A few years ago, the American intelligence community took a hard look at Nigeria and predicted her demise. At the time, the “Pharaohs” masquerading as leaders in Aso rock choose to play the Ostrich by burying their head in the sand. They lampooned the Americans for daring to state the obvious. Yet, events since then have continued to validate the grim prognosis for Nigeria as predicted by the American intelligence community as the nation has increasingly been mired in crisis after crisis.
The ongoing Guerrilla warfare in the Niger-Delta represents some of the last acts in Nigeria’s final descent into the abyss. Not minding the noise about the offer of amnesty emanating from a crassly incompetent federal government, the reality remains that the Nigerian army now stands defeated in the Niger- Delta. More than anything else, the successful crippling of the oil industry and the extension of the attack to Lagos signals the defeat of the Nigerian army. The offer of amnesty is a face saving gesture from a defeated federal government and her infamous army. Knowing the true character of the Nigerian army whose only achievement in its entire history is the raping and massacre of unarmed Nigerians and the pillaging of whole communities, only the reality of defeat could make them offer an amnesty.
The defeat of the army is both welcome and predictable. It is an army that has never reflected professionalism, nor the finer virtues of soldiering; it is instead a vastly corrupt mediocre establishment that represents the narrow ethnic interests of the Northern oligarchy. During the Biafra-Nigeria war, the Nigerian army in spite of a vast armada of limitless sophisticated weapons and superiority in numbers could not defeat a mostly unarmed, rag-tag Biafran Army for three years in full scale frontal (not guerrilla) conflict. In Sierra Leone and Liberia, the Nigerian army was on many occasions disgraced beyond belief by rag-tag rebels. A lazy, incompetent and politicised ethnic organisation that can hardly prevail in any battle, the Nigerian army also stands solely responsible for the injustices, marginalisation, domination, misrule and corruption that have brought the nation on the road to Somalia and inevitable disintegration.
Though the “Northern” army succeeded in deceiving the world and other non discerning Nigerians into helping them to fight for a so called “one Nigeria,” in reality the army which in the main represented and still represents the interests of the North never believed in Nigeria beyond the crude oil resources as events since the end of the war has proven. It should therefore come as no surprise that the same army has played the greatest role in the destruction of Nigeria. Since the end of the Biafra-Nigeria war, the Northern army has subsequently unleashed a massive criminal looting of the nations coffers, erected an “ethnic cold war,” introduced lopsided structures that favour the North and pursued outright policies of exclusion and domination that has created the cancer that is presently tearing down the nation.
No nation founded on fraud, sustained by force rather than by mutual consent and premised on injustice can survive. All such nations have historically collapsed, and Nigeria inevitably stands in line to join the long list of such decapitated nations. Already ranked 15th in the list of failed states where she shamefully jostles for space with nations such as Afghanistan and Somalia, familiar sights of gun totting hoodlums randomly shooting on the streets of lawless Somalia will sooner become a permanent feature of the Nigerian landscape.
With the increasing availability of general purpose machine guns (GPMG), rocket propelled grenades, dynamites and the technology for the manufacture of improvised explosive devices (IED) amongst others, Nigeria has entered the fast track route to Somalia. It is the inevitable price of long years of rapacious Northern military and civilian misrule, injustice, arrogance, marginalisation, exploitation, monumental corruption and domination. Barring a miracle, it will not be too long before we render a requiem mass for a nation that only offered her supposed citizens penury, oppression and death. Somalia here we come!
Comrade Lawrence Chinedu Nwobu
Email: [email protected]
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