In
one of my favorite novels by British novelist, Graham Greene, called, “Our Man
in Havana,” a Cuban policeman, Captain Segura, explains to the British spy Mr.
Wormold on who gets to be tortured in his country’s class system.
“The
poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central
Europe and the Orient. Of course, in your welfare states you have no poor, so
you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with
émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from
your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides.
Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more
criminal.”
I
thought of this quote during this year’s International Day of the Girl which
comes, as it always does, on October 11. This year, UNICEF teamed up with
American online publication The Daily Beast to post a special feature on girls
who have had to raise children born of sexual violence from forced marriages
with Boko Haram insurgents, in the northeastern part of the country. When many
girls manage to flee the insurgents, they often face stigmatization in their
communities and have had to live in camps with these children, where they
remain vulnerable to violence and abuse.
This
story follows a 27 September report released by Amnesty international detailing
the abuse and exploitation that women and girls, like the ones in the story,
experienced at the hands of Cameroonian soldiers, from early 2015. However, a
most damning detail worth noting from that report is that, the Nigerian army
worked with the Cameroonian army to forcefully deport these Nigerian-displaced
persons, from Cameroonian camps.
It
is true that there have been improvements in security in the country’s
northeast and that the government has done some work to improve the
humanitarian situation. It is also true that the trauma of having fled horrific
violence from one’s home could make one reluctant to return, and that recent
reports of Boko Haram killings and kidnapping, lends to the narrative, that the
armed group is far from defeated. Indeed, a study released on October 11 by the
Norwegian Refugee Council has 86% of the displaced people surveyed saying they
are afraid to return to their homes. The need to support a preferred
government’s narrative of returning normalcy to the embattled northeast, with
hitherto displaced Nigerians now returning to their hometowns, cannot be more
important than keeping ordinary Nigerians out of harm’s way.
While
it is clear that the Cameroonian government is deporting Nigerian refugees en
masse and often refuses them political asylum, the Nigerian government has a
responsibility to its citizens to protect them. People not wanting to return to
a volatile situation is entirely understandable. However, our government knows
that in interacting with torturable people, there can be no debating, no
discussion, no incentivizing. Their reasons for doing things cannot possibly be
based on any kind of logic because they are inherently unreasonable. This is
not, after all, much of a departure from the logic that tells us that the
vision of Lagos as a second Dubai is enough reason to forcefully evict poor
Lagosians from their homes, or that the need to affirm the non-negotiability of
Nigeria’s unity is enough reason to Nigerian army’s violence in the southeast.
Violence in response to people from a torturable class is a feature, not a bug.
The
most-scary thing about how we have come to define who belongs to the torturable
class and who does not, shows how ephemeral wealth in Nigeria can be. Most
Nigerians are a missed paycheque from dire straits. The wealthy among us know
this too well; after all, that is why so many amass of wealth for its own sake —
rather than doing what so many of their wealthy counterparts in other parts of
the world do, like invest in the arts or set up foundations that fund causes –
because even with all the money they have, they are just as stuck in survival
mode as the rest of the country. They know their place at the top of the food
chain is not assured and do not believe that they will fare well if the market
was truly competitive, so they use what money they have to buy favourable
political outcomes. This happens in even more development democracies, but the
difference is that there is no political counterweight to this strength here.
There are less grades of torturable and non-torturable.
The
differences between the most non-torturable and the most torturable are,
therefore, far starker.There is no class more torturable than those who have
lost their homes and are at the mercy of the state. In order to adequately
address the challenges, we face, Nigeria’s government will have to do something
that we know is against its nature: to protect those it is used to harming. You
can be the country that deals with challenges facing its most vulnerable, or
you can be the country that aids and abets their abuse and exploitation. You
cannot be both.
Source: guardian.ng
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