Being a keynote address delivered by Chairman, Governing Council, National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), Prof. Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, at the public commissioning of Mive Legals (Ballason Chambers)’s Centre for Medical Law and Matrimonial Counseling in Kaduna recently
Remembering Molluma, thanking Mabeiam
It’s my privilege to be part of this event to unveil to the public the Molluma Yakubu Loma Centre for Medical Law. Located in Barnawa, Kaduna, in north-central Nigeria, this centre is the first integrated medico-legal centre of its kind in Nigeria. It is designed to offer support and assistance to victims of the growing pathology of mass violence in Nigeria and to work with institutions interested in doing so to identify victims, catalogue them, give them dignity and identity even in death, enable their families and communities to experience closure and, in time, ensure that the perpetrators do not escape justice or accountability. It is an investment in both memory and the rudiments of a capable state. When it is fully established, it will domicile skills in different areas of medico-legal investigation of mass violence, including forensics.
This initiative is, however, non-governmental. It is the brainchild of Mabeiam Gloria Ballason, an outstanding young leader among a new generation of young advocates destined to challenge Nigeria to realize is true potentials. We should be grateful for Gloria’s imagination and industry; and we must find ways to support this initiative. It is long overdue.
Molluma Yakubu Loma, to whose memory this Centre is dedicated was also a bright and talented young lawyer, writer and mother. Molly, as many of her friends knew her, wrote her graduate thesis on the law of medical negligence In one of life’s fateful ironies, this daughter of senior medical professionals tragically died in March 2014 of causes not unconnected with medical negligence. This Centre seeks to do more than merely memorialize Molly’s life; its mission is to prevent – to scale – many more from experiencing the fate that befell Molly.
I’ve been asked in my remarks to address pathways to “healing Nigeria”. I claim no particular expertise on the subject of healing in general or in its specific application to the Nigerian condition. To heal anything, however, we need to begin with trying to understand if indeed there is an illness and, if so, what it is.
Democratised violence
This event takes place in a city defined by crisis and in a country currently scarred by mass violence on multiple fronts. In the north-east, Nigeria’s armed forces are engaged in mortal combat with a murderous, expansionist, sectarian extremists. To the south of those frontlines and not too far from here, livelihood, climate change adaptations, and identity define another frontier of inter-communal and ethnic strife. Further south in the Niger Delta, a military-led Joint Task Force marked the 20th anniversary of its deployment this year. In its 2013 report, the Kabiru Turaki Report laid out starkly footprint of the extent to which the claim of the Nigerian State to a monopoly of violence is challenged. Democratised violence is the symptom that now most defines Nigeria’s underlying ailment.
The ultimate measure of the effectiveness of any legal system or political economy is its ability to protect those that live within its territory. Only those who are alive can participate in government or trade. In the conclusion to his book, Defending My Enemy: American Nazis, the Skokie Case, and the Risks of Freedom (1979), Aryeh Neier explains that “the Weimar government perished in the same way that it began its life: unable to act against political violence …..” He adds that:
the lesson of Germany in the 1920s is that a free society cannot be established or maintained if it will not act vigorously an forcefully to punish political violence….Prosecutions of those who commit political violence are an essential part of the duty government owes its citizens to protect their freedom….
Put differently, an epidemic of violence is the opposite of a state of rule of law. It is at once evidence of an incapable state, of the mass failure of institutions of the rule of law, and of the absence of equal citizenship for all. This incapacity is more than merely speculative.
As we meet here, the armed forces are increasingly responsible for policing in the country, with deployments in 32 out of 36 States. In the period since return to civil rule, the Police has been denuded as the respectable institution it was. It has been under-budgeted for and recruitment and training standards have collapsed. As a result, it suffers from an overall dignity deficit. We have not equipped its men and women with dignity and they are unable to afford us dignity in return. Denied dignity, we are nothing; lack expectations of anyone, and do not care about much.
Running behind “Oga” as a general dog’s body, doing groceries for Oga’s madam or doing school run while Madam fulfills her pedicure appointment may not be anyone’s idea of dignified existence for a senior police officer but it helps him guarantee a uniform on his back, food on the table and school fees for the kids. Above all, he avoids the bigger indignity of serially begging on our streets for N20 from the same people he is employed to protect the society from.
The Police is over-centralized, over-exposed, grossly under-funded and under-manned, with about one-third of its personnel on private guard duties. With the armed forces so stretched by internal security operations, their primary mission of protecting the country against external threats is itself endangered. This opens up a huge new threat at a time of growing regional and global instability.
A brief diagnostic
The stock Nigerian response to the immense threats we face has been mostly inward-looking, characterized by immense inter-ethnic suspicion and prejudice. Yet it is essential to understand the threats to human survival and our national security beyond the current headlines, focused as they are on the threat of extremism, tales of spectacular violence and the commercialization of human misery. I will briefly illustrate six of what I consider the greatest underlying threats to our national survival today before ending with some suggestions. These are: governance, inequality, climate change, globalization, innovation, and our regional neighborhoods.
Take Governance. The worst thing that can happen to any people is bad or cynical governance. There are several ways in which governance defines security. I limit myself here to three in relation to the situation in north-east Nigeria.
For one, elections are usually events of significant security crises. Succession and election-related violence has become a major source of insecurity not just in Nigeria but around Africa. It nearly led one and a half decades of instability and near state collapse in Cote d’Ivoire; triggered crimes against humanity in Kenya in the wake of the December 2007 elections and came close to plunging Nigeria into fratricide in the aftermath of the 2011 elections. It is arguable that we have not yet fully recovered from the effects of the 2011 post-election violence.
To be continued next week
