The seeds of the Boko Haram madness were sown a few years ago. Some of the governors of the north thought they had discovered a political survival formula. They came up with a fresh doctrine of Shariarisation of their states and President Olusegun Obasanjo was trying hard to alert them of the need to not wake up the lion. They didn’t listen. They carried on famously in this mindless evangelical hucksterism, campaigning for people’s hands to be severed for the most frivolous of reasons.

One of them, who went to Benin as one of the guests of the State Government, in his hypocritical show of piety and in utter disregard of the elementary rules of good guest relations, refused to shake hands with the wife of his host, the state governor. Other governors had to plead with him to shake the outstretched hand of the genial lady. Now the chickens have come home to roost. The monster is at the door.

The Boko Haram people, in their unlettered naivety, have asserted that “western education is evil.” This is a dangerous doctrine but we can live with a dangerous doctrine if there is no attempt to convert other people by force to this pernicious posture. That is the real danger, the real evil, not western education. And that is the backlash of the shariarisation influenza of the past few years. As it has happened in several northern states in the past couple of weeks, these anarchists, hanging on to their half-baked understanding of Islam, have killed and maimed people, destroyed property and burnt churches in the attempt to convert people to their skewed brand of Islam. With a note of sulky truculence they trampled upon anything in sight, they spread their satanic message with daring-do-war-zone ethics. The nation recoiled with tingling shock, the fire of anger began to burn and our tempers rose to flash point. The security agencies tried to give them an ungentlemanly dust-up but grievous harm had already been done to this unhappy country.

I saw the photograph of the Boko Haram leader, Ustaz Mohammed Yussuf, in several papers. He was a big, ripe-bodied, barrel-chested man, adorned with heaving breasts. He looked like anyone of us who is lucky to be well built, and lucky to be well fed and lucky to have his incendiary rhetoric germinate in the hearts of other religious bigots like him. He didn’t have the intimidating visage of a Nebuchadnezzar – like Taliban, nor did he have the grooming influence of very high education. There lies the problem: Religious bigotry plus illiteracy or half literacy is a very inflammable cocktail. Many of the religious eruptions in the north can be traced to the lack of the liberating influence of higher education. Which is why, in spite of its large Moslem community, the south west does not erupt in rampant spasms of religious conflagration.

The challenge for the northern governors is to invest more in compulsory western education rather than Arabic studies. The world is wired to the west, like it or not and there is more to be learnt from western education than to lose from it. And several  Moslem countires have utilised this. Egypt is very western without any loss of its moslemhood. In Cairo, you find lots of young women in mini skirts, hair uncovered, prancing about.

In Jordan and Syria, life is almost as normal and cosmopolitan as in London or New York. Assad of Syria is an American educated leader and this does not make him less than a Moslem. In these places, western education and Moslem faith have co-existed without rancour. In Nigeria, one of the North’s great vulnerabilities is its low level of education which creates problems in various directions: religion, politics, civil service, governance and human rights.

In particular, women in the North are subjected to degrading and inhuman treatment, and many of them are often married off before the age of maturity and the educated ones, many of them, are barred from work. I have no problem with women who want to cover their faces or those who want to colour them. The essential thing is that there ought to be freedom of choice – to cover or colour one’s face or do nothing at all to it.

The federal government and the state governments in the north must pay more attention to nipping religious fanaticism in the bud. We have had several of these fanatics in the past – Maitatsine, Musa Makariki and El Zaky-Zaky – preaching pernicious sermons of incitement without anyone lifting a finger against them. These fellows are trying to plant a counter culture that will lead to the talibanisation of the country. They must be stopped in their tracks before they roast the country further.