Governor Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State has deliberately and complacently, if not self-righteously, marched briskly into another controversy. The politician and technocrat seems built for controversy than for anything else. This time he has got himself embroiled in a religious dispute over whether the state can legislate religious practice, particularly by licensing preaching. He has therefore forwarded an executive bill to the state legislature setting out among other guidelines how preachers may be licensed and the conditions under which they can preach. The bill is expected to replace a military edict on the same subject promulgated in 1984. But confronted by a horde of anti-regulation sceptics, the governor has simply shrugged his shoulders and soldiered on. The bill is not new anyway, he says, because it had existed under a different guise under a past military government.
The motive for generating the bill is sound. Kaduna State has a reputation for religious volatility, a disturbing reputation forged more than three decades ago and sustained by episodic bloodletting on a scale rivalled only by the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency. If the state ever witnessed ethnic disturbances, it was only because it had first manifested as religious schisms perpetrated through Nigeria’s ethnic fault lines. And if there is some peace and quietude at the moment, it is simply to the extent that the volcano has not reached its eruption temperature. Indigenes of Kaduna have learnt to live with the fear of indiscriminate flare-ups, even as they have gradually and quietly resigned themselves to segregated living. So, it is not out of place for the crusading Mallam el-Rufai to attempt what he sees through his often utopian prism as a permanent solution.
The bill, now more widely referred to as Gov. el-Rufai’s preaching bill, pitches constitutionalists against peaceniks, with the latter, because of their distaste for armed conflict, seeing nothing wrong in enforcing controls on religious groups in the state. No one can accurately determine at the moment which group is gaining the upper hand, the peaceniks or constitutionalists. And it is not clear whether even among the state’s or country’s religions the bill is popular. On the surface, however, some argue, the bill appears to target extremist Muslim preachers. But underneath, warn some Christian leaders, the bill targets and stymies the evangelical underpinnings of Jesus Christ’s mandate to his followers. For many constitutionalists, the bill is so fraught with problems that it is virtually dead on arrival. According to them, the bill stands on very shaky constitutional grounds, though no one can guess how the state’s lawmakers view the bill: whether with wary eyes, or with indifference, or with approving glances. To say the bill is controversial is, therefore, an understatement.
What is certain is that while Gov. el-Rufai has modified the 1984 military-inspired edict on the same subject, he has not appeared to examine why it failed and was abandoned. Mechanically speaking, both Christianity and Islam have been accommodated in the preaching bill in terms of ensuring representation, not necessarily fairness, in licensing preachers. However, no matter how well they are structured and sensibly constituted, the registration panels, which shut out other religions but the largest two, may find some difficulties in capturing, acknowledging and sanctioning the various doctrinal differences acceptable to the state. Indeed, left to the Christian panel , for instance, it is hard to see them in the 15th or 16th century approving Martin Luther’s radical and reformist ministry had he applied for a licence. More, had Jesus Christ lived in Mallam el-Rufai’s Kaduna, not only would he spurn the licensing requirement, his application would most certainly be turned down if he sought one.
There are incontestable moral grounds for the bill. As many other countries battling terrorism have shown, it may indeed be reckless to pretend that some regulations are not necessary to put a lid on extremism. They are. The problem is how it should be done, and whether they should even come as laws which stand the risk of conflicting with the constitution. The many bitter religious cum ethnic battles Kaduna State has fought — perhaps more than any other state — may offer sound pretext for regulation. For a state that appears eternally poised on the edge of religious conflagration, the governor may indeed be right and sensible to look and think proactively in anticipating religious conflicts and proffering solutions to either pre-empt or respond to them firmly.
However, it is doubtful whether the solution lies in more regulation or lawmaking. The 1984 edict fell into abeyance for reasons the governor should not find too difficult to fathom. Chief among the reasons is that anywhere in the world, it is extremely difficult to regulate religion outside the laws and the constitution, especially in a democracy with a liberal constitution. Even in authoritarian climes, the regulation of religions eventually collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Should the Kaduna State House of Assembly pass the preaching bill, there is little doubt that enforcement, insensitively and unwisely conferred on Sharia and Customary courts, would be so controversial and problematic that it would be challenged successfully in higher courts. There is also little doubt that once enforcement appears skewed, that itself would raise an avalanche of complaints and allegations of bias against the governor, his team and the enforcers. The preaching bill, notwithstanding the laudable task it hopes to undertake, is really a needless piece of legislation whose drawbacks cannot be mitigated by the governor’s boldness or altruism.
What is even worse is that the governor himself lacks the tact to sell the bill. Whether during his service at the federal level as Minister of the Federal Capital City (FCT) or as governor, Mallam el-Rufai has not been able to transcend his messianic disposition. He speaks combatively with a disturbing cocksureness that grates on the nerves of those who disagree with him. Very often his cost-benefit analyses are skewed in favour of the benefit side, and his manner of implementation peremptory and unfeeling. He regards himself a technocrat, and the country agrees with him. But he is now a politician who must manage his technocratic ways with the suavity of a principled politician. Mallam el-Rufai has not been able to do this. In fact, for a governor who adjudged the Shiites guilty of crime even before investigations had been carried out into the December 2015 Zaria clash between the Nigerian Army and some members of the Islamic Movement, it is difficult to imagine he can be trusted to show strict as opposed to benevolent neutrality when religions clash, or when those who oppose his rules and regulations test the might of the state.
So far, whether on the matter of this preaching bill or the bulldozing of properties, or that of relating with his critics such as Senator Shehu Sani, Mallam el-Rufai has neither spoken nor acted as a politician or a democrat. Reacting to those who opposed the preaching bill, he had said: “But what I found out is that the elite have one weapon, and that is religion, and it is sad. But, unfortunately for them, they have not studied me. If anyone had studied my career at FCT, he would have known that playing religious card would fail all the time, because the moment you play that card, I know you are an adversary that needs to be put down and I will not look back until I am done with you.” Yet, he rode on the wings of the change momentum during the 2015 elections and won, partly because of the popular disenchantment with the Goodluck Jonathan government. He will be sailing near the wind to think he has secured the right to talk down to the people and force laws on them before he has been able to persuade them.
Some of his bills, including the preaching bill, may be sensible in a few parts, and the motives pure, but he needs the wisdom of a sage and the patience of a true liberal and tested politician to govern a complex and eternally agitated state like Kaduna. He should go on to cap these attributes, should he prove capable of acquiring them, with the verbal forbearance of many of his northern role models. Given his general proclivity and the abrasive manner he ran the FCT with the connivance of ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, he will need extraordinary and herculean effort to reclaim himself from his former set ways. That prospect is sadly a little far-fetched.
Rather than initiate bills seeking to regulate contentious religious matters, the governor should explore other means of managing religious disagreements and containing extremism in the state. The 1984 edict did not work under the military; there is no reason to think an improved law based on that edict will work now or in the near future. Mallam el-Rufai has done little to persuade the state of the necessity for and relevance of the preaching bill; his reputation as a gadfly and his impetuousness stand in the way of sound and modernising politicking. He needs to change first before changing Kaduna. His task, as he acknowledges, is made doubly difficult by the prevailing economic crisis. He should, therefore, find no difficulty in understanding that the mood of the moment does not favour his flighty lawmaking adventures, nor does the edginess of the people condone the imperiousness of his messianic predilection. Since he has begun to recognise that managing FCT was a cakewalk compared with governing a state, he should be optimistic that that epiphany may yet help transform him into a more robust politician than the militician he had schooled himself to become since the Obasanjo presidency.
NATION
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