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From Noah Ebije, Kaduna
General Secretary, Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), Rev. (Dr) Yunusa Nmadu has said that most Northern states are governed by terrorists as a result of insecurity across the country.
In this interview with Sunday Sun, Rev. Nmadu said that it was only Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State that admitted the fact that there is parallel government by terrorists in his state, adding that other states in the region are suffering the same fate in silence.
The ECWA Secretary General who is the former Secretary, Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Kaduna State chapter, also spoke on Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket of the All Progressive Congress (APC), saying that it is designed to divide the country along religious lines. Excerpts:
Governor el-Rufai admitted recently that there is a parallel government by terrorists in Kaduna State. What is your reaction to this?
They will not tell you that they have failed. But me and you know they have failed. So, when the Chief Security Officer of the State is saying this, what does it mean to you. You are a married man, when you go home today and tell your family that this house we are in, I don’t know whether we will reach tomorrow, what are you saying? You are simply saying to them, to your tenth oh ye Israel. I am your leader, but I am sorry, I cannot even protect myself not to talk of protecting you. Governor el-Rufai is admitting too late in the day. Is it now? No. It’s not. It has been there. We have been singing it. CAN has been saying it, some of us have been saying it and they have tried to counter what we have said that we have two governments in some of the northern states, Niger and some other places. We travelled there, our church is all over the country and there are places where today the bandits take taxes and you must give the tax if you want your wife to be protected from rape, if you want your children not to be taken. Go and and find out, these are realities. These are not tale by moon light. We have seen the people, some of them are members of our churches they cannot go to their farms unless they pay money to the bandits so that they won’t attack them. It happened in Zamfara of recent that one of the kingpins was given a traditional tittle. The paramount ruler simply said if that is going to help our people why not, so that they don’t attack us. This is how they used to do during the time of armed robbery. When an armed robber lives in your community in the ‘70s, and ‘80s. When an armed robber lives in a community, that community is protected because he will tell all his boys not to attack that community. So, right now that is the tactics they are using. So, we have two governments in most of the northern states and it is an admittance of total failure on the part of the government. Coming back to what I said before, that this people have ran out of idea completely.
How has kidnapping and insecurity generally affected your members over the years across the country?
I was once the secretary of CAN in Kaduna State. So, I don’t see my membership only in ECWA , I see myself across denominational divide and when you say over the years it is important we differentiate what has happened in the past and what is happening now. Over the years, there were clashes, some were farmer/herder clashes , there were persecution of the church, violent attack of churches, when it started in 1987 that was when it was Kafanchan crisis, then they were looking for places of worship to destroy, then it graduated to looking for human beings to kill, but as you know we have graduated from that point to terrorism which is what we are facing today. So, if you say how many people have been killed, I won’t be able to give you the statistics, but they are in their thousands, numerous houses destroyed, businesses that have been affected, I don’t have the statistics, but I can tell you that in the last seven years, almost on daily basis, people were being kidnapped, killed, villages sacked, places of worship destroyed almost on daily basis across the northern states. The attacks have increased astronomically over the past seven years and again we know that this is what is going to happen as predicted that with the coming of President Buhari, the Fulani who were at the fringe will be emboldened to do more because they would think that our man is on top and he will protect us and again you cannot divorce this from the statement that he has made over the years before he became the president, statement like when Boko Haram were being attacked by the national forces, statement that they were attacking his own people, so some of us felt that this thing is going to be at the increase, I’m not disappointed with what is happening.
The Senate recently made the moves of impeaching President Buhari if insecurity does not stop. What is your reaction about the moves to impeach the president?
The problem with Nigeria is we are highly hypothetical. For example, there would be potholes on the road and it will not be fixed except when a notable person is involved in an accident, then before you know it within hours they will fix the potholes, it looks like the life of common man does not matter in Nigeria, the Senate are just waking up to reality too late, I think because it is touching them now and I don’t even see any seriousness in what they are saying, it has died out and these are the people when they bark and you throw bones at them, as it were in the case of dog, you can make them to be silent, I don’t know what has happened, the fire is dying down if it has not quenched completely. They just got up because it has started affecting them and their relations and secondly because election is near and they want to go back to their constituencies to win election, some of them have lost their ticket and they have gone to another party, I think they are doing this so that people would think that they are concerned about common man.
What is your stand on Muslim-Muslim ticket as adopted by the All Progressive Congress (APC) presidential candidate, Bola Tinubu for the 2023 election?
Those who have lined Muslim-Muslim ticket whether at federal level or in Kaduna State, they have failed exams already, this is not in the interest of the Muslims neither it is in the interest of Christians, I will never support same faith ticket even if it is the Christians where both faith are almost equal, and, of course, there are some states that are predominantly Muslim, you cannot go there and ask for Muslim-Christian ticket, it is understandable, there are some states that are predominantly Christians, you cannot go there and ask for Christian-Muslim ticket, then it is understandable, but I don’t know how anybody in their political calculation will ever think that they will win election in Nigeria without the Christians or win election in Nigeria without the Muslims. This is our country we are so divided in the last seven years of President Buhari government, the gap has increased so wide and it is expected that any government that is coming in now should emphasize unity and how to bring the people together, a same faith ticket by APC is dead before arrival, it is not in the interest of unity of our country. I think that those who are even pushing the candidate to do this do not even mean well for him. I believe that it is because they want him to fail election and that is why they are asking him to do that. Like I said a Muslim-Muslim ticket is divisive, it does not encourage cohesion and it does not bring the country together and what we need now more than ever before is national unity and we need whoever that will bring us together, respecting everyone because some of the reasons they gave in this same faith ticket is so mundane, unintellectual, they said we should be concerned about those coming to fix the country, that we should not be concerned about religion, are they saying that those to fix the country are only found in one faith? They also said it is competence and I see it as very insulting to other religious group in the country because what they have said is that they have searched in other religion and couldn’t find anybody that is competent, no, that argument doesn’t hold water at all.
Why do you think that Nigerians are more divided now than before?
We have been so divided over time, but not as much as prominent as it is today, this government of the day has widened the gap, they are the ones that have divided us because of the appointment they have made over time, the way they have favoured one section of the country, how do you want to surmount the insecurity in the country where they are 17 security apparatus and almost all of them came from the same faith and the same place, it won’t fly, the people in government know what they are doing, the division has been orchestrated by government of the day, by their appointment, the way they do things, favoritism they have shown and this is not how it should be. If you want to solve that kind of problem, it’s not by widening the gap and picking from same faith religion.
What is your feeling about the economic situation in the country that appears to have nosedived?
The economic situation of Nigeria , we don’t need figure to know that we are in a mess, we don’t need figures to know, you all know what you used to fill your car tank with and what it is now, you know how much a bag of rice was and what it is now, your wife goes to the market and you think she is cheating you, we don’t need figures, we are in the fire because when it is heat it is bearable, but right now we are inside the fire.These people in government do not have an idea any longer, they have ran out of ideas on how to fix this country and that is what I think should bother us more, it is not the situation we are in because we are in it already, but what should bother us more is that the people that are leading us have resigned to fate, they have no idea, they are waiting on their time to be over and it is a long wait, we have about seven months, a lot of damage will be done, I am worried that our people are not only clueless, but have resigned to fate and they are just waiting on their time.
There was this speculation across the country that ECWA has kept some children in Jos for forceful conversion. What is your reaction on this?
Well, we put up a press release on that. I will say a little about it and then forward the press release by my president to you. Again we are living in time where people just want to say things the way they think. We have a unit in ECWA. Don’t forget that we are a church organization that is involved in spiritual and humanitarian services. We have hospitals. By the grace of God, we have one of the flourishing private university today in the country. We have hospitals everywhere, clinic, tertiary, secondary health care centers, we have School of Nursing and Midwifery, we have secondary schools and so on, so we are engaged in what we call wholistic ministry and parts of this is helping people who otherwise are not able to help themselves. So, we open these centres under one of our departments which is called Church Related Ministry and we get people who have become hopeless and they come there for one year and we give them trade and give them startup equipment. Some of them learned bread making, shoe making knitting and so many other things. So, if you stay there for six months, you are allowed to go back to spend the holiday and return again, after the next six months then you are graduated and you go with your community. It’s very important to know that some of these people have been able to go to the university because of the state they are in and part of the things we do is to help those who can pursue their education to help them write their WAEC exams and then further their education. There are some of them that are in the university. It’s a mixture of Muslim and Christians. We are a Christian organization to cry out loud. So, anybody that comes there, you will go through some of our discipleship programmes. We are not shying away from that. That’s us. So, they all go through the discipleship programme. There are forms that are filled out, they signed the agreement for everything. So, there were these two boys, one in particular, who had gone for holiday and returned, but whether they planted him as a destructive agent or he himself something got into him, one day he scaled the fence. You don’t need to scale the fence. All you need to do is to say you are no longer interested. The door is wide open, you will be left out. And usually, we don’t accept people when they come by themselves. Guardians or parents will bring them so that they can sign on their behalf and during the holiday they go to such people who brought them to spend their holidays and then they came back. These two people have gone on holiday and they have returned. Then one of them decided to scale the fence one day and then ran to wherever he did and said that they were being forcefully converted and they said that the DSS raided the place. They also said that all the students had been taken away. That’s not true. Apart from those two boys who are from the same parents, all of them have gone back. In fact, as I speak to you now they have gone on holidays and have returned. Any of you who want to go and interview them, I can sponsor those of you who want to go to Jos and interview them and tell the world whether these people are forced or not, but we don’t want to join issue with people. We don’t want to be distracted from the good works we are doing, we know that heaven will reward us and we are contributing to nation building and it’s difficult.
