Fighting Boko Haram scourge

IT is public knowledge that Boko Haram is perhaps one of the most disturbing security issues facing Nigeria at the moment. On daily basis, there are media reports of wanton carnage orchestrated by the sect whose members have become death merchants.

North-Eastern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa are the worst hit in terms of the level of havoc the insurgents. Notable Nigerians escaped death by a whisker.

On January 20, 2012, there were coordinated bomb attacks in Kano metropolis. Back then, sources claimed that the death toll rose above 185, saying that 150 civilians and over 32 police officers were gruesomely killed during the multiple death ‘festivals’ organized by agents of the Boko Haram.

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Internally Displaced Persons or simply IDPs is another lexicon that has crept into our polity, no thanks to the ‘Boko Haramians’. Aged women, young ladies, nursing mothers and vulnerable children have become refugees in their fatherland, with no hope for a better, sustainable and guaranteed future.

As IDPs who have lost everything of their worldly possessions, they are forced to relocate to ramshackle tents and dilapidated school buildings to begin a new life of misery, anguish, hopelessness, wretchedness, squalor and haplessness.

To worsen their terrifying plights, relief materials donated by foreign and national emergency organisations are brazenly and shamelessly diverted into private use by some government officials.

The unsavory tales of the insurgents’ genocidal ‘war’ should be enough at this critical juncture. Nigerians are concerned, hence they are asking the government to expedite action in taming Boko Haram, which has become a Frankenstein’s Monster.

To this end, the need to overhaul the nation’s security architecture and enhance the level of intelligence gathering by various security agencies cannot be overemphasized.

But even more germane will be that troops at the ‘Theatre of War’ in the North-East must be adequately motivated.

They can only crush the menacing insurgent-foes, once and for all, if they are equipped with advanced and state-of-the art-modern weaponry. Otherwise, winning the insurgency battle in Nigeria will remain a mission impossible.

  Abdulhameed Yushau

Kano