The killing spree was the most serious challenge yet to the nine-month-old government of President Olusegun Obasanjo. “Both religions have love as cardinal in their creeds,” he said in a nationwide address. “We must return to tolerance, constitutionality, decency and good neighborliness.” Obasanjo said that the bloodshed violated a new spirit of dialogue that began a year ago, when national elections ended 16 years of nearly unbroken military rule.
In fact, the end of military rule has also fostered the airing of extreme religious and ethnic views. Sharia law–which would ban alcohol, make theft punishable by amputation and criminalize adultery–is only the hottest issue in the Nigerian tinderbox. In Lagos, extremists who seek autonomy for ethnic Yorubas are blamed for a series of attacks on police. And in the Niger Delta troops fight a low-grade guerrilla war with tribal extremists seeking a greater share of oil revenues.
Obasanjo long avoided declaring himself on the Sharia Question. A devout Christian, he may have feared appearing to favor his own side if he called the new laws illegal before they were reviewed by the Supreme Court. But in the aftermath of last week’s violence, he declared that “the Sharia in which you cut off hands, stone to death… is against the Constitution. There is no doubt about that.” And the new House of Representatives ordered an urgent legal review of the laws. But Muslim politicians know that, whatever the courts eventually rule, Sharia is wildly popular in Muslim areas. Christians haven’t been appeased by the knowledge that the new laws will apply only to Muslims.
Kaduna state is the third province to move toward formalizing Sharia law, and four others are posed to do the same. In northern Zamfera state the government instituted a new Sharia legal code last month, and last week the governor of nearby Niger state signed a series of Sharia bills, saying he had bowed to popular demand. “I do not play politics with the issue that I will be questioned about on the day of judgment,” said the governor, Abdulkadir Kure. Nigeria now must urgently search for an answer to such absolutism.
