By Paul
Onomuakpokpo
If our claim to being
an irreducible part of civilised humanity is to be validated, we must meet an
acceptable degree of adherence to the norms that guarantee that level of life
that is superior to that of a people at their inchoate stage of development. For
what entitles us to be a part of civilised humanity when the
robust allowance we ought to make for the sanctity of human life is
non-existent?
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| *President Buhari |
If we all take it as a given that respect for human
life is a fundamental principle of a civilised society, then we
must come to the grim realisation that as a people we still have so much work
to do to remain part of the civilised world. For clearly, the ascendancy of the
disdain for the sanctity of human life in our society daily spawns crises with
their attendant loss of lives. If these deaths were only caused by Boko Haram,
there would have been the tragic consolation that the perpetrators are only
irredeemable and blood-sucking lunatics on the fringes of humanity.
The first
step towards retrieving the society from its self-affliction of the warped
norms that nurture violence is that our political leaders must not recoil from
the responsibility of admitting that they were the ones who first
torpedoed the rules of mutual engagement that foster trust between the leaders
and the citizens. In them is reposed the trust of using the nation’s resources
to improve the lot of all the people. But on almost every occasion, this trust
is often injudiciously requited. They cater to their selfish
interest – buying mansions they do not need, buying private jets to
escape the pothole-ridden roads they fail to repair and acquiring
wives and mistresses in conformity with their sybaritic lives .
This
state of mutual distrust is expressed in an aggravated form through ethnic
suspicion. The tragic consequence is that thousands are killed on account
of unfathomable or the flimsiest provocation. It is this
mutual suspicion that provides the ground for the perpetuation
of the inter-ethnic feud as the case of the Agatu community where hundreds
were allegedly killed by herdsmen. In the case of the people of
Agatu and the herdsmen, we may make an allowance for the
possibility that a lack of constant interactions has
over the years exacerbated this mutual distrust. But how could
there be mutual distrust among people who intermingle almost daily in the
course of business or living in the same neighbourhood? This is the puzzle
that the tragic clash between traders of different ethnic origins
threw up in Lagos
