We are almost near a full blown religious war,Zamfara killings

A man named his dog “Buhari” and he was quickly arrested, brutalized at the police station, and promptly brought to court, according to the police for constituting public nuisance capable of causing a breakdown in law and order.
It was a strange charge, and there was public uproar about the abridgment of the rights of a private citizen, doing the most private of things: naming his personal pet. But the indelicacy of the situation has more to do with the act of naming judged subversive. The dog was named after Nigeria’s current president. But the action itself constitutes no particular infringement in law; it’s just an infringement of the sensibility of those who felt that the name of the president has been misused.
The owner of the dog so maned came out to say that he named his “Nwa Nkita” – his beloved dog - “Buhari,” from his abiding admiration of the president. It was an act of love. On the flip side, it might arguably be out of pure animus for the president. There are some who might even argue that “Buhari” is no fit name even for a dog. That a dog deserves better. It is complicated. All humans are complicated. That is why we make laws to negotiate our complexities. The laws of the land guarantees individuals those rights for individual conscience and the freedom of speech. What the laws forbid is libel against a named individual. In other words, under the laws establishing the Nigerian state, an individual could call his dog any name they wish, and would be protected by it. What the Nigerian police did in arresting and hauling the Nigerian citizen who named his dog “Buhari” to jail amounts to an abuse of power, and an abridgement of his fundamental human rights.
There are those who argue that it was an act of disrespect for the president. Well, not every Nigerian respects the president of Nigeria, and they have a right to their own conviction. They have a right to express their convictions in ways, including the use of satire and other non-violent means. It should never come to the point where “misusing” the name of the Nigerian president would earn one jail time. This is not the medieval age. And this would not be the Nigeria that the founding fathers of this nation fought for. Nigerians aspire to have in this 21st century, the gift of freedom promised them at Independence. A president is a public figure, and must as a matter of fact, endure the obloquy that sometimes comes from those who may not appreciate his work, or his office. Once in Baghdad, the US president had a journalist haul a shoe at him. To haul a shoe at an individual is apparently considered the highest “F-k you!” moment amongst the Arabs and the Persians; worse than being called a dog. Naming a dog after a Muslim president is insensitive and ill-mannered, since apparently, a dog is the lowest animal in the Islamic imagination, but it should be seen as no more than extremely bad manners, rather than an act punishable in law. Nigeria has a population of well over 170 million, depending on whom you ask. Many of these Nigerians are irreligious. They do not subscribe either to Christianity, Islam, or even the Traditional religions. There are Nigerians, in other words who are either agnostic or who are even Atheists, because they do not believe in any deity. They too have rights to lack in faith. The federal government acts as though these Nigerians without faith are invisible and non-existent, and therefore have no rights to be protected.
The fight in Nigeria today seems now increasingly staged between professed Christians and professed Muslims. The upsurge of religious fundamentalism in Nigeria is driven by the pressure of disappearing and complicated identities. It is, at the core, the basis of the divisions in Nigeria, given the old fiction of a “Muslim North” and a ‘Christian South.” The Nigerian government itself has played up these divisions, and funded the radicalization of Nigerians, through paying for the pilgrimages first for the Muslims, to Mecca, and now increasingly of Christians to Jerusalem. One of the most disturbing images for sensible Nigerians was the picture of former President Jonathan on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Over the years, Nigeria has spent billions in paying for religious pilgrimages of adherents of these “Abrahamic religions.”
Yet, Nigeria is constitutionally, a secular state. There is no state religion, and there is no compulsion to belong to any. Much of the money spent on pilgrimages could have been used to provide government-backed loans to young entrepreneur who might create jobs and expand the Nigerian economy.
Recently, in fact, the Buhari government ordered banks to sell hard currency to Muslim pilgrims going to Mecca at such a reduced price, while industrialists are unable to obtain the same terms for their spares and machineries. Over the years, the fundamentalist fire has been lit by the ways that the Nigerian government itself have responded to issues of religion and religious morality.
I have been told that today, even in the Universities, once the bastion of rational secularism, before each lecture, Professors now demand an opening prayer. This is outrageous. Religion should remain a deeply private thing, and must never be supported by the state. The result of state sponsorship of religious activity is the toxic levels of intolerance that has today led to the rise of fundamentalist movements like Boko Haram, itself an outcrop of the Maitasine movement of the 1980s. The Christians are currently unarmed, but increasing attacks on Christian communities and groups is most likely going to drive them to begin to respond to what they are increasingly seeing as the armed Jihad of the Muslims by staging their own armed crusades pretty soon. As the Sultan of Sokoto quite rightly, recently said, a religious war is difficult to manage. But we are already almost near a full-blown religious war. The separatist language of groups like IPOB are couched in fundamentalist religious terms, and Boko Haram, and the Shiites led by El-Zaky Zaky are already on the war path with the secular state. One of the great fictions of contemporary Nigeria is the notion of an “Islamic North.”
This is not true. The startling truth may actually be that far more Christians reside in the North today than Moslems, and this very fact, is driving the pressure by Muslim cultural nationalists feeling increasing loss of ground to react to this phenomenon.
This reality underscores the killing last week in Zamfara of eight people by fundamentalist Moslems. As the story goes, an argument suddenly led to the accusation of blasphemy, and to the burning down of a house in which eight people lived. The tragedy for me is mirrored more in the statement by the Zamfara state governor, reacting to the public outcry: the people killed, he said, were not Christians. They were Muslims. As if the killing of Muslims on the pretext of blasphemy makes it alright. No killing is right on account of holding a difference of religious or political opinion. The Zamfara state governor was not only insensitive in his assertions, but in doing that, underscores the tragedy of our contemporary public life, when people unsuited for the task are given the responsibility of public leadership. It is imperative that the fundamental questions be asked: why did the police and other law enforcement groups fail to protect the lives of these eight murdered Nigerians? What is the federal government doing to stop these killings? It is has gone on too far and for too long. Before the current incident, 70-year old Igbo woman, Mrs. Elizabeth Agbagheme was murdered by zealots in Kano for “blasphemy.”
The Zamfara killings must be made to be last killings of any Nigerian based on the expression of faith, conscience or conviction. Otherwise, the government might open the door for a religious war of the kind never seen before on the African continent, as the Christians, the current victims of these extrajudicial murders, are unlikely to take it for much too long.
The current call by the Northern convention of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) for Christians to begin to defend themselves is a signal of what is to come. The federal government must end these atrocities. Nigeria must stop the public funding of any religion, and any pilgrimages. It must arrest and punish those who have killed in the name of God. A man names his dog “Buhari” and is quickly arrested and taken to court. A group kills an entire household of eight in the name of Islam, and nothing happens. It is sending a bad signal.