adminQansy Salako Correspondent
Nigeria’s 300 unfortunate Chibok girls have remained abandoned in Boko Haram captivity for over two months, leaving their families continually drenched in sorrow. As a matter of fact, there have been more carnage and murders at the hands of Boko Haram.
Meanwhile, as the Nigerian leadership bickers and points crooked fingers at one another, the whole country is tangled up in a thousand bizarre conspiracy theories.
The Northeast accuses President Goodluck Jonathan, who is from the South, of sponsoring Boko Haram to depopulate its region for political advantage at the polls in the coming February elections.
Jonathan’s government laments that its core national security team has been treacherously infiltrated by Boko Haram sympathisers from within his cabinet and accuses the Northeast political class of playing politics with the lives of its citizens.
The federal government’s joint task force (JTF) soldiers is weak and in repeated mutinies. Nigerian officials are largely in denial. They have this irritable culture of thinking that having an unscrupulously garrulous spokesperson for a minister of information or special adviser would get them the credibility and respect they do not command. Two months after the abduction of the Chibok girls, it is probably now delusional for anyone to expect that all of the girls are recoverable.
Annoyingly, Nigeria still does not know exactly how many of its adolescent girls are out there living in the deflowering hell of the Boko group. Chibok secondary school from where the girls were abducted in the middle of the night is the only secondary school in the entire Chibok local government (LG) area of Bornu State. The principal of the school did not have a reliable record of students who slept in the school dormitory on that fateful night. Neither the LG chairman, state commissioner of education, state governor, area legislators (representative and senator) nor the federal minister of education has any accurate data source for student enrollments breakdown for Chibok LG. When everybody including the rescuing JTF generals initially gave the number of missing girls as 200, the world stood still in unprecedented shock. When days later, despondent parents whose wards did not come home alerted the country that 100 more girls were still unaccounted for, the world recoiled in horror and disbelief. The Nigerian leaderships only became more obstinate and blamed the parents for not coming out sooner! You just don’t know who or which to pity more, the girls, the parents or the country.
I wept over all the three. Strangely, Nigeria simply carries on business as usual in the face of a state of strife that is hacking citizens to death in thousands and banishing the living out of their homesteads in hundreds of thousands. The petrodollars continue to flow especially now with crude at over $110 a barrel due to renewed instability in Iraq. Nigeria, slightly more than twice the state of California, suddenly has more cash reserves available to share among its 36 omnipotent state governors and their 774 LGs, overpaid 360 representatives and 109 senators and the all-encompassing president and its extravagant cabinet. The general elections in February seem unassailable. The national convention of APC, the opposition political party, holds in Abuja without any hitches, displaying more dubious wealth than manifesto to the electorate. The coronation of a new but atavistic emir in the Northern city of Kano, a town that has seen multiple Boko bloodsheds including an assassination attempt on the immediate past emir, is making folks forget about the menace of Boko Haram, for now.
The political leadership spares a minute on Chibok and spend the rest of the day on the stratagem to partake in the spoils of governance and over-invoiced war. No tactic is too puny for use against citizens who are asking hard questions on reality and priorities. Banning of Chibok protests, clamping down on the local press, etc, all are fair game to retain and maintain the status quo. The new official attitude turns logic on its head by scolding Nigerians to unite in not protesting the government over its handling of Boko Haram and Chibok shame because these are challenging times for the country and because nobody is perfect.
War against terror is not a conventional war, granted. The facelessness of terrorists and the near impossibility of protecting every single soft target especially in the rural areas of a poor country like Nigeria are huge frustrations, checked.
But what’s with all the heart wrenching eye witness accounts that we hear from local residents all the time? There are so many reports of the local people knowing of impending Boko attacks and alerting their local/state government authorities.
Yet, Boko Haram would arrive as scheduled and carry out their burning, looting and killing operations for 4-8 hours without the JTF soldiers ever showing up. Are these stories false?
What about Boko Haram conducting their dastardly acts in full Nigerian military uniforms, confusing the heck out of citizens in the villages not knowing whom to trust or dodge? What about the porous borders through which the damned Haramists come in and go out of Nigeria at will? And the planted Boko Haram flags in the numerous villages they raze and “conquer?” What’s with all these in a region that is supposedly under a state of emergency? Is Nigeria containing these ridiculous events that undermine our sovereignty and territorial integrity? Of the ten thousands border crossings into Chad, Cameroons and Niger, are we working or planning to seal any one? Are we reclaiming any “lost village” yet? These are hard questions from Nigerians that won’t go away. — African Executive.
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