THE gruesome killing of a female evangelist, Eunice Elisha, in Abuja on Saturday is the latest episode in an ongoing escalation of sectarian hatred in Nigeria.
It raises real fears that Islamist fanatics and their sponsors are spreading their murderous tentacles from the Northern states to the Federal Capital Territory. Their jihad is made easier because successive governments have abdicated their responsibility to make every part of the country safe for Nigerians of all faiths or punish offenders.
The case of the late Elisha is pathetic. Waylaid during her usual early morning evangelism routine by suspected criminals, with their twisted creed of hate and bigotry, the 42-year-old mother of seven was stabbed multiple times and left to bleed to death. We are shocked and outraged by this gruesome murder.
Although the police have yet to conclude their investigations, there are already very strong indications that she was murdered by Muslim fanatics, who had reportedly threatened her before over her preaching. This extreme form of intolerance has been gaining ground, particularly in the Northern states where many state governments pursue policies that promote religion and inadvertently encourage fanaticism. There are reasons to worry.
The attack did not of course come out of nowhere. Nigeria has no shortage of grim examples of this kind of monstrous criminality. Indeed, the past few weeks have been fraught: Apart from a 74-year-old woman beaten to death by a Muslim mob in Kano for alleged blasphemy, three Christians killed in Niger State for the same reason, and a carpenter battered to near death in Kaduna, stories abound of hate attacks on Christians and churches in the North. The madness started long ago, escalated in the late 1980s with frequent pogroms in Kano, Kaduna, Bauchi, Katsina and Sokoto states. Churches, businesses and schools were fair game for bigots, while Christians and Southerners were murdered in their hundreds, many in gruesome acts of barbarity.
n October 2015, Christian Today magazine reported that armed mobs attacked two churches in Gidan Waya and Sondi villages in Taraba State, killing 31 worshippers. While the state may disavow any link with the 12,000 Christians killed, 13,000 churches destroyed in hate attacks as reported by World Watch between 2000 and 2013 in Northern Nigeria, Gatestone Institute cites endemic bias against non-Muslims by the region’s political and traditional elite. The frequency and geographic spread of the attacks are increasing and widening under Buhari’s watch. The Nigerian state is failing its citizens by its serial refusal to scrupulously prosecute the perpetrators of religious hate crimes.
Nigeria has too many problems already; strenuous efforts should be made to prevent it from becoming a sectarian killing ground. Buhari should be bothered about the impunity of Fulani herdsmen and fanatics targeting places of worship and persons of other faiths much like the Boko Haram terrorists. Open Doors, a non-profit, in its World Watch 2016 ranking of countries where Christians are persecuted on a scale ranging from extreme, severe and moderate to sparse, Nigeria was embarrassingly rated as severe and was 12th out of 50 countries. This is simply terrible.
No comments:
Post a Comment