LIKE GLEN COE: A Tale of Transmitted Hate and Misery

LIKE GLEN COE: A Tale of Transmitted Hate and Misery

William the Prince of Orange was regarded as a champion of the protestant faith and was involved in numerous wars with the powerful Catholic King of France Louis XIV. He invaded England with his Dutch troops in 1688 after allegedly engineering support from protestant politicians and soldiers within the ranks of the Catholic King of England James II. William III became the protestant king of England, Ireland and Scotland after his “Glorious Revolution” deposed James II who was subsequently allowed to flee to France from where he launched a failed offensive to regain his throne at the “Battle of Boyne”. A minority which included clergy and laymen sided with James II and opposed William III. Scottish Highland forces led by Viscount Dundee were involved in his failed resistance from 1689-1690; the king therefore offered pardon and demanded for an oath of allegiance from the defeated resistance particularly the Highland clans before the first of January 1692 in the stead of reprisal attacks.

The Scots hesitated because they awaited word and instruction from James II from his base in exile. The highland chiefs eventually got directives just before the deadline in mid- December 1691 to take the oath. Alastair Maclain the 12^th chief of Glencoe set out on the 31^st of December 1691 to take the oath. It took him about 6 days to eventually get this done due to a combination of bureaucracy, detention and bad weather. He came into contact with certain high ranking Campbells and Lowlanders who had reasons to detest the Highlanders.

Insignia of Clan Donald. Google images

The Maclains of Clan Donald together with some of their Glengarry cousins had looted the lands of Robert Campbell of Glenlyon on their way back from one of the battles during the resistance. They stole his livestock and aggravated his financial problems which forced him to take up an army commission. The delay in taking the oath by Alastair Maclain was capitalized upon by high ranking Campbells who found willing accomplices and convinved the king to order an extermination of the MacDonalds  as an action directed against a den of thieves.

A regiment of soldiers numbering about 120 and under the command of Captain Robert Campbell arrived Glencoe and they were received warmly. These soldiers were mostly Lowlanders with a few related to the Campbells. A property tax was supposed to be collected and they remained there for about two weeks catered for by the Maclains. Captain Campbell got new orders and despite the fact that his niece was married to Alastair Maclin’s youngest son; most of the soldiers under his command fell upon the inhabitants of Glencoe as they slept in the early hours of February 13^th 1692 killing 38 men in the process. About 40 women and children were documented to have died subsequently as a result of exposure.

Insignia of the Campbell Clan. Google images

Some of the soldiers failed to comply with their instructions with some warning certain MacDonalds and a few others even broke their swords. There was an inquiry afterwards which declared the actions were indeed murder. The king was exonerated and actions to punish the perpetrators were recommended. It is not clear if anything significant was done in favor of the victims save compensations. The memory and scars from this gory event still persists till today and a wreath laying ceremony in memorial of the slain since 1930 still takes place every year on the 13^th of February.

Nigeria is one nation that has been vandalized by repeated cases of murders and injustice. The scars from hundreds and thousands getting wiped out as a result of ethnic or religious prejudices are what unfortunately bridge the various ethnic groups of this great nation together. The relationship among ethnicities and religious groups cannot be termed healthy; our past and present national history is dominated by a vicious cycle of mass murders and reprisals fueled by a dearth of good governance of failure of the justice system.

One mistake many Nigerians make is to stereotype people from other groups and assume some sort of supremacist stance; it is usually the other people who are intolerant and violent. One kite which unfortunately has been flown over this electoral period is for certain “Southerners” to label all Northerners as extremely violent and intolerant bigots who are out to prevent a second term for their God’s chosen brother by any means necessary. Some have concluded that a Jonathan win would surely be confronted by widespread bloodshed and violence even in states where Northerners are in the minority. They go further to suggest that a Buhari win will definitely not provoke any such chaos but I ask them who is responsible for awarding a 4billion Naira contract to confirmed ethnic militia to guard pipelines. They obviously have never seen vehicles donated to the Ijaw Youth council by the Minister of Petroleum or the many unemployed youths undergoing intensive combat-like drills at roadside SURE-P camps in Ketu and on the road to Badagry.

This is not an attempt to focus my attention on just one group. The truth remains that there is hardly any group of people in this country called Nigeria that is innocent of directly or indirectly spilling the blood of fellow nationals. The have been many Tiv-Jukun conflicts; Umuleri and Aguleri; Ife and Modakeke; Ijaw and Itsekiri; just to name a few. The many lives consumed by conflicts in Jos, Barkin-Ladi, Kafanchan, Ajegunle, Kano, Southern Kaduna, Ipetumodu, Warri , Aluu community as well as the many cases of Fulani herdsmen and unknown gun men have not gone unnoticed.

There may be an army pact that has limited greatly the discussions about the coup culture intiated in January 66, the subsequent civil war and other coups thereafter. I am tempted to believe that many of those soldiers who witnessed and/ or participated in the hypersensitivity reaction of the July 66 mutiny as well as the civil war are constantly tormented by the memories of what they did deliberately or otherwise to their colleagues who were on the receiving end. Incidentally, many have reaped dynasties from their military adventures with a few still key in determining the pattern of events in the country even at this time. A few appear to me as truly concerned about how totally derailed the nation is and one of them I make bold to state is Major General Muhammadu Buhari.

Military coups appeared to become fashionable in the early 1960s with Nigeria, Ghana and Congo Kinshasa ranking high on the list. These coups largely toppled violently neonate democracies and the role played by external forces cannot be overemphasized. General Buhari assumed power as Head of state on January 1 1984 after a coup led by Major General Ibrahim Babaginda overthrew the democracy led by Shehu Shagari. This fact is what some people refuse to understand but heap so much insult on Buhari for solely truncating “our” corrupt democracy like Babaginda, Brigadier David Mark (current senate president) or Lt. General Aliyu Gusau (current minister of defence) were no perhaps more active participants. This coup was very similar to what happened in Ghana exactly 2 years prior. Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings supported by other military men and some civilians took advantage of the New Year festivities organized by the Head of state Dr. Limann to overthrow the elected government citing economic mismanagement. The irony here is that Dr. Limann was handed over power by the same Rawlings 2 years earlier. Rawlings first stint as Head of state in Ghana was in 1979 when he led a revolutionary group of soldiers to overthrow the presiding military government; he organized a rapid election which Limann won and thereafter returned to his commission in the Airforce. When he took over again on December 31^st 1981, it took just over 11 years for Ghana to return to democratic rule.

Jerry Rawlings was not smiling; he was ruthless in achieving his goals beginning with the execution of 3 past military Heads of state and Generals. He had taken out 4 high ranking officers when he realized they were all of Akan descent and in order to balance the equation and prevent a potential mutiny; he ordered the execution of 4 others who were not Akan. 3 Supreme Court justices, military officers and over 300 Ghanaians were reported killed or disappeared in Ghana while Rawlings ruled. It seems the coups of the early 80s were very similar producing leaders with similar goals of ending corruption in the countries and breaking the grip of colonial masters and global financial institutions. One personality visited at a time was Captain Thomas Sankara who became the president of Upper Volta on August 4 1983 about 5 months before Buhari came on the scene in Nigeria.

Sankara was propelled to the highest seat in his country following a coup led by his deputy Blaise Compaoré. He wanted to eliminate corruption and French domination; he pushed for debt reduction and resisted the World Bank and International Monetary fund just like Buhari did in Nigeria. He was so authoritarian that he changed his country’s name to Burkina Faso; he banned press freedom and paralysed Unionism dismissing 2,500 teachers following a strike. Sankara tried corrupt officials and sold off the country’s fleet of Mercedes Benz cars making the cheapest brand sold in his country at the time the official vehicle for ministers. He slashed the salaries of public servants and forbade luxury. Blaise eventually organized the assassination and dismembering of Sankara in 1987 citing deteriorated relationships with neighboring nations. Almost all of Sankara’s policies were reverse and the nation rejoined the IMF and World Bank just the same way Babaginda ploughed Nigeria back into the funding organizations when he took over in August 1985. We all know how Campaoré fled his nation with his tail between his legs last year despite transforming himself into a “democratically” elected president and ruling for 27 years.

Amnesty International as well as other International Humanitarian Organizations accused Sankara of extrajudicial executions, arbitrary detentions and torture of opponents. Despite all these allegations, Thomas Sankara like Che Guevara remains a symbol of genuine revolution and people centered good governance. He is forever idolized in Burkina Faso just as Jerry Rawlings is in Ghana. Rawlings is internationally recognized delivering lectures at reputable universities and earning a “Global Champion for People’s freedom” award in October 2013 from the Mkiva Humanitarian Foundation. I do not quite know if the descendants of those categorized as corrupt and executed by Rawlings hold any grudge against him or even against the nation of Ghana like it happens here in Nigeria. Perhaps General Buhari would have become our Che Guevara if Babaginda had opted to oust the duo of Buhari and Idiagbon in a bloody coup; perhaps the blame of misfortune and lies would never have occurred and we all would have seen Buhari clearly for what he stood and suffered for with over 3 years of his life in incarceration on the orders of Babaginda who had midwifed the 1983 coup.

Perhaps Buhari would have been our Rawlings but without putting lead into the craniums of the past heads of state but he did not have the time and we would never know. Sankara ruled for about 4 years without handing over to a democracy and Rawlings stayed on for 11. When people accuse Buhari of lacking an election plan, it only indicates that such people only want to give a dog a bad name in order to hang it. Obasanjo had handed over to Shagari in a hotly disputed election in 1979. That experiment clearly failed with corruption escalating. The final straw must have been the economic downturn or the clearly rigged election to earn a second term. I do not think it would have been wisdom to rush into another democratic adventure considering the circumstances.

The issues which retard our development as a nation have persisted since before independence; unfortunately the animosity and suspicion have now become genetic dominant enough to render even the ivy college educated completely unreasonable and primitive. Many of those who resist the candidacy of General Buhari really cannot coherently express why they do so. Some somehow blame him for all the atrocities committed by some Northern officers during the civil war while others somehow assume the pain of those whose breadwinners got jailed rightly or wrongly, those forced into lines by soldiers or those executed for drug trafficking. Although a few like the son of a certain governor and a musician still cling on to their grievances (of which they are entitled); there is however a significant group who have chosen apology or not to reach beyond their scars to join hands in support of the General.

Nigeria is a curious case where serious issues are constantly swept under a magic carpet and expected to vanish. We have done much evil to one to another but it may not be possible to achieve complete truth and reconciliation; we may never have full disclosure and even closure for all who have been severely scarred and routed. It will be foolhardy to remain resolute awaiting apologies from all who have offended us instead of striving hard to move on (which I know is easier to say). One can only imagine how long it would rake for every single case of injustice and savage killings from the slave trade period was revisited. Apartheid greatly undermined South Africa but the wisdom of a former militant who spent 27 years in jail somehow kept that nation on course. It took a former Australian Prime minister Kevin Rudd about 4mins and 3 seconds to apologize for the many years of injustice meted out to Aborigines who are the original owners of the Land.

The former emir of Gwandu and former ADC to General Buhari; Major Al-Mustapha Jokolo in an interview to the Sun Newspapers made several valid points with respect to the state of the union. He said:

“If Nigeria should disintegrate as a result of one office like that of the President, is it fair for anybody? Look at the implication for all of us; whether Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, majority, minority, we are all going to pay for it. If this position forces us to disintegrate, nobody in the North will find it easy going without seaport or oil. We cannot find it easy. Let’s not pretend because even if we have farms, even agriculture, generally, we have passed the stage of using hoes to farm.

We need tractors and how do we oil those tractors? We don’t have oil here in the North and we have no spare parts. Who are the traders in spare parts? Who are the electricians? The Igbo. So if there are none within our midst, on and on, we don’t have that knowledge. Even where few of us do, how are we going to survive without these things? On the other hand, look at the Igbo themselves. Can they survive without the North? They need space. They are a highly intelligent race. That was what happened in Germany. They discovered they were in an enclosure. That was why they started waging wars.

The Igbo with their active nature cannot be contained in the South-eastern states. So they need to expand to get space. And they have no space there. So how are they going to survive without space? Never mind food. You can import food from anywhere. Saudi Arabia has no food. So they can buy from anywhere. That’s no problem. But they cannot get space. So what are they going to do? If they have no space, they are going to move over like they did before and try to capture South-south. They are not going to allow the South-south to remain on their own. They had one region before.

They had ACB. They used the money from that bank and acquired choice areas in Rivers State and then there was war. The Rivers people fought against the Igbo and after the war, they said the property the Igbo acquired were abandoned property even though the Igbo owned the land. They bought the land with loans they got from their bank. Interestingly, David Mark as a Major was the one who was the Chairman of the abandoned property thing. So you find that we all need each other.”

We ought to concentrate more on the positives and less on our differences; some of the people we despise are able to do things that some of us will refuse a fortune for because we are just not capable.

It was a Scottish friend and instructor of mine who first mentioned Glencoe to me late last year when we were having a discussion. He told me of a relative of his who is a descendant of the Macdonalds. She instructed her son not to open a can of “Campbell soup” inside her house more than 300 years after the unfortunate massacre. I did a quick check on the internet to see if Campbell food products were packaged in Scotland but the only reference I found to Campbell soup and other products was a New Jersey based company that has done business for more than a few decades now. This is what many Nigerians want their children and descendants to do; to hold on to pain instead of being a balm and save ourselves from transmitted misery.

One of the fallouts from the Glencoe massacre was an amendment to challenge the Scots law of “murder under trust”. The result of the inquiry declared that:

 “Though the command of superior officers be very absolute, yet no command against the laws of nature is binding; so that a soldier, retaining his commission, ought to refuse to execute any barbarity, as if a soldier should be commanded to shoot a man passing by inoffensively, upon the street, no such command would exempt him from the punishment of murder.”

A public commentator said recently that he thought Captain Koli of the “Ekitigate” scandal was disloyal to his superior officer Brigadier Momoh by taping the conversation he had with ruling party members who have since affirmed their participation. I totally disagree with this viewpoint because the recording exposed serious issues of National importance. Should the loyalty of the Captain to his superior officer greater than to Nigeria? A military friend of mine suggested to me that his loyalty depended on whoever was in power hence he is currently fully loyal to Jonathan irrespective of any breach of the constitution and would therefore salute Buhari if he ends up winning the election. I do not know if there is any part of our military code that talks about refusing any command against the law of nature but I want to take the risk and assume that there could be something of the sort since our military evolved from the British system. Even if there isn’t any; our Military officers should know and be convinced in their hearts that their loyalty is primarily to Nigeria and they should not be tools in the hands of any group of desperate politicians to subdue the majority of Nigerians.

LONG LIVE THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA!!!!