By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
Cordelia Ego Ejiofor died like no one should, clobbered to death by her employer. Her dead body was never found. Around December 3, 1972, Alhaji Rauph Gaji, a senior lawyer in Kaduna beat Cordelia to death in his own house.
Late Deborah YakubuHe drove her remains to the outskirts of the city and disposed of them at a location along Kachia Road, where, months later, scanty human remains were located after Alhaji Rauph led Police to where he said he disposed of her body.
Mamman Nasir, like Alhaji Rauph, a Muslim, prosecuted the case to
a conclusion, securing a conviction for manslaughter, which the Supreme Court
affirmed on Friday, May 23, 1975.
If this case happened today, Cordelia’s killer would never have been brought to account. Her scanty remains would not have drawn any attention. Cordelia’s killing would hardly have merited the attention of the justice system and Mamman Nasir would have come under unbearable pressure not to prosecute a fellow Muslim for this killing.
For
a country whose coat of arms has “Unity and Faith...” as its motto, this is some
distance travelled.
In one of fate’s more unfair ironies, Shehu Shagari College of
Education in Sokoto, the school named after a pioneering Nigerian teacher who
rose to become president of the country and one of its most emollient public
figures, could be fated to become etched in the public imagination as the
funeral pyre to Nigeria’s coat of arms. It is the location where, in daylight
on May 12, 2022, a mob of male students set upon one of their colleagues,
stoned her to death and burnt her remains.
This school was the site of Deborah Yakubu’s public immolation.
Deborah’s life ended at the un-ripe age of 22. She did not die nor
was she merely killed. Deborah suffered a fate reserved for savages in an age
that exists largely in pre-civilisational apocrypha.
Nigeria’s
leading newspaper, The Guardian, reports that “Deborah allegedly had an
argument with fellow students online and the Muslims among them claimed that
she blasphemed…. The interaction reportedly took place during the Muslim moon
of Ramadan when the College was on break. When they sighted her at the school
today, all available Muslim male students surrounded her and started stoning
her. They continued until she fell. They made sure she died and subsequently
set her body ablaze.”
Spokesperson of the Nigeria Police Force in the state, Sanusi
Abubakar, is reported to have claimed that “Students forcefully removed the
victim from the security room where she was hidden by the school authorities,
killed her and burnt the building.”
Explaining why the police failed to show up until it was way
beyond too late, Mr. Abubakar added that the students ‘banded together with
miscreants’ to block the road leading to the school. This would suggest that
there was pre-meditation to this savagery. It fails as a plea of mitigation by
the police.
Deborah was a 200 level student of Home Economics education at the
Shehu Shagari College of Education, where she was also known as the Sisters’
Coordinator for the Fellowship of Christian Students. She came from Tugan
Magajia in Rijau Local Government Area of Niger State in Nigeria’s north-central
region and worshipped as a member of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA),
a leading Christian denomination in the region.
There
were credible reports, not exactly denied at the time of writing, that “she had
rejected the advances of a Muslim student, who later made the allegation.”
Deborah is the latest to suffer this gruesome fate in Nigeria. In
three decades of such lynchings in Northern Nigeria, no one has been brought to
account. There is no reason to believe that Deborah’s case will prove to be
different. Indeed, the Police conveniently claim the leader of the mob that
killed her is not of Nigeria, nor within it.
About June 2, 2016, a mob lynched 74-year old Bridget Agbahime in
front of her shop in Kofar Wambai Market in Kano, North-west Nigeria. She had
reportedly asked a male Muslim adherent not to conduct his ablution in front of
her shop, and otherwise, sensible request even if only for health and
sanitation reasons. That was her last earthly request. Affronted, the man
accused her of blasphemy, summoned a mob and they clobbered her to death.
President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement then describing
Bridget’s lynching as “sad and regrettable”, promising that justice would be
done. The Sultan of Sokoto and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in
Nigeria equally did the same.
The
government of Kano State quickly announced the arrest and arraignment of five
men in connection with Bridget’s lynching: Dauda Ahmed, Abdullahi Mustapha,
Zubairu Abubakar, Abdullahi Abubakar and Musa Abdullahi. A mere five months
after Bridget’s murder, the Kano State government itself withdrew the charges
against the five suspects. Like Bridget, this case died, never to be
resurrected.
45 days after Bridget’s lynching, Eunice Elisha, a pastor with the
Redeemed Christian Church of God was hacked to death in Kubwa on the outskirts
of Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital, after the leaders in a nearby Mosque had
warned her to stop her open-air preaching. Her killers were never apprehended
nor was anyone brought to account.
In August 1995, a young Christian trader from Southeast Nigeria,
Gideon Akaluka, was beheaded in Kano again on unverified allegations of
blasphemy. Some high profile arrests followed but, as with the case of Bridget
Agbahime more than two decades later, the suspects were never brought to
account.
Moments after Deborah’s immolation, the Sultan of Sokoto, as he
did in the case of Bridget Agbahime, promptly issued a statement describing it
as “unfortunate.”
President Buhari followed the next day, describing “the news of the killing of the young lady by fellow students was a matter of concern.” It would have been much better if he had persisted in the eloquence of his complicit silence. If his words are to be believed, the president was not worried by the killing but by the news about it.
One reading of this unfortunate sentence, crafted with the benefit of more
than 36 hours of contemplation, is that it would have been better if the
perpetrators had just quietly wasted Deborah.
The president could not even pretend to find any sense of
indignation in this affair. It was a mere matter of concern. Forgetting that he
is the guarantor of human safety and security under Nigeria’s constitution,
President Buhari merely “demanded an impartial, extensive probe into all that
happened before and during the incident.” Curiously, he directed this demand to
no one in particular, probably because he does not think anyone should act on
it.
In the same statement, however, the same president “also directed
the Ministries of Information and Culture, Police Affairs and that of
Communications and Digital Economy to work with GSM providers and Tech
companies to help contain the spread of false and inflammatory information
through social media.” The man is consistent: his worry is not the killing but
rather the cameras captured it for social media. He lost his voice on the
question of accountability but found it in time to direct social media
censorship, even when social media had nothing to do with this immolation.
Following the example of the president, other leading politicians
around the country lost their voices and their moral compass. Former
Vice-President, Atiku Abubakar, has issued a statement initially condemning
Deborah’s tragic fate, and proceeded to delete the statement from his social
media handles before explaining that he did not have anything to do with the
statements, to begin with. Self-acclaimed leader of the ruling All Progressives
Congress (APC) and one of its leading presidential aspirants, Bola Ahmed Tinubu,
vanished.
Deborah Yakubu was killed exactly 10 days before the Practice
Section on Public Interest and Development Law (SPIDEL), of the Nigerian Bar
Association (NBA), was to hold a widely advertised conference in Sokoto, the
site of Deborah’s last earthly moments. The morning after her gruesome fate,
while the smoke still smouldered from her funeral pyre, Monday Ubani, the
Chairperson of SPIDEL, issued a statement denouncing those who called on him to
reconsider holding the conference as scheduled as “without locus.”
Mr. Ubani’s statement is as gratuitous an insult to everyone as
the line that the stoning to death of Deborah “is not a religious problem.” If
blasphemy is not about religion, can someone, anyone, please explain what it is
about? Determined to give the lie to this, on May 14, mobs set some Christian
places of worship in Sokoto on fire, forcing the state government to declare a
curfew.
The issue clearly is not whether the stoning to the death of
Deborah Yakubu is a religious matter but whether the rulers of Nigeria both in
and out of government have it in them to give Nigerians reason to have faith in
the country. On the current evidence, there is only one answer.
*Odinkalu, a lawyer and teacher, can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu
I've always admired your public speeches and writings.
ReplyDeleteYour take on the ungodly killing of Deborah Yakubu in a citadel of learning in the way and manner her her death was executed captures the grostequesness of the young lady's demise and the inhumanity of the perpetrators of the heinous crime in this country called Nigeriaits scandalous that those who are morally and legally obligated to deal appropriately with the killers of Deborah appear to be slumbering away blissfully without realizing their sacred office and duty to ensure the safety and security of our defenceless citizens and their properties.
It's high time we are right thinking and concerned outraged witnessed to these serial reckless, lawless, mindless and sinister Islamist inspired assault on our collective humanity and sensibility
all rose in rage to put a decisive and telling end to a repeat of such monstrous acts in the name of God.