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Editorial
The nation is not in a civil war in a classical sense. It is not in the throes of what historians and political scientists call a fratricidal conflict. But what we have in Nigeria is worse than those in many respects. People are displaced. People are hungry. Soldiers are fighting. Refugee camps infest parts of the country. But this is a war without territory and also a war with territories. There are turfs on the ground. The more potent one is the turf of the mind. That is why it is called terror.
The real problem is that we say we are at war, but we keep losing and claiming to be on the march to victory. It is a war of lies, corrupt claims and tragedies. But fearfully, it is war without a deadline strategy or an assurance of victory. It is a war in which the enemy is better organised than our forces. They are better in the battlefield of bombs and bullets. They are better also in the battlefield of the mind. They generate more fear in us than we in them. They beat us in the battlefield of public opinion. They come away as potent, we as inept.
That was demonstrated in the massacre at
in Jere Local Government Area of Borno State. It started as a lone man’s hectoring presence. Wielding a gun, he bullied the villagers and they played coy as though yielding in their kitchens by cooking rice. The villagers ensnared him and tied him up.
This move infuriated his fellow militants. They let them fulfill their workaday rite as rice farmers. The militants loved to see blood more than corpses. They lined them up and slit their throats, one after another, according to news reports. The number identified was 43. A United Nation’s statement had hung it at 110 until a mea culpa that identified the victims in dozens. The numbers are gruesome whether 40 or 100, and the slaughter should never have happened. That has been our mournful laments for over a decade about Borno. We keep saying they should not have happened, but it is an impotence of tears. More people continue to die; more bland statements continue to come from the presidency.
The president followed a ritual of commiserating with the victims. But a new pattern has emerged: a tone of surrender. President Muhamadu Buhari said he has provided the military all they need. In other words, he has run out of ideas and strategy, all we have to do now is watch the sanguinary play and replay of a national tragedy.
Even his spokesman, Garba Shehu, showing impulse rather than empathy, blamed the victims. “Much of those areas have been liberated from Boko Haram, but there are a number of spaces that have not been cleared for the return of villagers that have been displaced,” the president’s spokesman said in an interview with the BBC World Service. But he had earlier said that they did not seek the army’s permission before they moved to the farms. He was, in essence, in spite of recalibrations after a hail of backlashes, saying that the villagers asked for their own massacre.
Even if he meant to explain a procedural anomaly, it was not the way to be a spokesman in a time of stress and human disaster.
The state governor had a better answer for Buhari’s mouthpiece. “People in Borno can’t wait for the government’s approval to return,” said the state’s governor, Babagana Zulum.
“If they stay at home, they may be killed by hunger,” he told reporters Sunday. “If they go out to their farmlands, they risk getting killed by insurgents.”
Governor Zulum articulated the savage dilemma of the average resident in Borno State. Not long before the rice farmers were eviscerated, 22 farmers were also killed in October. In June, 81 persons lost their lives in Gubio. It is pain after pain, dislocation after dislocation. As response, it is impotence after impotence.
Northern governors and the entire governors’ forum have not shown any capacity to act because it is not even in their power to do so. The problem lies in the hands of the army. But what can the Nigerian army do? Was it not the same army that stood as cheerleaders or humiliated bystanders as our neighbours rumbled into Nigerian territory to dislodge Boko Haram? When the United States wanted to save one of its kidnapped citizens, their soldiers came here and succeeded to locate him, save him and kill the militants. We were bystanders again in a heroic chapter on our own soil.
But it is not about Borno alone. The whole nation lives in fear. Where it is not robbers in open plunder and murders, it is kidnappers ferreting away citizens and high-prized individuals. We are in deep trouble as a people, but we seem to rely on an army that cannot even save itself. Its men say they do not have the armoury to fight, yet it is on record that billions of Naira is spent every year on their budget. Yet the enemy does not have the resources we have.
This has led to calls for years now that the service chiefs be changed. But as Shehu also explained after Zabarmari, the president is not about to bow to that pressure. The senate also has called for the president to change the service chiefs. The House of Representatives has now summoned the president to appear in its chamber to tell us what he is doing to keep those who voted for him out of harm’s way.
What we have now is a state of northern disarray. Herdsmen plunder and encroach so often it no longer shocks and is no longer news. They kidnap and rape, and they go their way. Recently, the Olufon of Ifon was killed on his way from a meeting in Akure.
So bad is the situation that the Sultan of Sokoto has cried out, saying that the north has never been this fragile. Again, he is now crying supernaturally, leaving the matter in the hands of God, especially when the security outfit of a coalition of northerners, Shage-ka-Fasa, is even now morphing into a terror group itself.
The Presidency should not see security as a bureaucratic matter. We need to be safe, and the Federal Government must do something, and NOW. Or else, we risk falling into a banana republic.
