fellow Yoruba man. He didn’t say anything about Tinubu’s policy proposals, manifesto, antecedent, capacity and capability. If any member or leader in his church supports Peter Obi, Genesis told them to leave. As their spiritual father, they must vote for whomever he tells them.
With that clip, Mahdi Shehu justified his claim that tribalism goes deep in the South. What he doesn’t know is we can all play that game all day long. You don’t have to dig too deep into the archives of the internet for you to see videos of thought leaders in the North spewing what southerners would term as hate, sadly. My point? Ethnoreligious bigotry exists everywhere in Nigeria. But if we cannot expect the best of others, Nigeria remains a pipedream. Democracy is pointless if, at the end of the day, everyone must vote along ethnoreligious lines.
By telling his audience that nothing was in it for them in an Obi presidency, it’s obvious how unaware he is of the dangers of such divisive rhetoric. I’ll like him to riddle me this; what has been in it for northern Christians and Muslims under a Buhari presidency? To take it further, with the exception of the political and religious aristocracy in the North, how has Arewa benefitted from all military juntas and civilian governments headed by northerners since 1960? Despite having produced the highest number of heads of state and presidents, the North is still the most social-economically backward in Nigeria. No other region has had it worse with illiteracy, poverty, insecurity, and infant and maternal mortality than the North. But of course, Peter Obi is the problem.
Mahdi Shehu is enslaved to his primal instincts. He hasn’t risen above the bigotry evolution encoded in him. And people like him are a deficit to the nation-state structure, which Nigeria has failed to attain in 62 years, unfortunately. Just like the pastor who villainised Buhari as an Islamist and Prophet Genesis’ blind support for Tinubu, Mahdi Shehu’s statement is yet another biting reminder of how deeply bigoted our politics and politicking are in Nigeria.
- Olayemi, the host of the Disaffected Nigerian YouTube channel, writes via via [email protected]
