Bloodbath and silence from the dome

MY style may differ slightly today. We don’t envy presidential image managers of President Muhammadu Buhari. It’s either they believe in their media advertisements of the APC government’s acts that take us to Golgotha or that they are naive not to know that the antics of the cabals around the government. Truly most often we, the spectators, doubt government sincerity(?) in policy pronouncements, but it is the responsibility of government image managers to truthfully sell the good intension of such policies because they are part of the nation’s policy managers, from formulation to execution.Unfortunately today, the presidential spokesmen, the image managers, are either deliberately willing to walk the turf of bloodsuckers or are intimidated to do so. Either way, they have a date with history. Bad story in their memoirs written by uncommissioned others.

Consider their defense of the deliberate silence of government over the bloodbath in the country in the past one year. The presidential Media Adviser, a cabinet rank position, dared us to shut up for accusing their government of insincerity in tackling security problems created by the boys, the terrorist cattle herders. And he in a laundry list asked us to compare the callous deaths during Obasanjo and Jonathan’s regimes and the Buhari’s government.  Does the comparison justify the murders? Maybe the presidential spokesman thought he has done a good job with his submission. He could have done better. After all, he is a robust intellectual and a fine journalist. The silence from the Dome cannot be masked. It is conspiracy if not complicity, you may add.

However, this is not the hour to ask Femi some questions bordering on tomorrow, his tomorrow.  What we rather ask now, is why all the killings and the Commander in Chief has not come out robustly hard on his security chiefs to halt the carnage, rather he is mum or talks with tongue in the cheek deploying his media men to insult sane Nigeria public with  trite and illogical releases. We play with fire. Blood is flowing. From Taraba, Nassarawa, Zamfra, Plateau to Benue, murderous Fulani cattle rearers are on the rampage slaughtering people in their sleep and sacking survivors from their homes and farmlands.

Of national conversations, presidential debates, big ideas

Somebody is celebrating. Who else? And their sponsor is shouting that Nigerians have seen nothing yet vowing to kill more as long as anybody dares their unhindered grazing in any part of the country, my country, your country where we have legitimate government. Nobody, not even the accomplices, has been arrested to account for these murders. Of course, why when the natives have accused the nation’s security of impartiality. Our military, especially, is challenged by the civil politicians and their democracy. We are playing with ember. Following this feeling of the impartiality, TY Danjuma, a rich and retired General, has warned on the consequences of self defence, which he said is the option in the meantime. And nobody can doubt the response from those being slaughtered and those who the inferno is overlooking their homes.

The smoke  is swirling with fire from the dome into the air.  There is fire. Citizens are on the edge and the Hobbesians world stares us. No man can remain docile and wait to be killed like fowl. Except the president is upholding  the late Sani Abacha’s alleged Marble on the Wall, ‘ if mutiny lasts more than 24 hours, government has a hand in it,’ otherwise, he should firmly order the murders to stop and the perpetrators account for their sin.

•Nnomeh, veteran journalist and journalism teacher, writes in from Enugu State.