Last week’s biggest news in Ortomdom was the forceful removal of 59 young boys from Benue to their states of origin in Katsina and Bauchi. This was an action undertaken by the Benue State Action Committee on COVID-19. Let me, at the outset, state that the position that this column takes on the deportation of these young boys from Benue goes against popular trends and opinions in the state.
The action was apparently very popular across the board with usual Ortom critics such as Kula Terso openly congratulating the Ortom administration for its deportation of the boys. Despite its apparent popularity, I am vehemently opposed to the action. My opposition to it does not derive from a refusal to applaud Ortom when he does something right. No, I am eager to applaud Ortom if and when he does the right thing. I stand against the action not because I don’t think that the Ortom administration can never get anything right. It is hard for it to get anything right but it is not impossible. My opposition against the action derives from its immorality, its unconstitutionality and its selectivity. It was an action seemingly done to protect public health in Benue but in reality, it was an action motivated by prejudice and grandstanding. It cannot, in anyway, protect Benue from the pandemic or any other health hazards that Benue faces or likely to face in the future. Actions motivated by animus to others never protects anyone or anything. They simply preserve and protect prejudice.
When news broke that a large number of young men had been “infiltrated” into Benue, the place where they had supposedly been brought from to Benue was identified as Kano. Purveyors of this false narrative wanted to prejudice our minds. Kano had become the hotbed of the spread of COVID-19 and the idea was to suggest that if these young people were brought to Benue from such a hotspot for the pandemic, it could only have been done with an ulterior motive of endangering the people of Benue. I did not buy that nonsense. I do not see Kano or any other state of the Nigerian federation at war with Benue. I could not see how people infected with the virus could become human missiles to kill many people in Benue or make them sick. The notion that someone or a group of people were deliberately dispatching young people who had contracted the virus to Benue in other to infect the people of Benue with the virus seemed fancifully-concocted to me. Second, the place where they were housed was described as a camp. Again, the intention here was to obfuscate issues to lead to only one conclusion: the intent to harm Benue by sending human missiles. It turned out there was no camp whatsoever. They were housed in two apartments in the Hausa Quarters of Makurdi.
Nonetheless, the suspicion that these young boys were deliberately sent to Benue to harm its people, provided the tabula rasa for the actions of the Benue State Government against them. First, they were presumed to be carriers of the virus. Consequently, the Action Committee checked their temperatures. There was nothing about them to suggest that they were sickened by the virus or had come into contact with those who had contracted the disease. None of them was running a fever. Taking temperatures of those arriving Benue from other states or other countries was not a bad idea by itself. It is an important means of checking for the presence of the virus and taking actions to mitigate its spread. The problem here was that of all the people who entered Benue within the period, only these young people from Katsina and Bauchi had their temperatures checked. Yes, there were pictures showing Abounu, the deputy governor of Benue and the chairman of the Action Committee, at a roadblock taking the temperature of a few passengers, but even then, none of those passengers was detained. They were all allowed to proceed on their journey. Some Benue indigenes traveled back to Benue from other parts of Nigeria, including from hot zones of the spread of the virus but they were neither isolated nor have their temperatures taken. Maybe there were some unstated reasons why the young people from Bauchi and Katsina were treated this way but in the absence of this column not been privy to such information, we can conclude that it was based on ethnic/religious discrimination. It was motivated by prejudice. Neither Katsina nor Bauchi is an epicenter of the infections in Nigeria. Other Nigerians coming to Benue from other places were not automatically suspected to be COVID-19 carriers the way these young people from Katdina and Bauchi were.
Deputy-Governor Abounu, according to press reports, articulated the sole reason why these young people were forcibly removed from Benue. Abounu claimed that they were housed in congested quarters contrary to presidential directives on curbing the spread of the virus. COVID-19 spreads through contacts and congestion of human beings can serve as an important vector for spreading the virus but this reason is not tenable as a justification for removing the young people from Benue. Many poor people live in congested quarters, not just in Benue, but throughout the country. My fear all along was that that living arrangement forced on millions of Nigerians by poverty which itself results from insensitive and myopic leadership, could become an automatic death sentence on many people if the pandemic hits Nigeria the way it has hit the United States, China and Western Europe. In Benue itself, the IDP camps are horribly congested. If congestion goes against a presidential directive, why was decongestion effected only against these young people who happened to have come to Benue in the midst of a hysteria induced by a quest to blame other people for Benue’s woes? How does removing 59 young people from two houses in Makurdi solve the problem of congestion induced by poverty? Many Nigerians living in squalid quarters where more than ten people sleep in a single room would like to live is spacious quarters of mansions and palaces in GRA, Makurdi, Asokoro, Maitama, Lekki and other choice locations of the Nigerian rich and famous. It is poverty that denies them that dream but being poor is not a criminal offense whose punishment is forceful deportation to one’s place of ancestral identity.
Even on a specious medical ground, the deportation of the young people cannot be condoned. In the first place, none of them has the disease but even if all 59 of them were infected, deporting them from Benue cannot stop the spread of the virus. In fact, under that circumstance, deporting them rather than putting them in isolation places would most certainly increase the contagious effects of the virus. The drivers of their deportation vehicles and all the places along the routes of their deportation would be exposed to the deadly virus. So, even on medical grounds, deporting the young men was a very foolish act. Ethically, it was immoral and indefensible because it was couched on discrimination and prejudice.
One of the reasons why the deportation of the young people to Katsina and Bauchi was so universally popular in Benue lies in the suspicion that Almajirai could become security threats. There is every reason to condemn the practice of Almajiraihood. It is a gross underutilization of the skills, talents and potentials of the young boys forced by their parents and wards into the practice. It leaves the young people with no discernible skills other than the ability to memorize the Islamic holy text, the Quran. It is grossly antiquated and must be abolished. The young boys involved in it are easily recruited by unscrupulous men into perpetrating dastardly acts. However, the action of the Benue State Government in the instant case did not strike a blow against the Almajirai system. In the first place, although the deported young men were referred to as Almajirai, they were not. According to the man who recruited them, he had brought them to Benue to get them employed in performing menial jobs. He said that he did this on a regular basis and apparently, it was his action this time in the current climate of fear over the pandemic, that triggered the panic reaction. In other words, they were not brought to Benue to learn the Koran and to beg for alms as are typical of Almajirai. They were brought to Benue as low-skilled workers. Even if the Benue State government, by its action, was making a statement of its rejection of the Almajirai system, how does the deportation curb the practice? There are many Almajirai already in Benue. Will be deported simply for being Almajirai? Moreover, if the deportees were Almajirai, their deportation from Benue would not impair the practice. They will simply be sent to other states that may not deport them. Those applauding the Benue State Government’s action because they oppose the Almajirai system have not reflected on the fact that if the young boys were Almajirai, rehabilitating them in Benue would have been a more effective posture than deporting them. Interestingly, were it not for the fact that positioning himself as a bulwark against a rampaging horde of Fulani invaders was so central to Ortom’s political triumphalism, Ortom would have been a champion rescuer of Almajirai. I can even picture newspaper headlines proclaiming, “Benue Gov. Ortom Rescues 500 Almajirai: Offers Them Automatic Scholarship to Benue State University.” Alas, in this instance, Ortom cannot eat his cake and have it too. Almajirai are a dispensable people. Mislabeling these young people as Almajirai and then deporting them to create the imagery of the Ortom doing everything to protect Benue were too alluring to be ignored.
Deporting the young people cannot be justified either on a claim that it would help to stop human trafficking. Even if we grant that bringing 59 young people from Katsina and Bauchi states amounted to human trafficking, did the Benue State Government take the action because of its opposition to human trafficking? The answer to this question is a categorical no. There are thousands of Igbo young men and women in Benue under all sorts of apprenticeship programs. Although we usually do not include their programs as forms of human-trafficking, in reality, they are. We should not hide ethnic and religious prejudice under the cloak of opposition to human trafficking. Opposition to human trafficking should not be ethnically or religiously-bound. If we oppose one form of human trafficking, we must oppose all forms of human trafficking. Anything else is an opportunistic mouthing of a popular phrase.
Under the Nigerian Constitution, every Nigerian has an inalienable right to live in any part of the country. Even those who have committed crimes in their places of domicile cannot be forcibly removed to their “states of origin.” It is discriminatory to deny a Nigeria residency rights in any state of his or her choice. The Benue State Government is not at liberty to deport anyone from the state, even on health grounds. It is unconstitutional. Some of us may applaud the Ortom administration for its action against the 59 young people because the murderous activities of some Fulani herdsmen terrorists have made Hausa- Fulani people, and by extension, Islam, objects of loathsome dread and anathema in Benue, but my fear is that if we succeed in doing it to young people from Katsina and Bauchi today, what stops other states from doing it to us, as citizens of Benue? Deportations of members of a hated group may be popular today, but hated groups are a moving target. Hausa-Fulani may not always be Benue’s hated group. The chickens of ethnic and religious bigotry have a habit of coming home to roost. We cannot decry the death and destruction which Jukun militia members are daily visiting on people of Tiv ethnic origin in Taraba State and at the same time, cheer-on the Benue State Government for sending away other Nigerians from Benue on the specious ground that they are not one of us and therefore have to right to live and work in Benue. The fact that other states may be doing it does not make it right.
The climate of uncertainty, the palpable fears that the pandemic has generated among us should not blind us to foolish and bigoted actions. The deportation of the 59 Nigerians from Benue was a foolish and bigoted action. It was an action motivated by prejudice and executed solely for creating the impression that the Ortom administration is taking proactive measures against the pandemic. Providing financial support to families and individuals, ravaged by the lockdown so they can buy food and other necessities, is a far more concrete step that will ensure compliance with the lockdown rules and curb the spread of the virus. That’s far more important in the efforts to curtail the virus than dramatic, but ultimately pyrrhic actions like deportations. Building and equipping hospitals in Benue as a priority public health policy is a better use of Benue time and resources than compounding the victimhood of hapless young men from Katsina and Bauchi States. This may not be a popular position but I fully stand by it. The fight against injustice should be based on what may be ephemerally popular. It should be based on the timeless and irrevocable commitment to equity and fairness.
Prof. Pita Agbese, wrote from Iowa, USA.
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