Achebe, Soyinka and Bekederemo-Clark oppose reprisal attacks, demand national conference and better security efforts

Soyinka, Achebe and Bekederemo-Clarke

On 8 January, three Nigerian literary giants, Professors Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Bekederemo-Clark, issued a joint statement urging Nigerians not to retaliate the attacks by the militant Islamist sect widely known as Boko Haram and also demanding better protection for citizens.

They said in the face of Boko Haram’s ongoing attacks on persons, places of worship and private residences, Nigerians must resist the temptation to retaliate, in order not to give the sect cause to celebrate.

In a joint letter titled: “LET NOT THIS FIRE SPREAD, AN APPEAL TO THE NIGERIAN NATIONAL COMMUNITY”, the trio lamented that the fears many Nigerians once nursed secretly, were sadly becoming realities. They observed that: “Rumblings and veiled threats have given way to eruption, and the first cracks in the wall of patience and forbearance can no longer be wished away. Boko Haram is very likely celebrating its first tactical victory: provoking retaliation in some parts of the nation”.

The writers urged Nigerians, at various levels of leadership, to resolve to tackle the challenges of insecurity in the country.

They said: “All who possess any iota of influence or authority, who aspire to moral leadership, must act now to douse the first flickers of ‘responses in kind’ even before they are manifested, and become contagious. We urge that, beginning from now, leaders become true leaders in all communities, utilise the platforms of their associations, professions, clubs, places of instruction and places of worship, NGOs and other civic organisations, that they relentlessly spread the manifesto of Community – capital letters! – as an all-embracing human bond, and refuse to be sucked into the cauldron of mutual attrition that is the purpose of the religious warmongers among us”.

They said their plea against reprisals was not based on “any doctrine of submission, of ‘turning the other cheek’, or supine supplication to divine intervention” as they recognized that “Self-defence is a fundamental human right and responsibility” of citizens.

However, they said it was necessary to “place the total humanity of our nation above the methods and intent of a mindless, though programmed minority that are resolved to set religion against religion, community against community”. They charged Nigerians, as a matter of duty, to “denounce the killers among us, to deny them, right from source, the sump of blood that is their nourishment, the chaos that is their ambition, and the hatred that has poisoned their collective psyche”.

They recalled that calls had been made in the past for the convening of a National conference “to debate just how the nation should proceed in reinforcing civic and political life, and decide, in full freedom, the terms of her integrated existence”. They urged the government to “stop shying away from this project”.

The literary icons also cautioned security forces against high-handedness in relation to citizens and reminded them that “their primary duty is to protect all citizens, and most especially those in opposition to government policies, in the exercise of their democratic rights”. They warned that: “The first single security notch on the gun is always the signal for a countdown towards two, then three, moving to four figure statistics in the struggle for human dignity. Syria is our current cautionary instance. We know how Libya ended”.

The trio urged security agencies to rather focus their resources on those areas that were generating the greatest threats to the nation’s security and stability. They said: “The security arms of government should recognise where their urgent and immediate capabilities and competence are needed, where the greatest threat to nationhood since the Nigerian Civil War has been gloatingly launched”.

They also called on the Federal Government to “intensify its obligations to protect the citizenry it claims to govern” and called for re-activation of “the basic professional strategy of preventive policing, which appears no longer in fashion”.

Actress Rabi Ismail to be hanged for killing man-friend, Supreme Court rules

On 8 July, the Supreme Court, Nigeria’s ultimate court, ruled that actress Rabi Ismail, accused of killing her male friend in order to acquire his property, should be hanged.

Ismail had been accused of drugging and drowning Auwalu Ibrahim (alias Zazu) at Rurum Dam along Tiga road in Kano, capital of Kano State, on 25 December 2002.

She was arraigned before the High Court in Kano in 2002, charged with the offence of culpable homicide contrary to section 221(b) of the Penal Code. The prosecution produced copius evidence showing that she drugged Ibrahim by giving him a doped Éclairs sweet, as a result of which he lost consciousness, and then pushed him into the water to drown. The court found her guilty on 5 December 2004.

Ismail appealed that judgement at the Court of Appeal, Kaduna Judicial Division, but the court said it found her appeal had “no merit whatsoever” and threw it out on 3 March 2008.

Rejecting those two verdicts, she went on to challenge them at the Supreme Court, arguing that the lower courts had relied on evidence with many gaps. The Supreme Court’s ruling, which upholds those earlier verdicts, means that the actress has now exhausted all legal avenues to free herself from the death penalty.

The global watchdog group, Amnesty International, reports that since the handover to democracy in May 1999, at least 650 people have been sentenced to death in Nigeria. During the same period, at least 22 people – possibly more – have been executed. Ismail has now joined the eight women among the approximately 830 inmates currently awaiting death in various prisons across the country. Her lawyers fear that local pressures could lead to her execution ahead of most others.

Ismail is part of a Kano-based, Hausa-language film industry known as Kannywood (the Hausa-language version of the better-known Nigerian film industry, Nollywood). Though popular with many urban youth, the industry and its community of actors/actresses is regarded with hostility by the powerful Muslim clergy and by radical Islamist groups who consider it an immoral influence on society.

Religious rage against Kannywood’s actors and actresses heightened in 2007, after a pornographic clip allegedly featuring popular local actress Maryam Hiyana, apparently filmed during a private affair, found its way into unauthorized public circulation. That scandal prompted Islamic authorities in Kano State to ban all video production in the state for six months. By the time it lifted the ban, it had rolled out 32 new regulations, which it says are intended to uphold public morality, Hausa cultural values and human dignity.

To be sure, Ismail’s death sentence is not for her role as an actress, but clearly for the crime of murder – a grievious offence anywhere in the world. But whether this sentence will be carried out, suspended like most other cases since 1999 or commuted to a lesser punishment, may be influenced by the immediate social environment in which the crime was comitted.

[THIS IS AN UPDATED VERSION OF OUR FIRST REPORT ON THE SUPREME COURT’S RULING].