Gumi and the sin-eater syndrome

In 18th and 19th century Europe, especially in Wales, upon the death of a person, his or her relatives would prepare a ritual bread and drink, place it on the deceased’s chest and invite the local sin-eater to feast on the offering. The idea is that by eating this food, the sin-eater would consume the sins of the deceased, condemn himself or herself to damnation for half a shilling while the deceased merrily proceeds to heaven.

The sin-eater performed a great service for the community and was rewarded with a few coins and a lifetime of stigma. With every ritual of cleansing they performed on behalf of their clients, it was believed they would become more horrible persons. It was not a profession many wanted and most sin-eaters were somewhat compelled to become one. Most.

The last known sin-eater died at the beginning of the 19th century. Otherwise, they would have been quite busy in this century, especially in a place like Nigeria where murder, rape and casual massacres have become commonplace, no thanks to the bandits ravaging the country.

Yet, despite the gravity of their sins or crimes, it would seem that Dr Ahmed Gumi has appointed himself the sin-eater of the bandits.

His engagement with them at first seemed like a much-needed intervention to try to find a solution to the havoc these dangerous men wreaked on the country. It was an intervention that surely had its uses, helped in the negotiated release of some kidnap victims and perhaps served as a means of understanding what drives these bandits.

But like sin-eating, the more one dabbles into it, the more macabre the practice becomes and the more he is shunned by society. Dr Gumi has willfully placed himself on a trajectory that has seen him quickly escalate down a slippery slope of becoming a mouthpiece for this most loathed gang of criminals, seemingly determined to launder their image from the perpetrators they are to appear as the victims.

His persistent justification of their acts, advocacy for their wellbeing, and criticism of military interventions in the crisis have continued to stun most Nigerians.

Following the recent military offensive against these criminals, Dr Gumi has again come out to shoot down the operations, seeming to chastise the authorities for gifting the bandits bullets instead of bread, honey, pipe-borne water and schools. Each time he speaks and makes excuses for the bandits—that they have long suffered neglect, that they are uneducated, that they have lost their means of livelihood and whatnot—as if over 80 per cent of the population of this country do not live beneath the poverty line or other groups of people have not suffered neglect and governmental abuse over the years.

Gumi’s insistence of a negotiated settlement ignores the fact that there have been negotiations in the past, that agreements have been reached and appeasements made to the bandits, the aggressors in this instance, at the expense of their victims who have received no compensation. It also ignores the fact that each time, these bandits have reneged on the agreement to continue their lives of killings. Bandit leaders like Buharin Daji and Auwalu Daudawa have all passed through the phases of negotiating peace deals with the government and reneging on them and only death on the battlefield sated their hunger for bloodletting.

What is evident, which seems to escape Dr Gumi and perhaps the government, is that the authorities have been negotiating from a position of weakness, that they come to the table holding no advantage over the bandits and are merely counting on the goodwill of the bandits to accept their terms, their money and their pleas for mercy. In such situations, the validity of these peace deals is at the discretion of the criminals, who take the money on offer, chill in government lodgings for a while before returning to the forest whenever they so please.

The inherent anomaly in this set-up is glaringly demonstrated when “repentant” Boko Haram members are housed in comfort right next to the ramshackle IDP camps their victims squat in. These hungry victims of these savages often watch as cows and truckloads of food are driven into these “rehabilitation or de-radicalisation camps” for the feasting of the killers.

The injustice in this set-up seems to be glossed over by the likes of Dr Gumi who only sees the injustice he thinks the bandits have suffered.

The reality is this: most Nigerians grew up poor, neglected by the government and struggled for their education. Most of them, like the villagers these bandits are fond of massacring, chose a life of toil and hard work on their farms while the bandits chose crime. Perpetrating crime is often a choice people make. It is not an affliction, like a virus that befalls people as they are sleeping or going about harvesting crops on their farms.

We must stop using poverty and ignorance to justify the criminal propensity of certain people. A poor man steals bread only when he needs to, a criminal kills people even when he doesn’t need to. The rampant massacres bandits have perpetrated in the Northwestern states and all over the country cannot be explained away with poverty and ignorance. It can be explained by bloodlust.

To continuously demand, stridently, that criminals should be exonerated from their crimes, be pampered so they stop committing crimes while saying nothing of their victims or the justice they deserve can only be a product of delusional thinking or a morbid case of the sin-eater syndrome.

The suggestion by Dr Gumi, in his most recent intervention on behalf of the bandits, that a Ministry of Nomadic Affairs be created to appease these bandits and assuage their rage is disingenuous and dangerous. Dangerous because it would open a door for all sorts of criminal gangs to demand a ministry to appease their own grievances.

Yes, the Amnesty Programme for Niger Delta militants created a precedence Gumi is riding on. Some people had at some point even suggested that Boko Haram members be given the same velvet glove treatment. But the Amnesty programme was a mistake and should not be repeated or encouraged further. Rewarding criminality with payouts may have stemmed the violent agitations in the Niger Delta. It has also created a forum where billions go down the drain, created a generation of people who bribe their ways onto the list of “militants” in exchange for payouts and threaten public peace if these payments are delayed. That is not how to run a country. It was supposed to be a temporary solution.

Now to ask for amnesty to be granted to every person who carries a gun and starts shooting people while the victims remain uncompensated, unacknowledged and unconsoled, will be an even graver mistake.

By this logic, we might as well have a Ministry of ‘Spare Parts Dealers’ Affairs or ‘Dot Nation’ Affairs to tackle IPOB militants and just in case, plan for a Ministry of Weaving Affairs should the Asoke weavers of Okene and the South-Western States decide to engage in criminality. And pray, tell, what ministry shall we create to tackle Boko Haram insurgents?

While this does not exonerate the government from culpability over decades of misrule and neglect that allowed such hordes of criminal minds to form, to band together and to strike, the government should take responsibility for its misgovernance while the criminals must take responsibility for their criminal acts.

All things considered, it would seem Dr Gumi is confusing his role as a cleric with that of a sin-eater, desperate to eat away the sins of a people whose crimes have terrorised a populace, devastated a country and will haunt a generation or two to come. The sins of the bandits are not for the government to forgive with an offer of amnesty or the creation of a ministry. It is for the people who have suffered these heinous crimes, these innocent people who do not feature in Dr Gumi’s obsessive ravings.