We must unite against extremism

By any worst-scenario indicator imaginable, Nigeria tops the scale: band of religious terrorists sacking communities, pillaging harvests, abducting and raping women, forceful conversions, millions of children not enrolled in school for the proper kind of education, cow-herds slaughtering whole farming families as a sidekick to the gruesome practice or wrapping up crying and shrieking infants they have plucked from their mothers’ bosoms in raffia mats and burning them alive. It goes on and on.

Alas, the peoples who are targeted in these bestial acts are folks who have been taught all their lives to “love thy neighbours as thyself” and to “pray for thy enemies.” These victims also learnt in their religious instruction classes and their religious service sessions that the Devil is full of cunning and would always find excuses to justify the evil that he does; in the same vein, too, people doing evil in the Devil’s name would find ready reasons to justify their terror.

Since Nigeria would lead all nations as the country with the highest number of poor people in 2018, the Devil’s cunning advocates would entrench policies to arrest development. These who kill at their whims believe that the blood of the “infidels” they have spilled would turn their transgressions before their god from crimson-red to snow-white.

They believe this, as exemplifies in the chants they do when slaughtering captives they have abducted; that slaughtering of people is a terrible corruption of the Old Testament’s rewards of the offering of innocent lambs at the Temple. The Devil always takes residence where the Word is warped and corrupted in order to lead people astray.

Jonah Sunday

Niger State