By Oyeyinka Fabowale
The Nigerian revolution unraveled to a seeming denouement, (incurable cynics would insist, to a new phase), when the Federal Government rose from a National Security Council meeting last Tuesday and announced a rash of measures to end the intractable security crises ravaging the country.
But Nigerians appeared least excited and showed no sense of gratitude or relief one expected the move by the government to finally fulfil its obligation to the people under the social contract would elicit, after years of official snoozing on the job! Instead, the news met with public indifference, disappointment, anger and even misgivings because the combat blueprint unveiled after the parley fell far short of more innovative and pragmatic strategies the high level security conference was expected to forge, given the drama that attended it and hope the tension-soaked nation hung on its outcome.
It was novel only in the sense of its being hollow and bereft of any special or new idea outside what has for long been in the public domain! It was ironic swashbuckling National Security Adviser, Babagana Monguno, emerged from the behind-the-door-parley to rehash prescriptions both experts and traumatized laymen had, in their distress, for long hawked on the streets and pleaded with dithering government to act on to rid the country of the menace of marauding kidnappers, bandits and terrorists who bestrode the land like pestilence, terrorizing law-abiding citizens and threatening to blight the Nigerian landscape.
Hear: The newly minted security chiefs had been ordered to go after the renegades and criminals and reclaim the forests they used as hideouts; there was to be massive deployment of defence and intelligence assets, blah, blah, blah. Later, came a presidential order for the shooting-on- sight of non-state actors found bearing sophisticated weapons including AK-47! A hollow ritual! So, the streets were right after all on what needed to be done?
Why had President Muhammadu Buhari turned a deaf ear to the people’s lamentations while these hordes of criminals, allegedly of foreign origin, killed, robbed, raped and savaged thousands of innocent and law-abiding Nigerian, – men and women, young and old? Can you then blame the citizens if they were skeptical, apathetic, even contemptuous of government and its so- called security package?
Reading Monguno’s lips and body language, one gets the impression that the motive and motivation of Buhari’s extraordinary consultation with his security cabinet last week, were not necessarily in deference to the long-suffering people’s outcry. It seemed to inhere more in the push-back by the masses including deterrent measures by states and resort to self-help by some communities in the South against a group perceived to harbor or abet perpetrators of these heists.
Although that development was in itself an indictment of government’s curious inaction or ineptitude and failure to protect them, to the Presidency, that was poking the cubs of the tiger prowling on the field in the eyes, and as it was wont, it moved to safeguard not just its own, but appertaining interests threatened by this aftermath. At least, so its absurd, sloppy and undisguised biased role in the entire affair portrayed.
So, when the NSA planked the ‘new’ security initiative on the need to restore normalcy in the country in view of occurrences of the last couple of weeks and made heavy weather of dousing tension and restoring order in all communities “…where all non-state actors have been causing problems for the innocent peoples, not just in Zamfara State or North West zone, but also the North East and other parts of the country…”; people, reading between the lines, wondered who exactly he must have in mind?
His disclosures that some people including highly placed individuals and groups had been flagged and placed on surveillance, as persons of interest on the nation’s security watch list for alleged collusion and clandestine subversive activities only raised further doubt and suspicion as to for whom he wished Nigerians to believe he intended his message.
Was it for the terrorists who had held the nation hostage for these past years and whose identities and activities, the security agencies had claimed several times in the past, they had a dossier of good intelligence on? If so, the next reasonable question is, why has nothing been done so far with that information to take them out?
Who would blame cynics for seeing the nation’s chief spy master’s outbursts as another in a chain of false alarm and red-herring- blowing hot airs and shamelessly hanging government’s gross ineptitude, irresponsibility and other shortcomings on so-called faceless ‘powerful’ opponents! Is the government saying these people are so elusive and more powerful than itself and all its security agents they could not have been contained long before now?
Ignoring leprosy to treat eczema
Mongunno left more than enough hint that his address and threats on national television were intended more for those Nigerians who decided to stand up to their oppressors, protect themselves, assets and heritage against pillage, destruction and impunity, all because government had all but totally abandoned them or watched on in apparent complicity, rather than for the outlaws when he opened his speech seemingly targeting Nigeria’s traducers only to suddenly veer off and devote the rest of the tirade to upbraiding and threatening those he accused of threatening the peace and ‘unity’ of the country as well as the stability of the government!
Government, he indicated, was poised to deploy even military force to ensuring the “… freedom of citizens to reside wherever they wish” which, he took time to remind us all, is stipulated in the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The security adviser made this item to look like an adjunct in the list of the issues the security council deliberated upon, even though it requires no smart brain to deduce it was a priority on, if not the main agenda!
And so, like it did with the #EndSARS saga, leaders in government rather than frontally and forthrightly confront the problem ailing the people would rather play games, engage them in a war of wits, watching their every move and reaction only to devise and unleash a response that leaves gall and ashes in their mouths, and the country marooned or adrift. Were government truly serious and sincere, one expected a roll-out of robust and comprehensive measures that would deal decisively and holistically with all the aspects of the problem.
Why, for instance, was there also no clear-cut pronouncement and concrete steps towards assuaging grievances of communities and victims of incessant bloodbath, robbery, kidnapping, rape, etc, which bred friction and led to eviction of those they reckoned were responsible for their woes?Could glossing over fundamental issues of justice and exercise of ownership rights on ancestral and indigenous assets in face of external belligerence and threats to both life and economic survival and interests be a sensible and pragmatic way of resolving a problem? Why did government not enunciate or support policies such as ban on open grazing and ranching that would immediately put an end to the incessant herders-farmers clashes which is mainly at the heart of the issue?
There are talks of compensating cattle-rearers and private foodstuff business owners of northern extraction for losses incurred over self-declared strike or food blockade against the south, yet, nothing has been said on the fate of southern farmers, whose means of livelihood were and are still being destroyed by pastoralists, or even those dislocated from their homesteads as a result of the activities of terrorists and criminals! How much indignity, humiliation, injustice, suffering and oppression can a people, even a tethered animal, endure to say “no more!”
The solution, if government only wills
If the security and welfare of the people of the country are truly of concern to President Buhari and his courtiers, if they genuinely love and wish to serve the interest of Nigeria, they know what to do. The solution is simple and in open sight. It does not lie in resort to propaganda, subterfuge, coercion, intimidation, arm-twisting tactics or veiled threats to perceived foes or ‘underdogs’. No, not in persecuting South Easterners or attempting to arrest a Sunday Igboho who were only responding to the Natural Law of self-preservation and defence in the Hobbesian state Nigeria was fast descending into.
It lies not in police summon to Abuja of mourning traditional chiefs of a Yoruba town for interrogation over the killing of a cow, when the murder of their king, a first class monarch, was yet to be unraveled and his killer(s) fished out by the security agency!
It calls for our rulers pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and engaging honestly with Nigerians by urgently implementing political, economic and social reforms and playing the game according to the rules. Most, if not all of our problems will disappear overnight. Like a miracle! Surely, that isn’t asking for too much.
But from its antecedents, the egregious actions it keeps taking and the sinister course it appears bent on dragging Nigeria along with it to, it is forlorn hope to expect that this government would catalyze the dream. The regime seems too far gone and so afraid of consequences. That is why amidst angst and tension over its flagrant disregard for the rule of law, display of crass sectionalism, nepotism, impunity and lopsidedness in appointments into key national and security positions in breach of the Federal Character principle, it has kept making more.
So, even if, as it claims, certain interests are behind and pulling the strings of recent uprising, can this government, in all good conscience, itself claim to have served and been fair to the diverse sections of the country?
Nigerians, scoring own goals
It has taken this long to write a sequel to the last edition of Revolution notes, because at the rapid rate events unfold, others would quickly have overtaken them and commenting would have been rash and tiresome. For instance, a now discarded piece entitled: “Major General Muhammadu Buhari: President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces: Really?” to have taken this slot was preempted on the eve of publication by Benue State Governor Samuel Ortom’s bombshell, accusing Buhari of being biased in favour of his Fulani kinsmen alone in matters affecting other ethnic groups and urging him to be the President of all Nigerians he swore by the constitution to be!
But not only the Presidency has been disappointing by its attitude. Politicians, lickspittles and public office holders including governors, ministers and no less a personality than Senator Ahmed Lawan, President of the Senate, had been busy muddling the pool by misrepresenting facts, pushing reckless, self-serving and incendiary and false narratives as it suited their personal interests and the part of the country they come from.
There are others such as Kaduna Governor Nasir el- Rufai who, perhaps, apprehensive of the unexpected turn events took and might lead, now blow hot and cold, waxing in self-righteous patriotism and lecturing on approaches and strategies to deal with the questions of restructuring and terrorists holding the nation by the jugular, assuming, one supposes, that we are all drunk on the draught of amnesia and have forgotten what their position had always been and is likely to be should the scenario switch again in their favour.
The poor masses have nobody to speak for them. Their so-called elders and leaders maintain complicit or cowardly silence, ostensibly due to political ambition or out of fear of being harassed for alleged corruption. The rest of the population consists largely of an army of megalomaniacs and enablers who for pecuniary gains help advance regional or government’s agenda obscuring or suppressing the truth that could bail Nigeria out of the conundrum and spinning and amplifying befuddling false narratives certain to escalate the crises and bring the country to doom!
Salvation, damnation: Still choices to make
The rabble is growing the more, the consequences are piling up more and more, daily and hourly. And we all are, by our actions and in-actions, contributing our quota to the gathering storm. The harvest will, however, soon ripen and each one must taste of the fruits he has sown! It will soon get to a head and then inevitably break upon and drown or sweep everybody away. The devastating impact of the collapse will not spare even those who profit from the present rot and presume themselves secure and invincible. It is the law. The false and the old must decline and collapse upon reaching the peak.
Only when out of disgust and despair at the unprofitability of our present shameful and filthy conduct, we embrace truth, love and justice in relating with ourselves, will a true up-building begin, only then will a new, enduring order, sublime, pure and ideal arise and blossom, spreading peace, happiness, harmony and progress for all to enjoy.
Not for nothing is it said: Amor vincit dominia! (Love conquers all!).
May peace be with Nigeria.
Fabowale is the Editorial Board Chairman of The Radiance.
