Perhaps never since the summoning into existence of the socio-political agglomerate called Nigeria by Lord Lugard in 1914, have we faced the type of insidious assault on the integrity of the Nigerian state as we have been forced to countenance in recent times.
Perhaps never since the summoning into existence of the socio-political agglomerate called Nigeria by Lord Lugard in 1914, have we faced the type of insidious assault on the integrity of the Nigerian state as we have been forced to countenance in recent times.
That global jihad has finally reached here from across the Sahara in the form of Boko Haram is certainly obvious to all. What is also sadly evident is that, in the contest for supremacy between the jihadists and those we elected to secure lives and properties, our leadership have been clearly found wanting. They have shown crass incompetence in dealing with the motley gang of murderers hiding behind religion to steal, kill and destroy.
In the battle against the local branch of global jihad, the federal government has quickly thrown up the white flag in surrender, declaring loudly its lassitude in confronting those that daily assault the peoples and entity the President swore to defend and protect when he took the oath of office twice. The President in clear irreverence to all those who have been slaughtered and hurt in the satanic rage of Boko Haram told Nigerians only recently that the sect had become too amorphous to confront and too mercurial to eliminate because “they have sympathisers everywhere”.
Perhaps someone needs to tell the president to do the right thing if he feels uninspired to effectively confront Boko Haram. In my view, the right thing is, for the President to tell all Nigerians to arm themselves in order to better defend themselves. I did not vote for Goodluck Jonathan so that I would be paid back with excuses. What the government does not seem to realise is that its incapacity to end the global jihad franchise in the country and the franchise’ watercourse of murders of clerics and other innocents have led many to re-assess whether a peaceful or violent negotiation of the Nigerian project is not worth entering into. It is daily become clear that in the face of government’s anaemic and uncharismatic response to the many gauntlets thrown by Boko Haram, ordinary Nigerians many of whom have since privatised their existence outside the gargantuan inefficiency and malfunctioning of officialdom will sooner have to chalk down the defence of their lives and the lives of their wives, husbands, parents and children from Boko Haram’ aggression as another project to handle themselves just like electricity, water, education, health and home security which the state has consistently failed to provide.
We are finally doing away with the ageing phizog of unity that our leaders preached in the past to coax us together in times of war and peace. Of course, they our leaders continue to orate the geriatric shibboleths of unity and love and in spite of the anomalous state of anomie they have created by their actions and inactions, they never tire to espouse the ante-diluvian cliché about why we should all “live together as one”
The anorexic entity that we are being forced to co-habit with those that murder us daily is slowly but clearly anonymising before our eyes, while they our leaders throw their hands in the air in absolute inertia and cluelessness demanding peace and unity as if the sick anthropophobes that kill men, women and children in Churches, Mosques, Taverns and in their homes every other day are going to be de-racinated out of their murderous enterprise if we their victims only live in peace and unity.
The reality is that “peace and unity” are overrated clichés that have done this country little good. When Mohammed Marwa of the Maitasine fame started his bloody massacre of thousands of Christians and Southerners, we were told to live in peace and unity. When thousands of people were murdered in the 1980s and 90s in Kaduna, Zaria, Kano, Bauchi and large swards of the North by Wahabists inspired by the hate filled sermons of their clerics against Christians, Jews, Shias and other Muslim sects, we were equally told to write off our losses, declare bankruptcy and live in peace and unity. When the Palestinians attack Israel and Israel retaliates, churches are burnt and innocent people who know nothing about the Middle-East crises are killed up north. When a newspaper in far away Denmark publishes a cartoon that we care nothing about, churches will be burnt in the north and innocent people murdered. When Sunnis and Shiites clash in Kaduna or Kano or wherever they occasionally spar, a pound of flesh is bound to be exacted by both sides from Christians and southerners who know nothing about their age hold dispute about who is the rightful heir to the heritage of Prophet Muhammad. When there is an eclipse of the sun in the North, Christians are blamed for it because they drink alcohol, eat pork and are “infidels”. Of course the sanction for such a purely planetary activity when the earth passes between the sun and the moon is for the occasional Christian to be killed and churches burnt. The normal response from government is “let’s live in peace and unity”. When churches are bombed on Christmas and Sabbaths and scores of little boys and girls blasted into fleshy pieces, we are summoned again and again to live in peace and unity.
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No doubt, for many the ritual of living in peace and unity in the face of persistent provocations is increasingly becoming boring and unexciting. While most of us really do want to leave in peace and unity, we fear that the capacity, platform and ambience to do so do not exist anymore. It does not exist because successive governments of the Federal Republic of Nigeria have shown strong disinclination to tackle any crises with a religious root or colour.
The fear of going after religion is sadly what has led us to where we are today. Years of treating deadly religious violence as nothing more than family squabbles that could be amicably settled in the ancestors’ shrine, their perpetrators and sponsors as nothing more than misguided but well meaning neighbours who needed rehabilitation rather than prosecution have created a broad canvas where the wicked and audacious can paint their demonic motif of hate and violence and sell it for a high price to Nigerians.
Peace and Unity have become ritualistic chants in the mouths of leaders and pseudo-leaders. We have all become lawful captives to peace and unity. Even those who openly call others who do not share their faith as “Kaffirs” as a matter of rite call for peace and unity even after their acidic and vituperative words have succeeded in creating chaos. Perhaps what will truly yield peace and unity is a rich investment by governments at all levels in the arrest and prosecution of the purveyors of hate.
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The elimination of Boko Haram will certainly go the longest way in solidifying peace and unity. The war against Boko Haram is a war that can be won despite the assertions, chest beating and titters by quislings and sleeper cells of Boko Haram in the media up north. The alternative to forcing Boko Haram to lift up the white flag in surrender is an alternative that men and women of goodwill do not wish Nigerians and Nigeria.
Nosa James-Igbinadolor is a political-economist and security analyst. He wrote in from Abuja
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