On the so-called "reprisals".

He is not my friend, but he and I frequent the same places, and so I hear the things he says.

I am talking about someone, a fellow Nigeria from the Southern half of the country who supports what the media calls "reprisal" violence against people from the North in response to the bombings of churches in the North. His exact words were, "doing nothing is not an option".

The problem with his point of view is ... the reprisals do nothing.

When you attack innocent members of another sociocultural community, you have not injured, hurt, apprehended or killed any of the people who carried out the attack. They are still around, freely preparing their next attacks, and laughing at you because you are doing exactly what they want.

The attackers want Nigerians from different religions to fight each other. That is how they want the world to be. That is the point of their attacks on the churches.

You see, contrary to everything you may have heard from Nigerian and foreign pundits, the people of Nigeria are not interested in killing each other. Most of us are not as brave as the courageous citizens whose profile articles I included on this blog (HERE, HERE, HERE and HERE). We are afraid of standing up to killers because we don't want to be killed ourselves. This applies not just to "communal" violence but to armed robbery as well as to government agents and agencies violently maltreating citizens. Inaction has never meant support.

But when one set of citizens attacks another set of citizens in the name of "reprisal" violence, they create a separate cycle of violence that has nothing to do with the initial attack. Recently in the City of Kaduna, gangs of youths from one community carried out "reprisals", which prompted youths from the community thus attacked to carry out "reprisals" to the "reprisals", at which point the first group of youths carried out a "reprisal" to the "reprisal" to the "reprisal" and so forth until the Kaduna State government imposed a curfew and the federal government deployed troops to the streets. None of the youths spilling blood on the Kaduna City streets, from either side, had anything to do with the initial attack that sparked the initial reprisal. And none of the people they killed had anything to do with that attack either.

Insecurity in the North has hurt Moslems AND Christians both. The insurgents are killing Nigerians regardless of their religious affiliation. The reprisals are simply adding to the insecurity, and are not in any way, shape or form having an impact on the likelihood of more insurgent attacks.

I believe the 13-year period from 1999 to 2012 is the second-most violent in our modern history behind only the period from 1966 to 1970. Do you recall what happened in 1966 and 1967?  Southern Christians, particularly the Igbo, were attacked in what the attackers claimed was a reprisal for what the attackers perceived to be as an "Igbo" coup-de-tat.

Bore anyone starts abusing me, I am not saying the 1966-1967 attackers were right to view it as an "Igbo" coup, and I am not saying they were right or justified in attacking the Igbo because of it.

Listen to me clearly and hear that I am making the opposite case.

It is wrong to attack innocent members of a sociocultural community simply because they share the same language, ethnicity, region of origin or religion as a person or group of people who committed a violent crime.

It is wrong today. It was wrong yesterday. It will be wrong tomorrow.

And it has the dangerous effect of moving our country from a situation where a small group of people do a violent thing, to a situation where millions of people start feeling obliged to fight Civil Wars against millions of other people when absolutely none of them was involved in conceiving, planning or carrying out the initial act of violence -- and when none of them even asked for or supported the initial act of violence in the first place.

It is so frustrating.

This should be a moment in history for the entirety of the Nigerian citizenry to rallies to confrong a shared threat. But lo and behold, our distrust of each other is as high as ever, and our perception of each other as being threats to ourselves is just as strong.

In prior posts, I have argued that our leaders do not want to fix underlying problems that give rise to violence because they rely on the continuation of those problems for their continued access to power, influence and wealth.

But what is our excuse as citizens?  Do we gain anything from acting in a way that fuels the fire that will consume us all if we are not careful?  We are like our ancestors who were still throwing spears at each other while a shared enemy approached with giant iron ships and Maxim guns to conquer us all.

If more of us were like the courageous few detailed in those links I provided, Nigeria would be a safer, better, happier place for all of us. We should lionize the good citizens among us, place them on a pedestal and hold them out to our children as examples for us all to follow.  They are the ones who should lead us away from the precipice.