NIGERIA: AVOIDING THE ROAD TO RWANDA

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This week is the commemoration of the 26 years of the Rwandan genocide, the racial massacre which took place in Rwanda between April 7 to mid-July, 1994. That was when the country became one big sepulchre, as hell enlarged itself, and people just streamed into it without obstruction. Indeed, Rwanda will never forget the weeks and months when the fields of Kigali, its capital, where brought to ruins and bloody wreckage. The waters turned crimson, and the rivers became rivers of blood, blood of human beings, not animals. Heaps upon heaps of corpses littered Rwanda, not in hundreds, not in thousands, but in hundreds of thousands. It was a spectacle that shook the rest of the world, dazed people to stupefaction, with its reeling shock and terror.

                        The streets of Kigali in ruins

The keynote to the macabre development in Rwanda was Hatred, Suspicion, Insularity, lack of national cohesion and intolerance. The Rwandan genocide was a morbid attack involving two racial groups in Rwanda: The minority Tutsis, which had dominated the country’s leadership for a long time, and the majority Hutu who later came to power. The Hutu and Tutsi are two tribes who share a common past. When Rwanda was first settled, the people who lived there raised cattle like the Fulanis of Nigeria. Soon, the people who owned the most cattle were called “Tutsi” and everyone else was called “Hutu.” There were also the "Twa" which constituted a very small group of hunter-gatherers who also lived in Rwanda. At this time, a person could easily change category through marriage or cattle acquisition. It wasn’t until Europeans came to colonize the area that the terms “Tutsi” and “Hutu” took on a racial role, as herdsmanism has taken in Nigeria.

The Germans were the first to colonize Rwanda in 1894. Just like the Nigerian Fulani hegemony and oligarchy structure, the Germans looked at the Rwandan people and thought the Tutsi had more European characteristics, such as lighter skin and a taller build. Thus, they put Tutsis in roles of responsibility. When the Germans lost their colonies following World War I, the Belgians took control over Rwanda. In 1933, the Belgians solidified the categories of “Tutsi” and “Hutu” by mandating that every person was to have an identity card that labelled them Tutsi, Hutu, or Twa.

The event that sparked the genocide took place at 8:30 p.m on April 6, 1994. On this day, the Hutu–led president Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda was returning from a summit in Tanzania when a surface-to-air missile shot his plane out of the sky over Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali. All on board were killed in the attack including Habyarimana. To this, the Hutus said it was not ordinary death, that the Tutsis caused it by shooting down the plane; then entered the carnage. As at the time the morbid attack ended, over two million Rwandans, mostly Tutsis were grounded to the dust.

                         Skulls in Rwandan museum

As Rwanda marks 26 years of the genocide, the heavens are weeping again. But this time, not for Rwanda but for Nigeria. The heavens are weeping for Nigeria’s level of hate, Suspicion, Insularity, Lack of national cohesion, injustice, loot and intolerance which were the prelude to the macabre dance in Rwanda.The situation envokes similar trajectory with which the Rwanda genocide was waged. As it is going now, all the variables that sparked the genocide 26 years ago in Rwanda are replete in Nigeria. Talk of hate; we have it in prodigious quantity among the ethnic nationalities. What of Suspicion? That is the middle name of Nigeria; Religious and Racial intolerance is the water most Nigerians drink daily, they even bathe in it to quench the thirst of love.

Unfortunately, the warlords in the guerrilla warfare use religion as a cloak to achieve their sinister motives. Here in Nigeria, due to the theatre of the absurd created by the incompatibility of professed tenets and the gruesome activities of religious fanatics, religion no doubt has been given a bad name. Religious and ethnic identities create strong passion and as such are susceptible to exploitation to advance selfish and egocentric interests. There are those who adduce sociological and psychological reasons to account for all that happen in Nigeria. They try to interpret the sad phenomenon as a by-product of mass discontentment and frustration among the jobless and hopeless hordes of people that roam about Nigerian streets in hunger. For some others, there is strong underhand fanatical arrangement and determination to convert or wipe out infidels from Nigeria. A case at hand is the inter-state Almagiri politics. In this process, bigotry takes the place of religious tolerance. Social anarchy, poverty and neglect caused by marginalization of groups of people from the social, political and economic mainstreams of the nation take the place of order and stability.

Well meaning Nigerians have watched with unease and disquiet how religion and mass hatred are becoming a tool in the hands of some politicians and non-politicians. Whatever administrative and legal action taken in Nigeria is almost wearing the racial toga. The COVID-19 pandemic holding us hostage is not an exception to this malaise. If government does not expunge these suspicions, build trust in the people, then we all are firmly on the road to Rwanda. If Nigerians do not spare a thought to tolerance, then we are sailing to Kigali. If this country continues to emphasize fault lines, play on our centrifugal forces like ethnicity, language, clan, religion, all because they want to rule, soon, we will find out that there’s no country to really rule over again. If we continue to politicize everything, even people’s security and life, then the debris of the Nigerian explosion will be nothing compared to the Rwandan version of the genocide. The cohesion of the country may have been destroyed badly now, but we still trudge on, but if Nigerian elites continue to fan the embers of discord, intolerance and hatred, then the rickety contraption we have will not continue to hold out. Things may fall apart, and the rest of the world will just say of us: truly there was a country called Nigeria.

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