By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
 |
| Chidi Anselm Odinkalu |
Nigeria
confronts combined challenges in the protection of human rights and delivery of
governance that easily present opportunities for transformative leadership. On
International Human Rights Day on 10 December, all in positions of leadership
in the country have an obligation to reflect on these challenges, re-imagine
our approaches to them and reassure Nigerians that we care enough about their
best interests to involve everyone fully in the search for durable solutions to
these problems.
The
United Nations General Assembly instituted International Human Rights Day in
1950 to commemorate the adoption in December 1948 of the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights. In commemoration of this day, the United Nations identifies
annually a unifying theme around which activities are organized.
With
a focus on inclusion and participation in 2012, International Human Rights Day
honours and affirms the work of all persons around the world working to end
discrimination in any shape or form. For us in Nigeria, this theme has
remarkable resonance in big and small ways.
A
country with over 380 ethnic, national and linguistic groups, as well as
diversities of faith and sect, we seem collectively determined to manufacture a
liability from the unique asset that is our diversity. Across the country, the
one thing that unites Nigerians today is a shared persecution complex and a
Catholic sense of marginalization on narrow identity terms.
Several
decades of unaccountable rule have largely rendered public institutions
irrelevant to ordinary citizens and our communities. With impunity writ large,
we now inhabit a vigilante society in which those who cannot buy or rent
security must find some means to protect themselves or risk paying with their
lives for being unable to do so. To many people, it now seems that only those
who carry guns or threaten to do so are heard, seen or listened to.
Narrow
identity is becoming the only metric and mechanism of protection. Inter-communal,
inter-ethnic and sectarian conflicts daily claim lots of Nigerian lives with
brutal and gruesome regularity.
Once
celebrated cities, such as Jos and Kaduna, have become by-words for
identity-based blood-letting, with different identities garrisoned behind
intangible yet impenetrable lines of bad memory. Integrated commercial cities
like Kano and Maiduguri tank under interminable siege from combined forces of
nihilism and its would-be exterminators.
Increasingly,
the only minority of any significance is the Nigerian and the only place for
the wannabe Nigerian is exile. We have become a country of polarities.
Indigenes and settlers; northerners and southerners; easterners and westerners;
few have and majority have-nots; militants and bombers; Christians and Muslims;
male abusers and abused female spouses; rulers and subjects; oil-producers and
oil (revenue) suckers; not to mention a motley crowd of ethnicities.
All
these identities are framed in such a way as to exclude rather than unite; to
diminish our collective humanity, rather than emphasise, claim or celebrate it.
In
this context, it surely seems hopelessly foolish to seek to confront
discrimination or to face it down. Many would say this is a fool’s errand for
those who have to deal with the evil of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) or
the desolation that follows in their wake. Two reasons suggest that we have no
other choice.
First,
the real story of Nigeria is almost certainly not the enormity of our
challenges but the fact that the challenges are not much worse. Around the
country daily, quiet heroes and heroines go uncelebrated in acts of exceptional
humanism and bravery – a man in Kaduna facing down his sect to save a woman
from near certain death from in the hands of apostles of hate giving the
Almighty a bad name; neighbours in Lagos braving the unknown to save a woman
from blood-letting in the hands of a poor specimen of a man and a bad excuse
for a husband; Christians and Muslims in Kano taking turns to protect one
another in their places of worship from agents of a God unknown to all persons
of true faith; a family in Onitsha rescuing children from hateful abuse and
setting them up for life with free education without asking for a refund;
elderly women Ubima rallying around with their wrappers to protect the dignity,
health and child of a poor would-be mother cramping with labour pains in the
middle of the local market. A young, improbable survivor of mass bombing in
Abuja deciding that she will help to heal others with her experience rather
than wallow in enforced disability. These and similar examples of our shared
values and common bonds are what the world asks us to remember, acknowledge and
celebrate on International Human Rights Day in 2012.
Second,
if we are unable to re-capture, celebrate or institutionalize these acts of
shared investment in our common humanity, we will not be able to face down
those who would blow us apart – pun intended – with IEDs or those who would
wish to serve up collective reprisal for the cowardly acts of hateful nihilists
or zealots on a mis-cue. Only by doing so can we forge the common cause
among communities, institutions, political leaders and friends and partners of
Nigeria internationally that will be required to re-discover the sense that
Nigeria’s future is not already behind us.
This
International Human Rights Day, therefore, serves up a huge to-do menu for
Nigeria, its people and our leaders. We have to find a common memory of shared
values; a common narrative for a shared country. A Nigeria history project that
celebrates the contributions of all of Nigeria’s diversities would help. In the
ongoing process of constitutional amendment, we must address the issue and
meaning of citizenship
in Nigeria and agree a national commitment to equal opportunities backed up by
adequate institutional guarantees. We must find ways to end impunity for crimes
big and small, including crimes of violence as well as grand corruption and
plunder.
Above
all, on the foothills of a new general election cycle in just over two years,
we must agree that all votes must count and be counted equally, for this is the
most effective way to guarantee inclusion, participation and
non-discrimination. A country that cannot count votes, is almost always also
unable to count its people or their money.
Odinkalu chairs the Governing Council of the
National Human Rights Commission.
No comments:
Post a Comment