Excerpts of Bishop Matthew Kukahs interview in todays Telegraph...he talked about insurgency in the north and also so called Muslim-Muslim ticket...below is the few cuts... What has it been like, being a Catholic bishop in a predominantly Muslim environment, particularly in this era of terrorism and insurgency in the country? You see, religion and politics are my areas of research interest. I don’t claim to understand all the issues but that was the subject of my PhD thesis. I think I appreciate the issues and when I say, for example, that this thing is not about religion some of the extreme wings of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) abuse me. They say we have no business talking with terrorists. They say I don’t understand that we have a battle between Christians and Muslims. Well, this is how I dress to Sokoto. I enter the plane in Sokoto almost every time fully clad in my cassock. There is hardly any person who meets me in the plane that doesn’t give me my due respect. If there were problems based on just religion or between Christians and Muslims, would I be walking the streets of Sokoto? Would I leave my house in the night to visit the Sultan and leave his palace even at midnight and find my way back home? Would I organise the Catholic community for a procession? This is my third year in Sokoto. Last year, we organised a procession that took us three hours to walk round the streets of Sokoto to witness as Catholics all over the world were doing, acknowledging Christ as our King. Early this year, we did a procession but it was slightly shorter to sensitise the people about the a few things. What I am saying is that at the very beginning, the issues were different. I issued a statement when the bomb blast occurred in Madalla (Niger State) and I said that the incident was evidence of the fact that we’ve got a virus of evil. Whatever name you call it, but don’t say that it is a bunch of Muslims trying to kill Christians. Yes, they bombed a church but I am not sure that that was sufficient to say that this was about Christianity or about Islam. But the kind of people you are dealing with …Now they have gone to bomb a mosque. Last time, I was speaking to the Emir of Kano, and I felt he displayed an uncommon courage to have gone back to the same mosque to pray because we cannot surrender the space. But I have also made the point that this is not something that you should ask President Jonathan or the National Security Adviser or even Bishop Kukah to know what is happening. The truth of the matter is that, and I say, metaphorically like the friends of Job in the Bible. When the friends of Job heard what happened to him, they said this is a good man; this kind of thing couldn’t have happened and they went to see Job to find out what really happened to him. If you read the book of Job, it tells us that when those guys arrived at Job’s house and saw Job’s condition, they spent seven days and seven nights; they did not utter one single word. As they say in Nigeria, they saw something wey pass them. So Boko Haram is like the situation of Job. We have seen something that has passed us. We can only trust in God, hoping that He will use the efficacy of human beings by whatever shape or form to bring this thing to an end. But we must develop the collective resilience to confront this evil together. Looking at the political landscape ahead of 2015, what are your thoughts about a Muslim-Muslim ticket? We are not doing the same thing. President Jonathan being where he is, it is evident that we are not where we used to be. It is a function of many factors. When I wrote an article about this sometime ago, I was subjected to a completely different level of interpretation. Whether Jonathan is competent or not is not what we are talking about, but his being President defies all political calculations; if you contrast it with our traditional understanding of how you can become President in Nigeria. You need to have either Islam or Christianity behind you; you need to have one major ethnic group behind you and you need to have a political party behind you. Also you need to have a deep pocket with which to oil the political machine. But this gentleman literally came from nowhere. Even the process of Diepreye Alamiyeseigha stepping aside and Jonathan taking over, becoming governor, Vice President, Acting President and finally all the way to President without paying a penny is not the usual thing we expect. There was literally no campaign and I am saying that Jonathan becoming a President is a metaphor. I am not saying it will happen tomorrow but I am saying that the doors of opportunity in the presence of God are never closed. Who is going to be President of Nigeria tomorrow? We don’t know and we will never know because all the guys with the deep pockets, whether by dint of hard work or theft or whatever have always never got the prize. In my view as a priest, that is one way of looking at it. Even in 2015, we’ve got no idea and I believe that Jonathan’s people need to work hard; Buhari’s people need to work hard; everybody needs to work hard because this is a country that has the potential for the greatest surprises. But even in the face of all we have seen we never appreciate the level of surprises that continue to manifest in Nigeria. If you are looking at the President of Nigeria from the fact that Muslims will be there for one candidate and Christians for another candidate, let me tell you the truth, you have missed the point. Go back to the history and produce the record of voting during elections in Nigeria and tell me which President has been voted for massively by Muslims in the way and manner that we understand and suggest. Shagari didn’t win in Kano and he didn’t win in Borno as it was then. So this frenzy about a candidate sweeping the polls because of tribe or religious consideration is from our poor reading of what is called Northern Nigeria. The political tendencies between Kano and Katsina have never been the same. All these groups you are talking about have fought different kinds of wars. Many of those wars have not ended. Islam as a religion because it has had a Caliphate which is architecture of power, has become an identity from the point of view of negotiation. But it does not in any way suggest that Muslims in Northern Nigeria will vote in the same direction. They have never thought in the same way. Never. Katsina has hardly ever voted in the same direction with Sokoto nor has Kano voted in the same way with Borno and so on and so forth. So our poor reading of this map is what accounts for our obsession with the fact that it must be a Christian or a Muslim candidate. If you talk of Christian, what do you need to become governor of Anambra State? Is it that you are Anglican or you are Catholic? Elections will always be determined by different factors; whether somebody is richer, somebody is black, somebody is white, somebody is male, somebody is female; but it’s always an aggregate of factors. I mean, I have my own issues about Obasanjo saying that if a President is a Christian, the Vice President must be a Muslim. This is one of these false legs that we have mounted on our table and is one of the reasons why this country is not working. Nigerians have shown very clearly that if you give them the chance to make up their minds, they are not too concerned about some of these things. These contraptions are created by the political elite who seem to lack imagination. Jonathan cannot just become a Christian because he happens to be from the South. If you want the Christian community to give you a candidate, then it has to be decided by the Christian Association of Nigeria; if you want the Muslims to give you a representative then you go to JNI or the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs. If PDP decides to pitch two people together, you cannot justify it by simply saying it was because one goes to the mosque and the other to the church. Both of them were essentially not sent there by their faiths and you cannot just inherit a faith by just getting to power. But again, we are gradually diminishing our sense of national identity. I can speak for the Christian. We have stated it very clearly and unequivocally that these things don’t matter and that is why we embraced Buhari and Idiagbon when they came to power. It is an open question whether if the Muslims have a choice of two Christians, would they accept that? But this is where you get to when you allow animosity to congeal. It took centuries for it to be broken in America because you had to be white to rule. Being white and Catholic was not enough; you had to be White, Protestant and Anglo Saxon. But again, the dynamics have thrown up certain distortions. Suddenly, it is amazing that now you have in America two unlikely people to ever govern America – a Catholic and a black person. I wrote about Barak Obama and I said that there are certain things that God does that sometimes you just sit down and watch because that Obama will be President as a black man and pick Joe Biden, a committed Catholic, was never contemplated. These were the kind of people that had been literally legislated out of the political life of America. It just tells you that the doors are not closed for us but those of you in the younger generation must begin to think a little more creatively and differently from being stuck in regionalism and faith politics.
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 09:57:48 +0000
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