Deborah is the latest to suffer this gruesome fate in Nigeria. In three decades of such lynchings in Northern Nigeria and yet no one has been brought to account. There is no reason to believe that Deborah’s case will prove to be different. Indeed, the Police conveniently claim that the leader of the mob that killed her is not of Nigerian nor within it.
In one of fate’s more unfair ironies, Shehu Shagari College of Education in Sokoto, the school named after a pioneering Nigerian teacher who rose to become president of the country and one of its most emollient public figures, could be fated to become etched in public imagination as the funeral pyre of Nigeria’s coat of arms. It is the location where, in daylight on May 12, a mob of male students set upon one of their colleagues, stoned her to death and burnt her remains.
Deborah, a 200 level student, allegedly had argument with fellow students on the class platform and the Muslims among them claimed that she blasphemed….The interaction reportedly took place during the Muslim moon of Ramadan when the College was on break. When they sighted her at the school, all available Muslim male students surrounded her and started stoning her. They continued until she fell. They made sure she died and subsequently set her body ablaze.
It could be recalled that Eunice Elisha, a pastor with the Redeemed Christian Church of God, was in like manner hacked to death in Kubwa on the outskirts of Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital, after the leaders in a nearby Mosque had warned her to stop her open-air preaching. Her killers were never apprehended nor was anyone brought to account.
Sadly, Deborah Yakubu was killed exactly 10 days before the Practice Section on Public Interest and Development Law (SPIDEL) of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) was to hold a widely advertised conference in Sokoto, the site of Deborah’s last earthly moments. The morning after her gruesome fate, while the smoke still smouldered from her funeral pyre, Monday Ubani, the Chairperson of SPIDEL, issued a statement denouncing those who called on him to re-consider holding the conference as scheduled as “without locus.”
About June 2, 2016, a mob lynched 74-year old Bridget Agbahime in front of her shop in Kofar Wambai Market in Kano, North-West Nigeria. She had reportedly asked a male Muslim adherent not to conduct his ablution in front of her shop, an otherwise sensible request, even if only for health and sanitary reasons. That was her last earthly request. Affronted, the man accused her of blasphemy, summoned a mob and they clobbered her to death.
President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement then describing Bridget’s lynching as “sad and regrettable”, promising that justice would be done. The Sultan of Sokoto and the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in Nigeria equally did same. The government of Kano State quickly announced the arrest and arraignment of five men in connection with Bridget’s lynching: Dauda Ahmed, Abdullahi Mustapha, Zubairu Abubakar, Abdullahi Abubakar and Musa Abdullahi. A mere five months after Bridget’s murder, the Kano State government itself withdrew the charges against the five suspects. Like Bridget, this case died, never to be resurrected.
In August 1995, a young Christian trader from South-East Nigeria, Gideon Akaluka was beheaded in Kano again on unverified allegations of blasphemy. Some high profile arrests followed but, like the case of Bridget Agbahime, more than two decades later, the suspects were never brought to account.
The issue clearly is not whether the stoning to death of Deborah Yakubu is a religious matter but whether the rulers of Nigeria, both in and out of government, have it in them to give Nigerians reason to have faith in the country.
