Nigerian Archbishop calls on Britain to link aid and justice

The British government must link aid with justice if Nigeria is to avoid escalating violence, say leading churchmen in Nigeria.

Furious at ‘a total lack of help’ in the face of increasingly savage massacres in the centre of the country which are happening with impunity, Archbishop Benjamin Kwashi of Jos Diocese has called for conditions on aid to be applied.

‘There’s a total lack of help. You bring us mosquito nets and bandages, but the key issue that must be ad­dressed for any nation to be a nation is the ability to provide justice for all the people.’

The Archbishop who has faced three assassination attempts has warned that Christian tribes, converted during the first decades of the last century are being forced to return to ‘traditional warrior culture’ in a bid to defend themselves from Hausa and Fulani Muslim pressure on their lands, and their demands with menaces for rights constitutionally reserved for indigenes.

A report on the violence is published in this week’s Church Times following a visit by Lapido Media Director Dr Jenny Taylor to the villages most recently affected.

‘What’s happening in Nigeria has been reported very badly up to now.  Western journalists like the Channel 4 team who went out with Peter Oborne to shoot for Unreported World with no religious understanding, appear to have done little or no research at all into where the pressure’s coming from and simply blamed Christians.

‘Yet after 20 years of impunity, and stark evidence of land-grabbing by the Fulani and even the enslavement of children as repayment on loans, violence against Christians has reached unprecedented levels in a formerly peaceful state.’

Archbishop Kwashi points back to the lack of arrests after the unrest in Kano on 12 March 1987, when 11 churches were destroyed, Christian businesses were looted, and at least 16 people were killed. It is a real root of bitterness, he says: now, the killing of Christians “has assumed an almost ritualistic dimension” in neighbouring Kano state capital – the home city of the underpants bomber and London University Student Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, who attempted to blow up a US-bound plane at Christmas.

Said Taylor:  ‘Post-colonial inertia and religious illiteracy are blinding people in the West to forces that may have more far-reaching consequences than they imagine.’

Read full article in the Church Times this week