Federal republic of divisions

BECAUSE crime now evidently pays, terrorists invaded the Government Secondary School Kuriga, Chikun LGA of Kaduna state on Thursday. “At GSS Kuriga, 187 students are presently missing. In the primary school, 125 pupils were initially missing, but 25 of them escaped and retired home,” a distraught teacher, Sani Abdullahi, told Governor Uba Sani. Abdullahi had resumed work by 7:47am and entered the Acting Principal’s office to sign the staff register. And then, “All of a sudden, the Acting Principal asked me to look at my back and when I turned, we discovered that bandits had surrounded the school premises. We became confused, we didn’t know where to go. Then, the bandits ordered us to enter the bush, so we obeyed them because they were many. So, when we entered the bush, I was lucky to escape alongside many other people. I returned to the village and reported what happened to the community. Immediately our vigilante and personnel of Kaduna Vigilante Service (KADVS) followed the bandits, but the vigilante did not succeed.”

In Borno State, Boko Haram terrorists abducted hapless women  in the Gamboru-Ngala and Dikwa local government area. The women, who were Internally Displaced Persons, were  kidnapped while in the bush fetching firewood.  “The exact number of people abducted remains unknown but is estimated at over 200 people,” said Ann Weru, Head of Public Information, Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the UN in Nigeria. Following the incidents, the Green Chamber tasked the security agencies to rescue the victims, whose temporary homes were said to have been razed by the terrorists. The IDPs are in camp as a result of the state’s failure to protect them, but now terrorists have razed the camps and herded them (the IDPs) into a world of greater pain.

For some inexplicable reason, I have in recent weeks been re-watching some videos of the Oputa Panel on Youtube and cannot, in light of current developments, help asking if we haven’t been fighting the wrong wars all along. During the Sani Abacha years, a senior official of the government received official communication from the C-in-C to “terminate the Yorubas” in the public service. The Yoruba man who was second in command was later taken out in a military coup arranged by the president himself. The 1997 “coup plotters” did plan “something” but strangely they commanded no troops and had no idea their presence in the military was giving the president and his tribesmen migraine.

The man that Victor Malu, who handed down the verdict of the tribunal, called the “principal offender” was not even meant to attend any trial: he was to have been shot dead at his Lagos residence and were it not for providence and the help of his security officer, Adebowale, he would not have survived the invasion of his residence. A major, because of his ethnic identity, had more power than the Lt-General who, in a replay of the Babafemi Ogundipe saga, learned that he had all along been serving foreign gods. In any case, the same “principal offender” would have died in a scripted plane crash if stomach trouble had not delayed his arrival at the airport on his way to a wedding ceremony. Diya is dead but he posed a question that the nation, balking at his assumed cowardice, shied away from answering: How do we prevent this (a Head of State hatching a coup plot and then looking for scapegoats among members of an unwanted group) in the future? By the time he spoke, democracy was already here. Abdulkareem Adisa took everything cheerfully, reducing his ordeal to a mere storm, but it remains striking to me that that storm had a more to do with his ethnic identity than it did with his alleged crime. I know all about Seun Fadipe and his candour but I am trained to look beyond the surface. What kind of trial ignores the “mastermind, planner and executioner”?

Now, what is the nexus between the terror attacks in Kaduna and Borno and our turbulent history? You have to ask Lugard and his people who wanted the southern lady of means to serve the well conducted youth who venerated them. In pondering the tragedies in Kaduna and Borno, I can’t help casting my mind back at the fundamental questions of nationhood and the road (s) not taken. Certain parts of this country have transnational relationships that are not shared by others ensconced in similar ethnic configurations. For instance, no less a personality than the Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, has articulated the transnational character of the Fulani nomad who has the right, on account of his ethnic identity, to take full advantage of the resources of Nigeria regardless of his nationality, and to bear arms in defence of his interests. When President Bola Tinubu and ECOWAS declared war on Niger, many analysts pointed out the fact that certain demographics in the North have closer affinity to Niger than Nigeria on account of their ethnic identity. Perhaps the Yoruba have the same feeling for their kith and kin in Benin Republic or perhaps they do not, but that’s precisely the point: we are yet to have a national consciousness; we remain buried in the divisions of the past and unless and until we decide to have a country and determine the parameters of our existence, we are merely staging a farce.

How do you arrest the security situation in the North in the face of the belief that certain people have the right to invade Nigeria’s shores on account of their ethnic identity? I haven’t seen other Nigerians arguing that their kinsmen from other lands have a right to enter Nigeria without passports, or to bear arms for self-protection. To throw open the borders to proven criminals and then lament incessant terrorist attacks sounds insane.

President Tinubu, perhaps looking at those years when it was anathema to be Yoruba and resident in Abuja, has been giving disproportionate appointments to Yoruba people, and another president in future will do the same for his own people. Buhari did far worse than Tinubu can ever be accused of doing. When you have the political elite mired in such divisions, you really cannot have a security architecture that is fit for purpose. And when you don’t have that, how can what happened in Kaduna and Borno be any surprise?