Why fight a dead horse with $1bn?

ONE billion dollars… You know the exchange rate, so do the math! Isn’t that some ostentatious battle? But that is not my shock. My indignation is, however, fueled by this: What Boko Haram is these governors intending to fight? If they have unanimously lapsed into amnesia because of $1 billion, I would gladly offer them all a history lesson at no cost. They can see it as my service to humanity, pro bono and I bet posterity would thank me for this reminder.

When in 2015 President Muhammadu Buhari made the declaration of annihilating the dreadful terrorist group, Boko Haram, I had hoped that someone misquoted him and wished that it wasn’t true but it was. Though I was devastated, I decided to rule it out as a septuagenarian’s delusion but history could never obliterate it even if it tried.

Now a quick recap for those who didn’t get it two years ago… In December 2015, six months after coming into power, President Muhammadu Buhari declared that Boko Haram had been “technically defeated.”

His exact words were these: “…so, I think technically we have won the war because people are going back into their neighbourhoods.”

Two years ago, immediately after the president of only six months said this, I expected one of his media aides to fling a release countering that statement or better still making it ambiguous at ravenous newsmen but nothing of such happened. As a matter of fact, I was again stung when two months after that delusional declaration, I saw another headline in a national daily that read “Boko Haram no longer poses threat to us, says Buhari.”

However, here comes the interesting part. This ‘technical defeat’ declaration came on Christmas Eve of 2015. Who knew Boko Haram had a Christmas present for the president! At least 14 people were killed and several others injured by Boko Haram gunmen in a Christmas Day attack on the Kimba village, Borno state.

It gets even more interesting. According to reports, the total number of deaths recorded since December 2015 till recent times probably stands at about 1,101. Findings have equally shown that the Boko Haram terrorist group seems to have had more impact in 2017 than it did in 2016, doubling the number of casualties it recorded.

Analysis of the figures also indicates that while Boko Haram increased its efficiency in 2017, it somehow managed to reduce the number of its foot soldiers killed in 2017. The explanation for this based on reports is that in 2017, Boko Haram changed its modus operandi, mostly avoiding direct confrontations with the military and focusing on soft targets instead. Most of the insurgents who lost their lives in 2017 did so during suicide bombings but our dear president and members of his cabinet, since 2015, have been about places saying things like this:

On 24 December, 2016, exactly a year after the ‘technical defeat’ declaration, President Buhari said this: “I want to use this opportunity to commend the determination, courage and resilience of troops of Operation Lafiya Dole at finally entering and CRUSHING the remnants of the Boko Haram insurgents at ‘Camp Zero’, which is located deep within the heart of Sambisa Forest.”

Note the usage of the word ‘crush’, which, I must say, literally means to “violently subdue an opposition or rebellion”, it can be replaced with ‘pulverize’ or ‘deform’… So, it would not be out of place to infer that in 2016, our president said that Boko Haram had been deformed. I must posit at this point that we ask the people we elected the important questions. Let me garner the courage to bell the cat with this one- why, on God’s green earth, would governors of Nigeria’s 36 states approve the withdrawal of $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account to fight an already defeated Boko Haram in a meeting chaired by the Vice President?

Let us assume that the president has finally come out of his two-year-old bubble to understand that Boko Haram yet wreaks havoc on the lives of innocent Nigerians and has chosen to rectify that but isn’t one billion naira (360 billion naira) too much to kill a dead horse?

Yes, that is the most recent expression used by the president to make Boko Haram diminutive. Of course, he said it through Lai Mohammed, our astonishing minister of information thus: “What we are witnessing now are the last kicks of a dying horse. A dying horse manages to engage in some kicks. These kicks may be dangerous, but they don’t last long. Progressively, they become weaker and weaker until the horse finally gives up.”

What then is the need for 360 billion naira when the horse has been put down already? I smell a rat, in fact, a skunk and if you have any cell of patriotism in you, you should smell it too! Why didn’t the national assembly approve this so-called urgent fund? We have had Dasuki-gate, Maina-gate, who is to say a Boko Haram-gate is not currently under construction?