If anyone had any doubt that Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf, the leader of the Boko Haram sect, was extra-judicially murdered mid last week, Thisday and Daily Trust provided sufficient evidence to dispel such doubts.

            First, last Monday’s editions of both newspapers published the half-naked picture of the man after his capture by soldiers. He looked hale and hearty in the picture. In any case, it is on record that the soldiers handed him over the police in one piece.

            Second, and even more telling, was the transcript of a short interview he had with an army interrogator which Daily Trust published yesterday.

            These two evidences gave the lie to claims by the police and the Governor of Borno State, Senator Ali Modu Sheriff, that Yusuf was killed in an exchange of gun fire.

            Yusuf was not the only leader of Boko Haram who was shot in the back by the police. At least one other, Alhaji Fuji Foi, a one-time local government chairman and a commissioner in his native Borno State, was similarly gunned down and his property destroyed. A similar wanton destruction was visited on the property of another of its leaders in Wudil, Kano State.

            Outrageous as it may sound, the license for this cold-blooded murder of the Boko Haram leaders and the destruction of their property came from our President and Commander-in-Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, Alhaji Umaru Yar’adua, no less. First was his action in jetting out of the country at a time the Boko Haram insurrection became a serious national crisis that required his hands-on management. Second were his words in which, according to his spokesman, Segun Adeniyi, he said in effect that the Boko Haram followers deserved no mercy.

            Obviously the president finds their gospel disagreeable, possibly even despicable, as many Muslims do. But even the most despicable person does not deserve the cold-blooded manner in which Yusuf was murdered, nor would any group deserve the horrible way in which his followers were massacred.

            Personally, I find Yusuf’s wholesale rejection of modernity disagreeable and simplistic. His rejection of modernity suggests he had mistaken it for Westernization. But even if he was right to equate the two it is not everything Western that is disagreeable.

            Even then Yusuf’s rejection of modernity / Westernization is not as outrageous as it is being widely portrayed. Anyone who thinks otherwise would do well to go to the archives of The Economist, that bastion of Western values, and fish out two surveys it published on Islam and the West, the first in its edition of August 6, 1994, the second on September 13, 2003.

            Between the two surveys the readers would discover that Yusuf is hardly alone in his rejection of the West’s decadence and is also not alone in his belief that the solution, in the words of the magazine first survey, lies in “find(ing) a way of putting individual initiative, the necessary driving-force of progress, within a shaping moral order, which is the only way of defining what the word ‘progress’ means. The shaping force may be religion, requiring believes in a God, or it may be purely secular consensus about what is acceptable and what is not... Something of that sort is essential. Otherwise the history books will record that the people of the West woke up during the 21^st century to discover that the pursuit of efficiency was not the same as the achievement of a happy life. The West, they will say, found itself living in a superbly efficient but, in the end, aimless machine.”

            Yusuf would, of course, have argued that his version of Islam is the only acceptable moral order for mankind. Billions of others, including his fellow Muslims, would equally disagree but it was a view he and his followers were entitled to as long as they did not seek to force it on others.

            His brief interview with the army in yesterday’s Daily Trust clearly showed he was not foolish enough to imagine he could impose his views on Nigeria. If he took up arms against the State, he said, it was because the group had to defend itself against constant harassment by the security forces. Thanks to the nature of the mass media as essentially the voice of the Establishment, however defined, few Nigerians ever heard of such harassments.

            Hiss excuse of self-defense was, of course, also foolish because his crude home-made bombs, daneguns, machetes and swords could never have been a match against the State’s artillery, armoured tanks, bombs and AK47s.

            Yusuf and his Boko Haram would not be the first to take up arms against the Nigerian State in so-called self-defence. In this they are in the good company of several militia, notably, the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) and Odu’a Peoples’ Congress (OPC), both of which have killed far more men in uniform than Boko Haram has or is even capable of.

The obvious difference is that with MEND, the organization has had the resources to match the State fire for fire, thanks to their access to oil-money whose language knows no boundary and whose capacity to suborn the forces of law and order knows no bound.

            In the case of OPC, the difference is that it springs from, and has had the universal support of, the Yoruba as the ethnic group which owns or controls most of the country’s media as the instrument of molding public opinion.

            All this explains why there has been limited and, in many cases, mealy-mouthed, condemnation of the State massacre of Boko Haram and its leaders. The Nigerian Bar Association as an example of the few voices raised against Yusuf’s extra-judicial murder merely said his killing was “not to be encouraged in a civilized society” and that it was “unjustifiable”. It is not difficult to imagine how forcefully NBA would have condemned the State if Yusuf and Boko Haram were not Muslims.

            This cold-blooded extra-judicial murder of Yusuf deserves the harshest condemnation and the massacre of the Boko Haram followers makes it necessary to thoroughly re-examine the trigger-happy approach of our security forces to maintaining law and order and the stability of our country.

All told, the episode once again exposes the hypocrisy of the claim by our leaders and social critics that before them all human beings are equal.