ONE of the images that have, painfully, endured in my mind as a journalist was the photograph of one Gideon Akaluka, whose severed head was put on a spike and carried with glee all over the streets of Kano by fundamentalist Muslim youths, some time in 1996.Akaluka, a Christian Igbo trader, was reported to have attempted to protect a woman who was about being lynched by a mob of fundamentalists. She was accused of using a torn portion of the Holy Quran to wipe the backside of her toddler child who had just defecated.As the Muslim youths bayed for blood and descended on Akaluka, Policemen arrived and took the Igbo trader into protective custody.The following day, an army of Muslim youths invaded the Police station, went after the 'infidel'and slaughtered him like a ram. They placed the head on the spike and danced round the city with their prize.The blood hounds were not hooded, because they know that there was no need for it: They were protected from the highest quarters of Nigeria, no matter what.To date, nobody has been arrested, or been made to face trial for the high crime. To date, the Policemen in the station remain unknown and protected. Nigerians have, in fact, forgotten about the incident. It was just one in a long list of blodletting, not by foreign invaders but by citizens on their fellow citizens.Between the Akaluka killing and now, Muslim fundamentalists have carried out many more daring street murders and have graduated to bomb throwing and suicide killings. Ask the residents of Jos, the hitherto pristine capital of Plateau State.Yet another sad experience that I have been unable to remove from memory was the 1991 pogrom that followed the attempt by the Christian community in the same Kano State to have a renowned Christian cleric, Reinhard Bonnke, hold a crusade in the capital, Kano.Dead bodies littered the streets, churches and private buildings belonging to people from the Southern part of the country were torched. Fellow citizens from the Middle Belt and largely Christian states in the North, such as Benue, Kogi, and Taraba were wantonly slaughtered. To date, there is no official record of anybody facing the music.Surely, this cannot continue. The state has a duty to put an end to these mindless killings so that the victims will not have to consider self-help; and reprisal.The Christmas Day bombing at a Catholic Cathedral in Madalla, Niger State and other co-ordinated attacks in Yobe and Borno States are only a consequence of state protection for serial killers who are bent on igniting religious crisis in Nigeria.As I watched the footage of the Christmas Day bombing in Madalla, shortly after returning from church last Sunday, and the African Independent Television (AIT) brought home the pictures of the bombed church, the fatalities, the badly hurt survivors and an arrested suspect, I was moved to tears.Yet, I could not tell who I was sorry for: The dead, whose body parts littered the floor; the survivors, who were in excruciating pains in hospitals; the underaged suspect, who was obviously a victim of the uncaring social system that Nigeria has continued to nurture; or the nation, which has again lost a generation of future leaders and is once again set on the edge'Subsequent reports have revealed the harrowing experiences of the families of the deceased: a teenaged girl, whose entire family was wiped out; a man, who lost four children; a woman, whose husband and son died in the man-made blaze; and so forth.Watching the suspect, said to have been arrested by residents and handed over to the Police shortly after the twin explosions went off, I could only shake my head. The boy could only mutter indecipherables. The anchor persons of the programme on AIT said that much, although in passing, that the responses from the boy did not make much sense, if any.Assuming, without conceding, that the boy who was paraded was involved in the mass murder, then a lot more needs to be done to arrest the asphyxiating incursion of terrorism into Nigeria.The boy, apparently an almajiri, could only have been a pawn in the power game; an expendable.If that almajiri is the face of the bombers, then the call for a Sovereign National Conference must ring louder now.I refuse to believe that that boy had the technical know-how to assemble high definition explosives, and if he did, I state that he could not have had the financial muscle to acquire the components, not to talk of the vehicle in which the bomb throwers sped out of the vicinity after the attack.Th same unknown Nigerians who protected the killers of Akaluka and have been behind all these other killings, even during military rule are no ghosts.For the second time in recent weeks, explosions have rocked mosques in Delta State. The immediat import is that no ethnic group or religious persuasion has a monopoly in the use and deployment of weapons of mass destruction.That is the course from which the government must pull Nigerians back. The big fish who are behind the recent upsurge in the activities of the Boko Haram must be working on a two-pronged thesis: That the Christian community will fight back and fuel the plan for religious conflagration, or the Christians will adopt the passive path, in which case the fold of 'infidels'in the country is decimated.This is the sinister plot that the Federal Government has a duty to stop. And this is a plot that can only be achieved through educational and economic empowerment of the pawns. Truth be told, the Northern part of the country has nurtured educational ignorance for long.I am willing to wager that the 'suspect' who was paraded on AIT last Sunday is a water hawker (mai ruwa), vegetables seller or something of that kind. His exposure to Western education could only have been at the level of forced personal training to speak passable English and understand the requests of his customers. And such people in the North are in millions, untrained and unloved.The truth also is that a similar group of untrained young men and women also litters the Southern part of the country.If their Northern counterparts are pawns in the hands of power brokers who propagate hate religion and ethnicity, those of the South are expendables in the hands of politicians during elections. The current reduction in the spate of violence in the Niger Delta is traceable to the decision of the Federal Government to provide educational training ' even abroad ' to repentant militants. One of them was recently reported to be making plans to wed a white lady in the country where he is undergoing training. As a people who now have a hope for the future, many of such former militants are not likely to sit where discussions centre on taking up arms and going for a fight to the finish.It is such complete reorientation and overhaul of state relationship with the citizens, as well as clear and unambiguous clamp down on the sponsors of these ill-motivated killings that will ensure peace. And justice.
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