By Abuchi Obiora
In different areas, and for several reasons, Nigeria has been in the eye of the storm as the country feeds the international community with unpleasant stories of killing, maiming, kidnapping, abduction, and sack of communities by different types of terror groups operating in the country.
This week, we shall look at some of these different areas – the pressing ones – as well as examine some immediate reasons (though multiple the reasons may be) why Nigeria appears in the eye of the storm, especially in the last six years, beginning from the inauguration of the incumbent President. This discourse assumes that most of those conditions for which Nigeria is in the eye of the storm would have properly been taken care of by an effective leadership over the six years the government has been in power. But most unfortunately, apart from the government having not tackled the problems it met on ground, the socio-political conditions of the country has degenerated beyond what it was when the present government assumed office. Admitted that the incumbent government did its homework well as an opposition party, identifying the conditions in the socio-economic fabric that needed attention and secured the votes of Nigerian electorate based on the promises to address such conditions, the government has failed woefully in applying solutions in such manners as to alleviate the problems of the citizens.
In our consideration, we shall also look at both the short and the long-time social, political, and economical implications of the negative development in the history of what is becoming a failed country.
In his memoirs on the Nigerian Civil war, titled “There was a Country” Professor Chinua Achebe succinctly noted that official corruption is the albatross that would eventually lead the country into decimation. Not long after the death of the literary Icon, some of the fall-outs of that executive impunity and recklessness called official corruption manifesting as poverty, apathy and frustration have led many Nigerians, especially those from the Northern part of the country, to resort to crime and criminal activities for survival in a country whose people has been abandoned by their political leaders, and governments.
Somebody in a WhatsApp group I belong once wrote that “when a child reads tales of genocide, misogyny and never develop revulsion for such evils in adolescence, a creeping acceptance of justified moral evil in adulthood is a logical conclusion.” Following the natural pattern in human psycho make-up, the Nigerian youth, having grown up in a bloody environment and accepted bloodshed which occurs daily in Nigeria as a normal occurrence, has been hardened in heart that he found it both easy and normal to dispense different levels of mischief through the many available violent means and groups across the country.
The Newsexpress Newspaper in a mid February edition https://newsexpressngr.com/news/117686, wrote that 1,525 Nigerians were killed in the first six weeks of the year 2021. Though 1 have not got a figure to put my hands on as being the correct figure (nobody can say exactly how many lives are lost every day in Nigeria), I am sure that more than ten thousand lives have been lost across Nigeria since January 2021, apart from those kidnapped on whose heads ransoms were paid to secure their release. With this figure, Nigeria is experiencing an effective warfare, though asymmetric the war may be.
Before this government was inaugurated, precisely during the tenor of former President Goodluck Jonathan, there were pockets of abductions by kidnappers, and incessant cases of Boko Haram attacks confined to the North Eastern part of Nigeria. Hell was let loose with the abduction of girls of a secondary school in Chibok by Boko Haram insurgents and the attention of the international community was attracted to the first mass scale abduction in Nigeria with that occurrence. The opposition party, the APC, used that opportunity to good advantage in shoring up its campaign, promise of completely securing Nigeria. The mantra of ‘Change’ to ‘Next Level’ subsumed the political atmosphere, and with its accompanying slogan of ‘Sai Baba’, the Nigerian electorate was unknowingly fooled to become a willing accomplice for the opposition APC to clinch the 2019 Nigerian Presidential Election, assisted by the high-tech electoral rigging executed by no other party than the national electoral umpire, INEC.
Not only have there been more abductions, killings, kidnapping, maiming, and sacking of entire villages by Fulani Herdsmen and other terror groups now fully established within and at the outskirts of Nigeria, terrorism in Nigeria is being presently executed with a level of audacity and impunity never before witnessed in the history of any African nation. Above all, the government, surrendering the sovereignty of Nigeria to the terrorist has not hidden its suspected complicity in the terrorist attacks as it openly negotiates and pays ransoms ranging into billions of naira to terrorists.
The suspected complicity of the government in the growing trend of terrorist activities in Nigeria was boosted with the revelation to the international community that a sympathizer of some international terrorist organizations around the world, including the al Qaeda by the name Sheikh Pantami, who is a highly-placed and much-respected Nigerian, being also the Minister of Digital Communication, is on the terrorist watch list of the government of the United State of America.
Other actions and non-actions of the government, including the gruesome massacre of protesters against Police brutality in Lekki toll gate has not helped matters. They all have ensured that Nigeria has remained in the eye of the storm since 2015 when the present government took over the reins of power.
Many people across the country especially from South-South, South-East and Middle Belt part of the country have condemned the socio-political condition of the country. It is surprising that not much is heard from the core north as to address the social inequality which forms the foundation of the descent of the country to the abyss, except when they talk in favour of perpetuating the status quo. The mute silence kept by the former heads of government from northern Nigeria and some other elder statesmen from that part of the country, in spite of the groundswell of opinion to kick-start the country through a restructuring of the system, does not eulogize them. At best, it is an act of cowardice and at worse, it suggest a collective conspiracy of the North against the South, and the need to take a comprehensive forensic analysis of their greed in the management of the country’s commonwealth. Nigerians are aware of the sharing of the crude oil wells of the South-South among these northern elites and their traditional rulers, mostly of the Fulani ethnic stocks in Nigeria. It obviously could be for the reason to maintain the continuous flow of their petro-dollar resources that they have decided not to talk, even as the country burns, and countless number of lives is daily lost.
In its WIKIPEDIA information update of October, 2020 which was released via en.m.wikipedia.org, a media watch group called “The Reporters without Borders”, indicted the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria on its unwholesome attitude in press censorship. In that report, the group wrote, “With more than 100 independent newspapers, Africa’s most populous nation enjoys real media pluralism, but covering stories involving politics, terrorism or financial embezzlement by the powerful is very problematic,”
This observation of 2020 by ‘The Reporters without Borders’ was recently demonstrated by the arbitrary shutting down of the Nigeria airspace against Twitter, a world renowned, and one of the leading Social Media Network vending companies in the world, by the Nigerian government on the instruction of the President of the country.
The Kaleidoscope read with the whole wide world that Twitter, the choice and popular Social Media Platform, probably in exercising its duty of protection of the rights of people across the world, and in solidarity with the clarion calls by the international community on Nigerian government to stop the killings of Nigerians, brought down (expunged) the video of the Nigerian President from its Platform and public surfing. In the video, the President of Nigeria whose agents hitherto paid billions of naira as ransoms to Islamic terror groups operating in the northern part of the country, had threatened to deal with the Christian youths of South Eastern Nigeria ‘in a language they understand’. This statement which was easily understood as a valid threat to levy another war to destroy the Igbo of Nigeria has attracted condemnation around the world including the US, Britain and the E.U.
I would have very little to say here, but I must, in passing say that fact I find it unfortunate that a retired Army General does not know the implication of opening up multiple asymmetric war zones in a country with a limited firepower and generally demoralized rank and files. It is an open secret that the psych of the masses have been bruised by the wide gulley and uneasy calm existing between all the Nigerian ethnic nationalities with the Fulani ethnic stock who call the shots as heads of the security agencies in a national security architecture hosted and manned by the Fulani. With the present level of apathy and suspicion towards the Fulani ethnic stock in Nigeria, it is not unlikely that there will not be a hundred percent observance to superior orders of the military hierarchy by the ranks and files that are inevitably drawn from the bruised and disenchanted families across the marginalized and subjugated ethnic nationalities in Nigeria.
The Nigerian government seems not to have learnt any lesson in the summary execution of a former Boko Haram leader which action turned that organization that had earlier mounted a subtle campaign to dissuade Muslims from attaining Western education, into a monster.
By openly threatening to deal with the youths of the South Eastern Nigeria, the President may be driving those youths to the forests with the consequences of doing more harm to the country than is being presently witnessed from the Boko Haram. One of the reasons for this assumption is that the South East is genuinely aggrieved as a result of marginalization and injustice being meted to the region, and the region’s claim is obviously superior to that of the Boko Haram whose only grouse is the westernization of northern Nigeria.
Secondly, the President must understand that if he rustles the hornet’s nest, he will be dealing with highly literate, much travelled, and evidently well connected South Eastern Nigerian youths who do not have any social or economic semblance whatsoever to the vastly illiterate foot soldiers of the Boko Haram in the Northern Nigeria.
As for the opportunist and greedy politicians of Southern Nigeria who throw spanner in the wheel of the realization of the common aspiration of the oppressed South, it seems to me that it is high time the people began to institute some severe deterrents to check their excesses as betrayers and traitors who work against and sabotage the people as those politicians covertly contribute to the subjugation of Southern Nigeria by the Northern Fulani-Muslim political class
Furthermore, the imbroglio between the federal government of Nigeria and Twitter Social Media Platform, when taken together with the increasing spate of divergence in views between the federal government and the international community raises the question as to whether Nigeria is not becoming a pariah country within the comity of other countries of the world.
One of these differences in view between the Nigeria government and the international community is the subtle encouragement of terrorism by the government through negotiating with them, paying ransoms to them, and most surprising, absorbing them into the Nigerian armed forces. All these practices are against international opinion which is to discourage terrorists across the world by ruthlessly dealing with them.
Recently, Nigerians woke up to the reality that the ‘repented’ terrorists were actually absorbed into the armed forces simply for the sole reason to send then to the South East to continue their terrorist activities under the cover of the Nigerian armed forces. This reasonable line of thought is evidenced in the death of a police officer-suicide-bomber who was once a Boko Haram terrorist but was enlisted into the Nigerian Police Force.
Another weird act of the government of Nigeria which puts the country in the eye of the storm is the on-going mop-up of the young men from the South East, their disappearance from public view, and accusation that these young Igbo youths are taken away to unknown destinations and murdered in cold blood. This mop-up gives rise to the suspicion that the exercise is to forestall a possible use of these young men during a sudden future regional need, to combat the siege completely laid on the South East by the Fulani militia marauding as herdsmen. With hindsight, this mop-up in the South East sounds very much like the hushed and hurried murder of Terwase Akwaza (Gana) in Benue State, and the dispersal of his men who also could have been useful to his own Tiv people if the need for a balance of terror in Nigeria urgently arises. It is for this reason of mopping up possible future opposition to a Fulani conquest of the ethnic nationalities of Nigeria that Sunday Igboho must be protected by the Yoruba ethnic nationality.
This line of thought, too, is becoming more plausible amongst Nigerians as the dangerous terror drama with Nigeria as the stage, unfolds by the day, because it is difficult to explain to a sane and reasoning mind why one repentant criminal, Gana, who with his boys, surrendered himself, arms and ammunitions to the government, will be waylaid and murdered on his way to the public declaration of that surrender and acceptance of amnesty while his compatriots in crime in Northern Nigeria are paid billions of naira in ransoms, begged to surrender, granted amnesty, and re-absorbed to the Nigerian military services to terrorize other ethnic nationalities across Nigeria.
On a final note on this discourse, the recent assassination in Imo State of Barrister Ahmed Gulak, a former aide to the immediate past President, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, was the worse news from Nigeria in recent times which also put the country in the eye of the storm.
To say the least, that assassination of a man regarded in political circles as a gentleman is one too many. For whatever reason the man paid the supreme sacrifice, whether political as alleged by the Imo State governor, Senator Hope Uzodinma, or as a result of a shadowy business that went awry, that assassination is highly reprehensible.
In a manner typically characteristic of a great orator who is suddenly and unusually caught up in stage fright as he reads through a script he does not actually believe in, the Imo State Governor reacted, surprisingly, too early without allowing investigation by the security agencies. His quick and summary Press Conference where he said that the assassination of Barrister Ahmed Gulak was politically motivated shocked me. It is the opinion of the Kaleidoscope that it is too early for the Imo State governor who is also the state’s Chief Security Officer, to jump into conclusion without allowing investigation by the security agencies. Apart from being suspicious, his quick reaction would more likely influence the investigation by leading the investigation away from clues that may unravel the motive for the assassination. This is more so especially with the confusion as to the killing or capture of the assassins.
Be that as it may, the Imo State governor may have gotten more than he bargained for with that assassination in a state where he is both the administrative Chief Executive Officer as well as the Chief Security Officer because the people who lost one of their most illustrious sons in Imo State will not allow matters to be swept under the carpet, if precedents are anything to go by.
Let me end this discourse with the wisdom of Ezeihuoma Ezeayika, the son of the great Ezeayika who was the patriarch of Ezeayika clan and the custodian of our ancestors’ traditional war arsenal fearfully referred to as ‘Ojogwo na-apu agu’ (‘Ojogwo’ that invokes lions to fight battles)by both friends and foes. Ezeihuoma Ezeayika usually masked his wisdom in cryptic style of language. After giving his advice to us in those good old days of middle sixties, he would say, “Mmmm Mmmm Mmmm, onwere ihe nkwuru?” (Mmmm….. Mmmm….. Mmmm….. did I say anything?), and we will all chorus “Mba” (No!).
This closing statement of Ezeihuoma Ezeayika which I hereby adopt implied that he actually meant well and said nothing that may be recorded negatively against him…. the same way I feel about all that I may have said in this discourse!
ABUCHI OBIORA
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