Nigeria cannot find any respect. We have been looking for solutions to the country’s security problem everywhere except in the most obvious and logical place- within Nigeria’s ethnic agenda, economic and political institutions. We have held in common a distrust for ourselves. We have been largely held stagnant by blood politics, ethnic suspicion and internal despotism. If national unity stops receiving reinforcement, the nation does not stagnate but disintegrates. What time are we? Death time, horror time and mourning time, preface to disintegration!
Boko Haram is not against western values. It is a symbol of home-grown ethnic hatred. Northern ethnic politics is largely responsible for it. Since liberation does not happen in a straight line, movement towards terror-free Nigeria will not progress from military action alone. By definition change has to move in concentric elliptical chaotic ripples that reach far into our ethnic consciousness and national expiation in order to find bearing, momentum and strength way into the future.
The April 14, 2014, killing of more than 200 innocent Nigerians in the Boko Haram savage bomb attacks at Nyanya bus terminals in Abuja and the kidnapping of school girls in Government secondary school, Chibok, Borno State call for national contrition, confession and penance. Do we suppose that we are more vigilant that those Nigerians whom the bastard zealots of a twisted version of Islam smoked in the blasts of bomb? No, unless we repent and do something, we will all perish like them.
Come to think of those innocent Nigerians dispatched to their graves by depraved people who think they have divine mandate to kill. The victims did not commit any crime, deserving of any punishment much less the horrific death meted to them. Their only crime is being Nigerians at this critical time. Leaving for their normal duties in a bid to make end meet, these citizens met their death in a most horrible way. In a fraction of a breath the bombs exploded permitting no prayer chance and no time even to think swiftly and make last wish to loved ones. Just deafening blasts and it all ended. Before one could figure out the meaning of the blast, more than two hundred Nigerians, men and women, some of them pregnant, adult and children became gored, scalded, bloodied bodies, twitching as they turned to corpses. The bomb severed limbs, tore open skulls, disgorged brains and viscera.
In its video clips, I saw what no man ought to see. Human skulls burning like stumps of tree in fire-gutted mangrove forest. Human bodies releasing black billows of smoke like a vandalized oil pipeline. I saw severed human flesh butchered into parts as if they were to be weighed in kilos for potential customers. It has all ingredients of abattoir, petrol filling station on fire. Some victims while dying slowly were calling on God who appeared to have deserted them. Some were calling for human help where everybody was a victim with different degree of burns and where the unaffected were on the run.
In the darkness of this horror, politics started playing out. The cancellation of presidential trip that day was over-emphasized more than the incident. It was as if the cancellation was more newsworthy than the horror. Just to whip cheap sentiment of Nigerians, President Jonathan was portrayed as a caring leader who had to cancel his trip to visit the scene. At the sight of the horror, the President left with a message difficult to understand- Boko Haram is temporal. To score another point, government image builders went on air to distort figure of casualties. The casualty number was released before pieces of decapitated bodies were harvested from where they were buried four-feet deep. Initially, the number was put at twenty-something. And when cameras began focusing on the carnage, fear of escaped video clips prompted the security agents to review the figure upwards to 71.By my proxy unofficial counting, that number is a slap on the waist of lives wasted.
On the corpses of those who died; on the wounds of those bleeding from the injuries, on the agony of the bereaved, other politics came up. In a press release, the PDP National Publicity Secretary, Olisah Metuh pointed accusing finger on the opposition APC. And, as usual, APC responded like a wounded lion. Metuh was smarter this time. His typist was faster because those who know Lai Mohammed knew that he must have been in the business centre typing his own press release to indict government before Metuh’s gunshot went off. We cannot forget also that few hours after the attack the president zoomed off to Kaduna to keep a rally date. There, they swayed to the music and took few graceful musical steps. Only in Nigeria!
To add insult to injury, the governor of Adamawa State, Vice Admiral Murtala Nyako came up with his ethnic flag, tagged ‘Memo to Northern Governors’ dated April 16. The letter, copied to all 18 northern governors is toxic, convoluted, divisive, subversive, and treasonable. Therein he said that the military campaign to rout Boko Haram is a full-fledged genocide against the north. While absolving Boko Haram of any wrongdoing, he accused Jonathan of causing wars in the north between Muslims and Christians as well as perpetuating ethnic rivalries. He talked about Easterners’ conspiracy to eliminate northern elite. He cited the attack on the Senate president in Imo State, two northern governors, Shehu of Borno and Emir of Kano. He said that Fulani communities who had been in their locations for over 100 years are now being raided and uprooted by paid killers within Nigerian Army. He alleged that all soldiers killed in Boko Haram insurgency are northerners. After clearing the ground he called on the north to rise against the government.
Time has come to set the record right and avoid politics of tragedy. It is silly for Nyako to pretend that Boko Haram was created by Jonathan. Routing out Christianity in Nigeria has been an age-long dream of northern elite. Boko Haram came for that religious mission. At a point they became a political tool for northern politics. Now, it has caught up with them. Those who were riding on a tiger’s back at one point ultimately ended up in its belly. The Niger Delta started also as political tool created by politicians for extortions and partisan gains till it sought to consume its creators.
Boko Haram is sustained by religious and ethnic sentiment. The natives know their sons in the sect but intelligence is hindered by sentiment. If government is wrong, it is for nothing and not for doing something. Government appears to be saying; ‘north lick your wounds till after 2015 polls.’ If government has no hidden agenda in the current challenge, the presidency ought to declare full state of emergency, shutdown borders, and match the killers with equal force. And where they have grown so big to handle, it is time president stepped down from office or tore up the country, let every ethnic group control their region.
Nyako’s ethnic trumpet and the similar hate speeches are evil agenda the Igbo should rise against. Nyako has waved ethnic flag to the charging bull of extremist Islam, Boko Haram and ethnic irredentists, and the next slaughter is just a step away. He has indirectly told them to turn eastwards. If the Igbo do not rise to this looming pogrom, deaths will soon knock on their doors; and then it would have been too late. Enough is enough.
