Nigeria’s cat and mouse fight with Amnesty International

There is this bitterly hostile rivalry between cats, mice and rats that is as old as antiquity. Unable to find a solution to this constant rodents/cats squabble, Odolaye Aremu, Kwara State, Ilorin’s dadakuada music exponent, retrieving his muse from ancient Yoruba wisdom, sang that only God could settle this endless rivalry – Olo’un lo le se’dajo ologbo at’ekute’le. In 2014, British’s House of Commons attempted to exploit this rivalry by using one to neutralize the other. Rising in parliament to debate the infestation of the House buildings built in 1860 by a huge mice population, MP Anne McIntosh said, “It is a matter of fact (that) the mice population is spiraling out of control.” To combat the rodents, members suggested storming the House of Commons with a herd of cats.

“The Parliament of Rats and Mice” is the title of the prologue to William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Considered to be one of the greatest works of English literature of the Middle Ages, it is an allegory of cats and rats, a narrative that tellingly depicts their rivalry. After so many squabbles between them, the rats concluded that the world would have peace if rodents let the kittens be. One rat, addressing its colleagues, said, “Though we had killed the cat, another would come to catch us and all our kind, although we creep under benches.  Therefore I advise all the commons to let the cat alone… Where the cat is a kitten, the court is wretched.  That is witnessed in Holy Writ, to whoever will read it: ‘Woe to thee, O land, when thy king is a child.’  No man there would rest at night because of rodents, for we mice would destroy many men’s malt, and you rats would tear men’s clothes were it not for the cat of the court who can pounce on you.  If you rats had your way, you could not rule yourselves.”

Global human rights policeman, Amnesty International (AI) and the Nigerian government are acting out Langland’s allegory. AI, over the years, has become the “cat of the court who can pounce on you,” as it ferrets nooks and crannies, baying for the blood of “mice (that) would destroy many men’s malt.” Last week, AI accused the Muhammadu Buhari-led government of extrajudicial executions in the Southeast and Niger Delta areas of Nigeria, in what it called “the heinous crimes of enforced disappearances” of persons.

Sauced with blood-curdling examples, AI’s frightening allegations were made on the anniversary of the International Day of Support for Victims of Enforced Disappearances.  One was the celebrated disappearance of Abubakar Idris, known as Dadiyata. A university lecturer and vocal government critic, Dadiyata was abducted from his Kaduna home on August 2, 2019 and his whereabouts is shrouded in secrecy till today. He was a critic of the Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai.

Recently, in a BBC piece she penned, Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani, Nigerian journalist and novelist, depicting the fad of “unclaimed bodies” of “missing people,” allegedly wasted by policemen on the streets of Nigeria, wrote about the experience of an Anatomy student of the University of Calabar, 26-year old Enya Egbe, who fled from his anatomy class upon seeing the body of a friend of his, hitherto declared missing, whose corpse was the specimen to be worked upon.

“The cases of at least 200 people – including former militants from Niger Delta, members of IPOB, #EndSARS protesters and security suspects believed to have been subjected to unresolved enforced disappearances in Nigeria have been documented by Amnesty International – The real number is believed to be higher. Nigerian security forces often cite the anti-terror law that allows the authorities to hold people without charge or trial in unofficial places of detention, often without contact to the outside world in practice, clearly increasing the risk of people disappearing after being detained,” said AI.

While it could put up with allegation of the impunity of Nigerian police’s disappearance of persons which has been national pastime in Nigeria from time immemorial, the Buhari rat would not condone AI’s revelation of its impunity in its conquered fiefdom. In a reply to AI, similar to the flipping of an enraged rat’s whiskers, Garba Shehu, presidential spokesman, accused AI of championing the matters of “a tiny dot in a circle,” which he euphemized as “those that violently oppose the Federal Government of Nigeria.” He could not stand AI “parroting the line of Nnamdi Kanu and IPOB, a proscribed terror organization.”  He also claimed that “controversial American lobbyists are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars annually… laundering IPOB’s reputation in Washington DC.”

In its 2015 edition, produced by the Institute for Economics and Peace, the Global Terrorism Index’s comprehensive summary of key global trends and patterns in terrorism of the preceding 15 years, and based on data from the Global Terrorism Database, (GTD) it said terrorism had become highly concentrated, “in just five countries — Iraq, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria…. (and) accounted for 78 per cent of the lives lost.” It said further: “Nigeria has experienced the largest increase in deaths from terrorism… There were 7,512 fatalities from terrorist attacks… an increase of over 300 per cent. The country houses two of the five most deadly terrorist groups…Boko Haram and the Fulani militants.” Yet, the government of which Shehu is a megaphone, has deodorized the terrorism of Fulani herders, as well as bandits’, refusing to label the latter terrorists, aware that the moment it does, many of the Fulani bigwigs who offer nesting place for the bandits would face the wrath of the globally authorized cats.

Justifying, rather than repudiating the allegations by the AI, Shehu wondered why the international organization would be interested in the case of an “IPOB (that) murder(s) Nigerian citizens… kill police officers and military personnel and set government property on fire, (who have now) amassed a substantial stockpile of weapons and bombs across the country.” He then propounded a racist counterfactual, a line of thought prevalent among and deployed by African despots to racially profile western opposition to their tyranny and thus legitimize their despotism: “Were this group in a western country, you would not expect to hear Amnesty’s full-throated defence of their actions. Instead, there would be silence or mealy-mouthed justification of western governments’ action to check the spread of ‘terrorism.’”

Astonishingly, Shehu then queried AI’s legality in Nigeria. “Amnesty International has no legal right to exist in Nigeria,” he said. “The Nigerian government will fight terrorism with all the means at its disposal (italics mine). We will ignore Amnesty’s rantings… an organization that does not hold itself to the same standards it demands of others,” he concluded.

This cat and mouse tiff has endured between AI and the Buhari government almost since the latter’s inception. At a time, AI alleged that, in the name of fighting insurgency, Nigerian soldiers were massacring civilian population in the northeast. In 2019, same Nigerian government engaged in a spat with respected Wall Street Journal when it revealed that over 1,000 Nigerian soldiers killed by Boko Haram insurgents were secretly and unceremoniously buried in a graveyard at Maimalari Army barracks in Borno State.

Government’s attempt to query the legitimacy of AI for doing a job whose modus operandi is known all over the world is baffling and reveals its naivety or insincerity. Or both. The question to first ask is if Shehu was aware that Nigeria is a signatory to international legal obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, (ICCPR) as well as the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances? Does he know that by being a signatory to the conventions, Nigeria had ceded the right to “investigate, prosecute, punish and provide remedies and reparation for the crimes of enforced disappearance” to the AI?

It bears stating that AI is always at loggerheads with rogue governments all over the world that have no regards for the lives of their people. In Nasirabad, Sindh, Pakistan on April 17, 2017, like Nigeria’s Dadiyata, HidayatullahLohar was forcibly disappeared. An activist, his abductors, men in police uniform and civilian clothes, rough-handedly disappeared him from the school where he taught, shoved him inside a double-cabin grey coloured vehicle and his whereabouts, since then, has become a mystery. In same Pakistan in 2017 and 2018, repeatedly harassed blogger, Ahmad WaqassGoraya, was also forcibly disappeared, alongside three other bloggers in Punjab. Their sin was that they ran Facebook pages considered to be critical of Pakistani military’s policies. Same happened during the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1964 where 434 political deaths and disappearances reportedly occurred between 1946 and 1988.

IPOB has acted like a demented organization, inflicting irresponsible and senseless violence on the people of the southeast. Its sadism reflects the kind of leadership that Nnamdi Kanu gives it. It kills, maims and orchestrates untold arson on government buildings, with a magisterial impunity that must never be allowed in a community of human beings. However, Nigeria has gone past the military despotism of 1984 – whether George Orwell’s or the cow-obsessed despot’s – where Bartholomew Owoh and his ilk could be executed retroactively. The moment we laud, rather than heckle government in its trampling on human rights, no matter who the victim is, we lose an essential component of human essence. Felons abound all over the world and an eye for an eye would make the globe go blind. With patent bias harboured by the head of this government for Igbo and anyone else but the Fulani and his blood-soaked pedigree, it is dangerous for humanity to hand over Nigeria’s remains in his hand, unchecked. He will willingly make suya of it.

It is a notorious fact that his government’s sense of justice is warped and self-serving. Fulani nomads’ pillaging, acknowledged by the Terrorism Index, which made it to declare Fulani herders as a global terror as far back as 2014, is not worth the labeling of terrorism in the lingua franca of the Nigerian government; not the terrorism of northwest felons, even when they downed a military jet. Comparatively small-scale irritation of felons of southeast, spearheaded by Kanu and separatist agitators of southwest, never known to have shed a pint of blood, however provoke the misplaced hyper brawns of the government.

It is not difficult to explain the anger of this government against Amnesty International and its phobia for public disclosure. An English proverb says that evildoers are evil dreaders. Yoruba’s own version of this is that executioners mortally dread the presence of swords in their vicinity. Government’s dread manifests in its choice not to name Boko Haram sponsors all this while, even when requested by Rtd. Commodore Olawunmi and even Mary Beth Leonard, U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria last Monday. Leonard had said America was eager to help Nigeria in the disclosure. Could government’s dread of disclosure be a consequence of fear of its own shadow? Till date, government hasn’t said a word about the retired Commodore’s maggots-dripping allegations of its covert boost for insurgency.

Knowing the collapse of the mirror that our society used to see its core values and evils in human action, it goes without saying that AI and government’s cat and mouse tiff would be viewed by many of us with the APC/PDP, region and religion lens. Until we become personal victims of the evil we play the ostrich to label its correct name.

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