The frightful spurts of violence across the country intone a brazen incantation of bestiality over mankind. It exposes the scourge of our inner ugliness and establishes citizenship as a barbaric ritual drama, where the performers periodically swap masks among government and the governed.
From Boko Haram-IPOB- ESN-armed banditry- kidnapping for ransom, to the herdsmen-farmers crisis, tribal militia terrorists, criminals and mass murderers actualize their fantasies of ill-bliss across the country.
Exemplifying the worrisome situation, the Jos, Plateau State gruesome murder of over 22 innocent commuters by Irigwe ethno-religious terrorists along Rukuba road, the murder of Gen. Idris Alkali and other unfortunate victims at Dura-Du in Jos South of Plateau State, and the 2023 Christmas eve murder of over 200 innocent souls in Bokkos etc, signals a near return of crisis on the Plateau apart from cases of other attacks and counter attacks along the federal highway, in villages and hamlets across the state. Another bomb could have exploded on the sensitive issue of call to prayer by the Muslim community in Jos tabled before Plateau State House of Assembly through a petition from an ‘offended’ infidel who never hid his love for violence. That is Plateau State for you where the tenets of peaceful co-existence are murdered under the guise of a claimed religion grossly misunderstood and abused.
When Christianity was managed by foreign missionaries, it was a respected and flourishing religion on the Plateau admired by all for its humbleness, love, perseverance and care. But when converted Pagans took control, it transformed to a money making venture and evil planning machinery for violence.
As of the time of penciling this piece, another tension seems to be brewing in Plateau State with the announcement of the relocation of Jos main market from its present site at the heart of the Tin city to a far distance of over 15kilometers at Mararraban Jema’a within the midst of renowned native terrorists that celebrate murder of innocent people while pretending to be adherents of Christianity that abhors violence.
Although, Governor Caleb Manassah Mutfwang, is handling the worrisome situation his own way, there is need for certain drastic measures to be introduced to send signal to those ethno-religious terrorists and their restless sponsors nursing ethno-religious cleansing under the guise of land grabbing to be careful and have a rethink. No person can be violent and expect peace in return. No one can forcefully eject a legitimate land owner from his land and expect to have peace in reward. You cannot murder mine along the highway, to expect yours to survive in my own habitat without revenge. It will soon be a tit for a tat game all over until the natives come back to their senses or the grain is separated from the chaff! That is the bottom line.
Security agencies should be given marching orders to shoot on sight rather than arrest vandals for any claimed prosecution that may last longer than expected. If not, where are those suspects standing trial for the gruesome murder of an Army General at Dura-Du? Were they not released on bail by a vandal in the temple of justice? Enough should be enough on the Plateau. The people need peace to survive the odds if they so honestly desire.
Amid the mayhem, we embrace the cancer of forgetting, knowing our capacity to forget is ultimately therapeutic in our dysfunctional state of affairs. Hence, it may be understandable that Nigerians have forgotten already, grievous incidents, like the tragic fate of one Malam Abubakar Yunus, who watched helplessly, as Boko Haram beasts slaughtered his two loving children like rams, in his presence.
The Yunus were reportedly harvesting their rice in fields around Zabarmari, about 25 kilometers from Maiduguri, Borno State’s capital, when the terrorists arrived decked in army camouflage. They tied up Yunus’s children and slit their throats alongside other farmers. He helplessly watched and cried internally.
Official reports cited 43 dead in the wake of the terrorist attack, even as Borno State governor, Babagana Zulum, told journalists that at least 70 farmers were killed. Boko Haram spokesman subsequently stated that his group killed 78 farmers in the attack with pride of brutality.
If the Zarbamari incident was as a rude jolt to the government’s ineffectual war against terrorism, the growth of kidnap for ransom and ethno-religious cleansing portends more evil and danger to the corporate existence of Nigeria.
From my investigation on the dwindling economy of Plateau State, almost all Niger Delta indigenes and prominent Igbo and Yoruba business moguls that invested heavily in Jos, have exited the state to safer environments where they are most wanted and accommodated without accusing fingers pointed at them for land grabbing or murdered as settlers.
In Kaduna, the abduction of Greenfield University undergraduates with few ones murdered to bully former Governor Nasiru El-Rufa’i into paying the N800million demanded ransom without budgeting for such, arouse fears about the fate of several hostages that later regained freedom after a long suffering in the den of the beasts.
Then, there were several other cases of kidnapping of school children in Sokoto, Kaduna, Yawuri in Kebbi State, and other places unannounced.
The funeral pyre mounts as kidnappers, armed bandits and murderous herdsmen and tribal militia gangs run riot across the country.
More worrisome is the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB)’s posturing as Nigeria’s second insurgency. While the police and southeast governors trade invectives over several cases of scourge of killings perpetrated by “hoodlums” against policemen in the region, police morale, which took a heavy hit during the #EndSARS murder of police officers, has taken a further dip. Every fresh killing occurs jarringly in the wild drama; the corpses manifest as a sick rose wrapped in menacing public thorns.
Amid the mayhem, the governors look up to the federal government to rescue their states from the jaws of insecurity thus drawing speculations about what they do with the outrageous security votes they draw from the federal allocation, monthly.
President Tinubu and the Governors’ occasional knee-jerk reactions to insecurity are ineffective and steeped in artifice. There is no gainsaying the Tinubu administration at the centre has lost its grip on the nation’s security apparatus right from the time it appointed allegedly incapacitated service chiefs despite glaring failure from all ends and several allegations of malfeasance and corrupt practices retarding progress.
The Air Force was the worst in performance as it recorded more successes on social media than in reality.
It is, however, pointless rehashing calls for an overhaul of the security structure for the quantum of damage inflicted on the nation by those service chiefs. The game of nepotic appointments cannot work! Nigeria needs a more drastic intervention to security threats.
Prior to change of guards at the presidency, the Buhari brand of administration lacked the capacity to defeat Boko Haram and armed bandits. Save occasional flashes of feeble resolve, it kept urging the nation’s military on a glorified hide and seek from then to its expiration in 2023.
Whatever good the incumbent administration might have achieved is smothered by the miseries and death cries of victims of insecurity, unemployment, and infrastructure lapse. On the watch of the All Progressives Congress (APC)’s President Tinubu, Nigeria diminishes into a Darwinian spectacle of turbulent energies: terrorism, warmongering, buck passing, corruption unabated, and inefficiency- the same failings for which the party tirelessly chastised the former administration of President Jonathan of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).
At the moment, Boko Haram, herdsmen, tribal militia gangs, armed robbers and bandits have seized control of most rural communities across some northern states; a colony of shady characters striving in twos and threes, fours and fives, have made it on to the boards of Nigeria’s most lucrative cash cows, the country’s public corporations.
From their vantage positions, it becomes easier to hike fuel charges, prevent stable electricity, dominate import-export business, steal public funds, weaponise financial crisis and influence election results.
Many Nigerians, the youth in particular, are probably living through the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city while many more live through such. Add these to an economy patched with foreign loans and dubious tales of growth; if Nigeria is prospering, it hasn’t manifested in the lives of the citizenry. This explains why most politicians in elective positions are dictatorial while those in aspiration have access to abundance of rabble rousers, betrayers, miscreants and hooligans as campaign structures. This scenario is typical in present most northern states.
It took a perfect assemblage of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a character to lead us through and survive it. This is where if possible and as a clarion call, Sen. Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State in the PDP or Sen. Abdul-Azeez Yari of Zamfara State in the APC may come in to set the cat free of the trap.
Nigeria deserves a dependable President: a patriot of uncommon grit and fibre whose discipline, humaneness and decisiveness would signal the end of Nigeria’s recurrent carnage and years of the locust. As the country endures, the youth would do right to coalesce into a cohesive force, given their significance to the country’s impending doom or probable rebirth.
Come 2027, Nigeria should seek candidates capable of fostering policies that would revivify industries, improve agriculture/animal husbandry, generate employment, a functional health sector and quality educational system.
The search should start now under Tinubu for individuals endowed with the native intelligence, skilled manpower, astounding genius, street smarts and wisdom that Nigeria sorely needs to power her rebirth.
The 2027 prospective candidates must be convincingly detribalized and courageous enough to eliminate crime and power Nigeria’s comatose industries, which matter. If the youth are gainfully employed, they won’t be vulnerable to criminal masterminds.
It is always instructive to note that no former or incumbent president, governor or national legislator has descendants among the perpetrators and casualties of the widespread mayhem. Such homicidal groups are mobilized from the working class, the boondocks and other destitute divide.
Today is spitting out monsters, tomorrow portends the emergence of a million more ogres, if the cycle is not reversed.
What Nigeria needs at the moment is leadership driven by moral courage to change the status quo. While I wouldn’t root for a clueless gerontocracy or corrupt oligarchy, if Nigeria must elect a youthful leadership, it must comprise fully evolved, courageous, young men and women, capable of fostering change beneficial to all.
Moral courage encompasses the nerve to do the right thing and speak the truth always. It involves defying the mob as a solitary individual; spurning toxic comradeship and disobedience to a corrupt potentate, even at the risk of your life, for a higher principle.
It’s about time Nigeria roots for a candidate identifiable as the window into the Nigerian psyche, and the one who internalizes the grief pulsing on the streets.
I speak of the candidate who could manifest as the blank screen on which people of vastly different stripes can rally to project their dreams and needs; the passive yet active instrument by which Nigeria may prosper and attain rebirth.
Failure to do so, would manifest as yet another sociopathic confusion; a sign of the internal political and social divisions that make it difficult for Nigeria to bloom by her youth in monolithic terms.
The youth is crucial to Nigeria’s rebirth, knowing this, the incumbent ruling class silences them by an irresistible material caress. Think political appointments, unearned benefits, tokenism, violence, and intellectual thuggery for cash, and so on.
The youth must understand their role in this cosmic mess and avoid future rehash of the present unless, Nigeria is a cautionary tale.
Lest I forget, for anyone interested to witness how political vultures feast on a living-dead political merchants living in a world of illusion, then hurry down to Bauchi State and witness how political novices with sleaze funds are boxed and fooled by supposedly their campaign team mates and supporters consisting of serial losers, charlatans, jesters, betrayers than politicians of substance, while claiming the endorsement of highly placed politicians in public offices including Mr. President.
The game is purely an exercise for stomach infrastructure and survival of the fittest. Despite the glaring incapacitation staring those concerned, we are told that stating the obvious, amounts to wanting to force a way into the deceit or seeking recognition and membership of the failed journey.
As media consultants that enjoy good relationship with the government in power, why nursing an interest in joining the vultures of the other divide to feast from the crumbs of failed politicians caught by mere 2027 illusionary aspiration? What a comedy of the absurd! No, the power tigers are safer, where we are. We are realists not betrayers, migrants or opportunists. We are with clean and support mission to some the Sheriffs in offices for the good of Nigeria!
No politician as of today has the capacity and experience that can beat the track records of Governor Bala Muhammed and Sen. Abdul-Azeez Yari in service delivery to humanity. And no politician across the divide can defeat their most preferred candidates for elective offices in 2027 on the platform of any party of their choice no matter the gang-up and connivance that may be deployed. Mark My Words!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
