Yes, the Minister of Communications and Digital Economy, Dr. Isa Ali Ibrahim Pantami, has renounced his past fundamentalist views but let nobody be fooled by the ease with which he did so. The move was less about repentance; he just could not afford to do otherwise. For a man who holds a “juicy” government position, the privileges he currently enjoys would have been imperilled if he had stayed with his zealot’s creed. A better test of his purported ideological conversion would have him repudiating his past without a lush job at stake. As long as he sits in that office and accesses grand opportunities on Nigeria’s bill, he cannot sincerely claim his evolution was informed by moral convictions.
Saying he no longer believes what he lived for decades of his life is quite easy. Anyone can claim to have repented, and that is why no one takes the word of a child molester for it when they say they are over their pedophilia. They might have genuinely turned a new leaf, but society still bars them from occupying spaces where their resident evil can be reactivated. Now, since Pantami has more than indicated he would not be going anywhere, he should tell us what he intends to do with the world that he helped shape with his fundamentalist ideologies?
Today, much of northern Nigeria is wracked by the casual violence he helped institute with his worldviews. He contributed to making religious cruelty quasi-official. One cannot extricate preachers like Pantami from the presumption of authority over other people’s lives that roving bands of religious maniacs in the North presently arrogate to themselves. Pantami is a part of the problem of insecurity that bedevils Nigeria at present, and he cannot leave it all behind by merely saying he was immature and ignorant at the time. He might have been young, but he should have known too that rooting for violence is proof of soullessness and an abject lack of character. He cannot walk away from all of that by just saying so. How does he atone for what he taught people and which now manifests in how they censor others through brutal and repressive violence?
When his fellow northerners petition the Inspector-General of Police to threaten violence if the head of another citizen is not delivered to them on a platter, how much guilt does he feel? What does he think of the atrocities that groups like the Hisbah commit in the name of religion? When his ex-congregation members violently attack and kill others in the name of religion, does he feel any pinch of responsibility for the evil he helped unleash in the world, or he merely views them as barbarians who took him too seriously?
It is myopic to assume that since his controversial sermons were about global politics, the damage is in the past. No, that kind of worldview has consequences that carry over through time. It simultaneously inculcates a sense of resentment against the state of world affairs and encourages people to redress those feelings by assuming the power of life and death over others. When you valourise the shedding of the blood of infidels abroad, you are not telling your provincial congregation about people who live far away and whom they will never meet in their entire lives. What you are doing is to desensitise them to the massacre of those they consider infidels in their immediate environment.
Unfortunately, there are still many others like Pantami espousing zealotry as quick means of accumulating social capital. His recanting suggests that, in private, some of them might not even be fully persuaded by those extremist ideologies. But they still preach it anyway because it is a social ladder to fame and power. That is how they build popularity and establish themselves as power brokers. If not for the archived documents that outed Pantami, he would have successfully sustained his hypocrisy and manipulative behaviour.
If there is one good revelation that has come out of all of the debacle, it is the utter lack of integrity of the regime of Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.). The resounding silence in official quarters confirms that the regime has no values they deem worthy of protection from the taint Pantami brought to them. It is hard to believe that nobody in the regime high places knew about Pantami’s past before he was chosen for his present position. It is far more plausible that they selected him despite it. If the present regime does not consider itself in possession of any integrity that can be undermined by the continued presence of Pantami in government, we can stop wasting time by asking them to apply the moral censure of asking him to leave the position of high responsibility that he occupies. People only resign when their values are out of sync with the ones that define a place. Resignation is possible-and meaningful-when the matter concerns people who have values they do not want stained by the likes of Pantami and his inglorious past.
Unfortunately, what Pantami believes is not that much out of tandem with what the rest of his ilk who are in the highest echelons of government today also echo. Just one year ago, one Senator Ibrahim Geidam from Yobe East sponsored a bill titled to rehabilitate “repentant” terrorists. A whole Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, he had no qualms saying he could not wait to see terrorists “enter politics, religion, and society.” Geidam is not the only one who has had the effrontery to ask for scarce resources to be expended on Boko Haram members in a country where many people have been badly impoverished. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi is another clown who has made similar requests. It is not a coincidence that -and Pantami said similar in one of his old tapes- their justification for demanding public resources on behalf of “repentant” terrorists is the Niger Delta and the amnesty they received during the Umaru Yar’Adua administration. These terrorist-apologists keep echoing each other on that score for a reason. There are millions of children out of school, but they are no priority. Failing healthcare, poverty, and inadequate housing does not faze them. The one that detains these carpetbaggers are Boko Haram members who can be used to siphon federal allocations.
There are many more of them out there in high places, bidding their time and working towards a federal allocation that will funnel resources into the causes of various terrorists. They are the reason Nigeria is a long way off from ever defeating Boko Haram. The #PantamiResign movement can take it for granted that Pantami will sit out the storm like a typical Nigerian politician. He will survive this episode because his sins are not different from those of others who dominate Nigerian bureaucracies. Unless a “donor” country specifically registers its unease over Pantami’s Saul-to-Paul ruse to Aso Rock on his alleged support for global terrorism, we can take it for granted that he is not going anywhere. In the meantime, he will keep deploying his hounds to muddy up the conversation on social media and all other sites where the debate on his indiscretion is taking place. In a matter of weeks, the issue will simmer, and he will go on as if it never even happened. We have seen this movie replayed a few times.
Was it not just weeks ago that we saw how the chairman of the Code of Conduct Tribunal, Danladi Umar, conducted himself in a public place? The man failed his office and could not even muster enough shame to take himself out of an office supposedly set up to regulate public conduct. Now the latest news is that the Senate is investigating him. Why is that the Senate’s business when there are Police stations in the Federal Capital Territory that could have immediately arrested him for assault? Thinking about the possibility that Nigerian public officials will do what is right by the people presumes these administrators are upright, and they take their relationship contract with the country seriously.
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