The brutal ambush and killing of eight security personnel soldiers in Umualumaku, Ehime Mbano Imo State served to remind the country of the boiling pot that the Southeast is, and the limitless savagery of those who stoke the fires there.
The officers were said to be responding to a false distress call when they were ambushed, brutally slaughtered, and set afire by the gunmen.
This latest attack also highlights the mammoth perils security operatives face in a country that is very much in the line of terrorist fire.
In 2009, Boko Haram, the terrorist group which has mostly operated out of Northern Nigeria, regrouped and expanded its operations, and launched what has since proven to be a deadly offensive against the Nigerian state.
The group’s messages and mission of death which quickly threatened to consume Borno State, soon spiraled into other states in the Northeast, threatening the fragile stability of the country.
In the ensuing years, Boko Haram has splintered into different terror groups, some of which have proven to be deadlier than the original group. The group’s crusade of death has further weakened Nigeria’s fragile security architecture, enabling banditry and emboldened bandits to run rampage through the Northwest.
Entire communities, especially in Kaduna and Niger State, have since felt the force of terrorism at its worst. As killers have sprung from practically every part of Nigeria, the lot has fallen on security operatives within the country to keep the country safe. This lot has come with a terrible price.
In August 2023, terrorists attacked Nigerian soldiers along the Zungeru-Tegina road in Niger State. About 36 soldiers lost their lives. The attack followed a similar attack which claimed the lives of over thirty soldiers in June 2022 in Shiroro Local Government Area of the State.
The local government, whichh hosts a key national asset in the Shiroro hydroelectric power station, has somewhat become a deathtrap for Nigerian soldiers.
Apart from entire communities sacked by terrorists, the gallant soldiers who have continued to fall like flies capture the terrible cost of the war against terror.
When soldiers die as they have in the attack in Umualumaku, it is easier for communities to deny responsibility for harboring terrorists, and for the authorities to say they will fight back than for any real results to be wrung out of hastily conducted operations that are more about rage than sage strategies.
Each time, the corollary damage wrought while responding to these attacks somehow manages to trump the real damage with communities left scared and scarred, perhaps forever.
Usually, following such gruesome events, the security storm around Nigeria quietens only to rage again at an appropriate and opportune moment.
How can Nigeria stop the indiscriminate and frankly heartbreaking killing of its security personnel? It is by confronting headlong the monster of insecurity, which is itself a brainchild of terrorism. This confrontation must be at once honest and wholehearted. This means that all those who sponsor insecurity in Nigeria, and all those who profit therefrom, must be exposed and prosecuted.
This brutal attack on soldiers coming just days after Bako Angbashim, a gallant police officer, was decapitated in Rivers State by a cult group is starkly suggestive that this attack is one too many.
It is one thing to accept that becoming a security personnel heightens the chances of paying the ultimate price, but it is quite another thing to allow indiscriminate triggers for these chances.
As for the Southeast Nigeria, it is sobering that a region steeped in as much blood as enterprise is again having to handle so much all at once. If the historic and heroic sacrifices made during the Nigerian civil war are not enough to secure the region’s future going forward, then it is doubtful if anything ever can.
The slow and unutterably painful deterioration of security in a region whose people have always wanted nothing more than to show their enterprise can be traced to the activities of Nnamdi Kanu and the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) group.
While he remains stuck in indeterminate incarceration in Abuja, the fire lit by his indiscreet supporters in the Southeast has is burning indiscriminately, scalding those it was supposed to keep warm.
In Imo and Anambra States, many communities have become hideouts for criminals and their hideous activities. For Nigeria’s security forces, combatting these criminals is a forbidding task. Those of them who have fallen into their traps have met grisly deaths, for which there have always been reprisals and recriminations. These have often complicated the situation.
The solutions will not be simple, but they are necessary. Nigeria has been battling terrorism for more than ten years now. The succession of each year has only succeeded in bringing more blood with it – the blood of civilians and security personnel alike. For this reason, Nigeria has very much becoming a country with so much blood on its hands, and it may yet get bloodier.
Southeast Nigeria is patently unsafe. There is hardly a week that goes by without any report of criminal attacks on civilians and security personnel. This ugly situation has tarried for far too long to suggest that it will fade away anytime soon.
Dismantling the altar of insecurity on which security personnel continue to get gruesomely sacrificed requires wholistic action, which will take enormous resources and political will.
It remains to be seen if Nigeria is ready to have a go at it.
Kene Obiezu
