"BOKO HARAM WAS NOT BORN BY POLITICAL ACCIDENT OR OVERNIGHT IN NIGERIA"

THE ORIGIN OF TODAY'S RELIGION VIOLENCE AND RIOTS IN THE NORTHERN NIGERIA:Nigerians can easily forget their own history. Without the past, there will be no now or tomorrow in all reality. Knowledge in the human universe is always advancing with time. Boko Haram was not born suddenly, accidentally or overnight in the Northern Nigeria. Boko Haram is a direct product of the many successive religious riots and violences in the Northern Nigeria since the early 1980s. The only new thing today about the whole operations of the Boko Haram is its political ambition, sophistication and modernisation. Today, Boko Haram uses international terrorist networks, IEDs, grenades, heavy weaponry, propaganda machinery, social networking sites and the local and international media to function in line with the information technology age of our 21st century human universe.

Religious bigotry, fanatism, ignorance and intolerance have polarized and divided this nation especially in the Northern Nigeria from 1980 to date along religious lines. It all started in Kano city in 1980 under the administration of the then Alhaji Shehu Shagari who was our president at that time and the late Abubakar Rimi who was the Kano State governor in the same period. In December 1980, a radical Islamic preacher by the name of Mohammed Marwa Maitatsine led riots in Kano. He was killed by the federal security forces, but his followers were never fully arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of our laws. These surviving remnants later started many uprisings in the other northern cities of Nigeria throughout the 1980s, 1990s and into the new millenium.

On the record today, tens of thousands of innocent and ordinary Nigerians from both sides of the nation's two biggest religions (Christianity and Islam) have been murdered and billions of Naira worth of properties burned down without any serious official persecutions of these murderers, religious bigots, criminals and arsonists by the successive Nigerian governments of Ibrahim Babangida, Sanni Abacha, Shonekan, Abubakar Abdulsalam, Obasanjo, Yar'Adua and currently Jonathan Goodluck for the last 30 years to date.

Can Nigeria survive as a nation of hero worshippers of religious leaders, religious fanatism and bigotry? Time marches forward in Nigeria despite all these odds in that diverse nation of ethnic nationalities and religion bigotry, ignorance or fanatism. Time, posterity and the accounts of history will surely tell us one day in the nearest future what the various outcomes will be.