Rhoda Jatau on my mind. God, the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent has supreme power and no limitations. He has the infinite capacity to defend His name without help from mere mortals. In fact, the blasphemy here is the claim that someone or a group of people are defending God because that in itself is a gratuitous insult to the Supreme Being whose awesomeness is transcendental and unfathomable. The dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate political Islamists who killed Deborah and clamped Rhoda Jatau in jail for condemning the barbaric killing blasphemed God and debased humanity’s common heritage by their despicable acts.
Rhoda Jatau (in black) in court penultimate Monday
By Ikechukwu Amaechi
At the 2023 TheNiche Annual Lecture, Rotimi Amaechi, former Governor of Rivers State, lamented what he considered a national malaise. “Nigerians don’t react to anything,” he said.
Looking straight into the eyes of the distinguished audience, he asserted: “Even if you come to a Nigerian man’s house and kill his mother, the father will continue with his life. Nothing bothers you. Nothing! … If you say it is a lie, line up ten Nigerians and shoot them tomorrow and nothing will happen … It is a hopeless situation.”
Amaechi said one of the most frightening realities of life as a Nigerian is how easy one can be imprisoned for doing nothing wrong. “The greatest fear I have is being found in prison for nothing. And you can be found in prison in Nigeria for doing nothing.”
He is absolutely correctly. Today, Citizen Rhoda Ya’u Jatau, is languishing in prison for doing nothing. This is her 18th month in confinement and Nigerians are not reacting. For all we care, it is her problem.
Rhoda Jatau, a 46-year-old woman, and mother of five children, hails from Bauchi State. A Christian, she was a healthcare administrator with the Warji local government area in Bauchi before her arrest in May 2022.
She was arrested a few days after sharing a WhatsApp video condemning the burning to death of Deborah Yakubu, a 200-level student of the Shehu Shagari College of Education, Sokoto, over alleged blasphemy.
Like Deborah, Rhoda was also accused of blasphemy. Prosecutors allege that by sharing the video, she committed multiple offences of inciting disturbance, contempt for religious creed, and cyber stalking. Penultimate Monday, a Bauchi State High Court rejected her “no-case submission” and sent her back to prison. Yet, there is no national outrage. If such had happened in Iran or any of the other hardline Muslim nations, the people will protest.
READ ALSO: Deborah Yakubu: Killing in the name of God
Did Bridget Agbahime commit suicide?
But Rhoda is luckier than Deborah. She is still alive. The 22-year-old Deborah was murdered by Muslim fundamentalists parading as students, who recorded and uploaded their unbelievable barbarism in the social media for the whole world to see.
Whatever crime she was deemed to have committed, her very last words, “What do you hope to achieve with this,” and passionate plea to her murderers to spare her life ought to have melted even hearts of stone. Sadly, it didn’t because only her blood could quench the animalistic cravings of the bloodhounds.
Deborah’s fate, a consequence of the fanatical conviction that God decrees acts of violence against the infidel, which is a blatant lie, threw up a lot of issues.
God, the omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent has supreme power and no limitations. He has the infinite capacity to defend His name without help from mere mortals. In fact, the blasphemy here is the claim that someone or a group of people are defending God because that in itself is a gratuitous insult to the Supreme Being whose awesomeness is transcendental and unfathomable. The dyed-in-the-wool, inveterate political Islamists who killed Deborah and clamped Rhoda Jatau in jail for condemning the barbaric killing blasphemed God and debased humanity’s common heritage by their despicable acts.
The fact that Rhoda has been locked up in the last 18 months and the key thrown away for seeking justice for Deborah shows how emboldened the fundamentalists have become.
Assuming without conceding that blasphemy is, indeed, a crime deserving of death, who makes that determination – the bunch of ignoramuses who are in most cases the accusers, prosecutors and judges? Put differently, what constitutes blasphemy?
For instance, Rhoda was incarcerated because she shared a video that condemned the killing of a fellow citizen. How does that blaspheme either Prophet Mohammed or the Islamic faith? She has been charged with inciting disturbance, contempt for religious creed, and cyber stalking. What manner of logic presupposes that zealots who burnt a fellow citizen to death for no crime known under Nigerian law are patriots while a concerned citizen who condemned the barbaric act is inciting disturbance?
How can the condemnation of an illegal act be contemptuous of Islamic creed? Does Islam, a religion of peace, condone extra-judicial killings by hoodlums? And who was Rhoda cyber stalking?
The tragedy of the Nigerian situation as exemplified in the Deborah-Rhoda debacle is that those who committed murder are free, having been let off the hook due to the deliberate refusal of the prosecution to come to court, while the person who condemned the barbaric act is in prison, denied bail and her family in hiding for fear of violence against them.
But Deborah’s murder was not the first and I dare say, it will not be the last.
On June 2, 2016, a 74-year-old Bridget Agbahime was murdered in the presence of her husband, Pastor Mike Agbahime, by Muslim fundamentalists in Kano.
Agbahime, who hailed from Imo State, and was a member of the Deeper Life Bible Church, was said to have prevented some Muslim youths from performing ablution in front of her shop at Kofar Wambai Market in Kano, where she sold plastic wares.
The punishment for such a “crime” was death, in the opinion of the mobsters, who promptly accused her of blasphemy and lynched her. She was murdered by those young enough to be her grandchildren and her age could not act as a leash on their murderous impulse.
The hideous characters knew that nothing happened to their fellow blood-thirsty zealots who beheaded Gideon Akaluka in the same Kano and paraded the streets with his head hoisted on a spike with blood dripping on their hands some years back.
And despite the huffing and puffing of the leaders at the time including President Muhammadu Buhari, Governors Abdullahi Ganduje and Rochas Okorocha and then Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arase, who all acknowledged that Madam Agbahime committed no crime, the five suspects known as Wambai 5 – Dauda Ahmed, Abdulmumeen Mustafa, Zubairu Abubakar, Abdullahi Abubakar and Musa Abdullahi – who were slammed with a four-count charge that included culpable homicide, were discharged and acquitted on Thursday, November 3, by Chief Magistrate, Muhammad Jibril, on the advice of the state attorney general. And Nigerians didn’t react.
Today, Nigeria is one of the 12 countries in the world that still criminalises blasphemy and one of the seven, which includes Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Brunei, Mauritania and Saudi Arabia, where it is punishable by death.
And we are expecting Foreign Direct Investments (FDIs) whether horizontal, vertical, or conglomerate. What a bunch of unserious people we are.
As noted recently by Isa Sanusi, country director for Amnesty International in Nigeria, blasphemy or accusations of blasphemy are now a tool for gross human rights violations or even for “settling personal scores.”
All it takes for anyone to be murdered by religious zealots is to be accused of blasphemy. Only few of the accused like Rhoda Jatau are lucky to be arrested. For others it is summary execution by those who made the allegation without providing any shred of evidence.
In August, the United Nations special rapporteur on freedom of religion released a statement on the same issue of blasphemy: “We express concern over the criminalisation of blasphemy in Nigeria contrary to international human rights law and standards and the rising episodes of violence relating to accusations of blasphemy targeting religious minorities in Nigeria.”
The fact that some people assign to themselves the job of protecting God when it should be the other way is ridiculous. It is even more so that the Nigerian state, which claims to be secular, watches these horrors without protecting endangered citizens from the snares of religious zealots.
It is horrifying that in a multi-religious society like Nigeria, adherents of one religion arrogate to themselves the right to kill and maim in the name of God. And no one is reacting for fear of retribution.
Leaders who would rather admonish fellow citizens to respect the religious sensibilities of Moslems than condemn egregious acts such as the killing of Deborah and incarceration of Rhoda are being dishonest.
Those who want to be politically correct will deny the facts staring them in the face. But truth be told, there is religious persecution in Nigeria, particularly in the North and Christians are at the receiving end. The only reason why Madam Agbahime and Miss Deborah are in the grave today is because they were Christians; the same reason Rhoda Jatau has been in prison in the last 18 months. I have never heard of Christians in Nigeria murdering Muslims because of blasphemy no-matter the provocation.
It behoves President Bola Tinubu to save Rhoda Jatau from this needless ordeal. She neither committed a crime against Islam nor the Nigerian state. Her continued incarceration is impunity taken too far. Tinubu doing so will be in keeping with the oath of office he took on May 29, 2023 to discharge his duties “faithfully and in accordance with the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and the law.”