Insecurity: Anarchy looms

You never get to your destination running on the wrong road. You encounter difficulties and finally, frustration. We pause and start differently today. May I begin on an apologetic note. I was absent last week. Many ardent readers called to ascertain if all was well. It was then the full weight of failing to appear dawned on me. I cherish my readers. The failure to appear was caused by circumstances beyond my control. My regrets though.

We have devoted this space severally to talking about the insecurity plaguing the country and giving out solutions yet the scourge keeps growing in intensity. The dimension currently is monstrous. This is the truth, never mind that we have become unshockable people. Nothing moves us any longer. Else with what is happening our reactions would definitely have been very different. The latitude we have given our leaders would have been curtailed rather than bang our heads with campaigns for fresh mandates; they would have been scurrying for safety themselves and appealing for calm and our understanding with a promise to turn a new leaf.

  Hardly a day would pass without the sad news of kidnapping or abductions. I hope there’s a difference taking place in one part of our dear country or the other. Before insecurity was a common thing, truth be told It used to be an isolated development. We saw times that just one could drive from Aba to Sokoto without fear of any foreboding. Not any longer. Today our hearts are virtually in our mouths. Fear has taken over completely. Insecurity has taken over the land and life has become so cheap.

  Every corner of this huge country is facing a threat. It has gotten to the point where citizens now fear to step out of their homes. Journey across cities is now very difficult to make. There is this fear that joyous moments on our roads could in a twinkle change to something else. The stories told by those who survived kidnapping and abductions are not pleasant at all. They are tales of human degradation and emasculations.

   What could be more traumatic than a father losing a 23-year-old young lady who just finished her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and was set for a place in destiny but couldn’t survive captivity in the hands of terrorists, who so violated her humanity that she told the parents who sold all to raise N60 million ransom fee never to pay since she didn’t see reason to stay alive if even freed by the hoodlums imported into the country. She was shot and killed by her captors who placed no value at all on human lives. Her case is one of the many happenings across the country.

   When a disease is improperly diagnosed, we have been told severally, the cure becomes very difficult, that is if healing would be achieved at all. Our leaders began by masking what the challenge was really about. Citizens were regularly killed by felons who stormed or invaded locations in large numbers and usually under cover of darkness. They called it robbery, from this to rustling and finally herders-farmers clash.

  The question became, if it were mere robbery cases how come the criminals appeared invisible? Granted some were caught,what did the investigations discover from their confessions? How come the development turned out to be widespread and the pattern very similar? If it is about herders/farmers clash why is it the number of cattle quadrupled within a time? Are the herders all Nigerians? If we claim so, how come most of them don’t speak Fulfude, the Fulani language or Hausa that has been common to both Hausa and the Fulani? Many citizens who have come in contact with the herders confirm they come from countries in the Sahel region of the continent.

Who brought them in large numbers into the country? How did strangers know local governments and communities to be occupied? Who gave them locations in forests and the idea to build new settlements without authorization from anyone, locals or government? Who?

 It is pure stupidity to set a thief to catch a thief. A serving governor in this country not long ago told us the country has been declared home to all Fulanis in Africa. We heard that and kept quiet. Just imagine an Igbo going on national television to say the making of Biafra has become inevitable. Imagine the outrage that would follow. Do a reverse thought and note that no revulsion followed the disclosure, yet we say we have banditry and insurgency threatening our peace and stability.

If nothing else has emerged to prove we may be fighting a lost battle, the capture and eventual death in captivity of General Rabe Abukakar penultimate week in the hands of Islamic terrorists would seem a strong pointer. While in captivity the nation was told nobody knew the group that was responsible and their location. We were told the security agencies were working hard to unravel things.

  When the news of his passing was broken, the state government became the first to let the world know the General died from “natural causes.” The government specifically said the General died from diabetes and hypertension. How did they get to know that? Could they have had a link to the criminals unknown to the rest of the security network? The late General’s son disputed the reason the state government gave and even said they didn’t know how the same government retrieved the corpse for burial.

Was it the right procedure to handle such a delicate task without the knowledge of the immediate family? Pictures suggested the marauders brought back the corpse and rode back to hiding. Is this instructive enough? If this wasn’t the case, the corpse was retrieved in record time, a clear indication many people knew who the barbarians were and their exact location. So why was it difficult for all arms of state security to know exactly what was happening within our territory? A few days after the General’s burial, security agents invaded the camp of the terrorists and got the wife “rescued” ; they didn’t tell us if some of the terrorists were killed and others captured. This is becoming like the story of the tortoise full of gallantry yet lacking in substance.

Today as you read this, the national stability graph is sliding down the south very fast. Anarchy looms. The somalization of Nigeria is almost here; we may be thinking it is a joke but it is not. It was Karl Marx who taught that terrible developments do occur in societies. The first time as tragedy and second as farce.

He explained when significant historical events or mistakes recur, they do so differently. The first time, it is a genuine, often bloody struggle or tragedy. The second time, it becomes an absurd, hollow, and comical parody, a farce, because society failed to learn from the original event. We have failed to learn. The result is clear to those who love the truth.

We have entered this circle. The political class aren’t given insecurity the same attention and focus they give to politics. Many citizens are getting killed daily than would have been the case if we were involved in a civil war yet nobody is accountable. We run as if nothing is happening. 

The government is in place, security officers are in the office giving us excuses why they failed. The Defense Minister is talking back to citizens and barking out warnings rather than talk and act tough to hoodlums. Leaders tell us they would square up to terrorists and at the same time carry out far more efforts reforming “repentant terrorists” than they do fighting the scourge of insecurity.

The farce dimension is here, scoundrels mount the social media and for hours sharing money to the public who write in. In countries where they desire peace and stability, where there is value for lives, governments would react differently and with despatch.

As a friend educated some of us recently, the government would have called an emergency meeting of heads of departments of the security architecture, the Central Bank, National Financial Intelligence Unit, banks, Fintech, TikTok, identity management and communication companies to find out identity of enemies of the country so they could be arrested and prosecuted. This is not what we do. Anarchy looms. We can pretend it doesn’t matter. Anarchy looms.