BOKO-HARAM: NIGERIANS, LET'S GO FOR BROKE

By Folarin Samson

These are indeed trying times for us as a nation. I am weeping in my heart and can barely think straight even as I try hard to coordinate my thoughts to form a coherent piece. Why should we continue to take the insouciant siddon look, ‘God help us’, ‘it is well’ posture as our nation dips into anarchy? As the media daily inundates us with a plethora of high-profile corruption cases depleting our commonwealth, so are we troubled with the harrowing cries and sorrows of fellow countrymen who have lost their loved ones to the bloody bullets and bombs of Boko Haram. And it is doubtful anyone will remain dry-eyed after hearing the horrifying accounts of victims of the Islamist terror group at the press conference held few days ago at Abuja on the auspices of the Christian Association of Nigeria-Americans. Women who have lost their families. Children who are now orphans after watching their parents slaughtered like rams before their very eyes. People whose only crime was to have lived in the space called Nigeria and to have professed the Christian faith. I will stress my opinion of the later point, soon.

It was a blubbering Dr. Oby Ezekwesili who spoke with the media, and she couldn’t have put it better:

“So if we have become a nation that does not put value on human lives, then we are really in a bad place. Listening to these women particularly and seeing what they have to carry alone, you almost feel a sense of abandonment for them. It is almost like they are invisible to the rest of us and that worries me. We must get ourselves back to a drawing table and figure out who we really are; what are we and what we have become as a people and as a nation.”

Ezekwezili captured it well. Our problem is that many of us have not been hit, hence we don’t feel the heat of others. We don’t know what it means for a whole family to be wiped out in a single sorrowful night. We don’t understand how it feels to be in church and suddenly come to the rude realization that we may never return home alive. And that is why we are as indifferent and placid as those we criticize for lack of action. If as a people, we fail to initiate a sense of urgency, fervency and importunity, we will only continue to wish, and this nightmare may persist.

But we must face certain truths. Boko-Haram may be a terrorist group with some senseless, vague mission, but one thing is true, they are strategically hunting the Christian faithful. They have not only stated this umpteen times, but have demonstrated it in the nature of their attacks. It was reported that before they killed some fourteen people in a factory recently, they painstakingly sifted and separated the Christians from the Muslims and to even be sure, they asked for their names. So, for anyone to deny this fact under any religious or sentimental guise, is wickedness and insensitivity. It is important to create this understanding so that our Muslim brothers can join to condemn terrorism in all its pretexts and we all can avoid arguments that lead nowhere.

Second, the present regime has failed abysmally to address security issues. It has failed to assure protection of lives and property which is the first duty of government. It has failed to inspire confidence in the ability of government to rise to the occasion in critical moments. Nigeria has become a metaphor for a mass slaughter house. People die like fowls and the records of unresolved murder cases keep piling up. To indicate its helplessness and probable surrender, government’s reaction to killings in the country is predictably perfunctory and measured. Reason being that the security agencies have been infiltrated by terrorists.  This fact even became more evident in the recent death of the commissioner of police of Kwara State. The police chief died despite the huge security operatives attached to his position. President Goodluck Jonathan shocked Nigerians when he publicly acknowledged that his cabinet has been penetrated by the terror group. Scratch that. Sometime last year, some members of the national assembly were in mortal fear to open critical discussions on Boko Haram because they knew the sect had members on the floor of the assembly. They don’t want to die. And only very few have had the courage to speak vociferously against government’s poor handling of this critical national mess. And some would rather have us make history by being the first nation on earth to grant unconditional amnesty to terrorists or shamelessly dialogue with men who have killed thousands of innocent Nigerians. The thought is disgraceful. It is the definitive sign of acquiescence with the destroyers of our nation.

It may be true that there have been some clampdowns on Boko-Haram. The Joint Task Force has succeeded in wiping out some of the group’s members in reactionary combats and fire-fights. Some of our security men have shown commendable courage, and some of them have even died in gun battles. Yet, it appears each time they are levelled, Boko Haram replenishes with the rapidity of soldier ants and furiously launches deadlier corrosive butchery that renders earlier attacks mere child play. This means we are not giving this cancer the treatment it deserves.

Fellow Nigerians, it is high time we stopped whining and complaining. It is high time we stopped waiting and wondering, what will our government do for us? Someone said, the most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don't have any. Martin Luther King the junior and his black American people did not wait and wish away racism, they took drastic steps. The Tunisians, Libyans, Egyptians did not just criticize their despotic leaders from newspaper stands and in the comfort of their bedrooms; they took to the streets in protests. With the current, unmitigated spate of bloodshed in the nation, I urge all Nigerians, let’s go for broke. 

Let’s all go out in solidarity for the lives of thousands of our brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, who have been slaughtered for no just cause in the North. Enough is enough.

Let’s all take to social media and every other means of communication and declare to the international community that all is not well with our nation and if nothing is done to help us, we are in grave danger to self-destruct.

Let’s demand an urgent convocation of sovereign national conference to re-evaluate our union, re-define our association and re-assess the appropriateness of our governing constitution. 

Let’s all demand the immediate resignation of cowardly men in authority who have refused to use the enormous power of office to end these senseless carnage. Those who have died are human beings and if anyone or a group of cabals decide to look away from our pain, it is high time we told them sovereignty lies with the people!

Let’s all cry and weep at the altars of our churches and mosques and ask God: “One hundred years of chaotic existence, whither Nigeria?”