WHO will save our land from this ravaging holocaust? The alarming wave of insecurity in Nigeria, particularly of late, is tragically changing Nigeria from a weak nation to a failed one, and from a failed nation to a no-government nation. Peasant farmers were slaughtered in Zabarmari, an Oba in Ondo state was shot dead in broad day light, over 300 student abducted in Kankara, Katsina State. This is a tell-tale sign that nothing, nowhere and nobody is safe under this political dispensation. The recent happenings are a clear-cut evidence of degeneration in the level of security in Nigeria. Every rational and compassionate thinker would ask whether there is really someone humane who in actually sense can be regarded as being in control of the ship of this nation. No doubt, our lexicography is now fully filled up with uncouth vocabulary like banditry, kidnapping, brutality, injustice, massacre and holocaust due to the unwavering insecurity that has now become the new normal in every nook and cranny of Nigeria. Who is worried about the reigning insecurity? Who is sincerely perturbed about the Presidency’s lackadaisical, ineffectual and mischievous attitude and Nigeria’s government officials towards security challenge in Nigeria?
Who is really committed to the cause of bringing into reality the lofty dream of our founding nationalists? I believe none! It’s now a pipe dream that we remain indissoluble as one nation living in peace and unity. Many seem to be blindfolded by one irrational ethnical thought or the other that we now see bloodletting as a political matter. What baffles me most is that even the political class in Northern Nigeria, where there has been wanton destruction, is collectively hell bent to shortchanging the poor masses in the region by playing politics with the lives of people. They are annoyingly hardboiled by the politics of “na mu” at the expense of security for the lives and properties of people inhabiting the region and for all at large. What government can be worse i than a government under whose watch human lives are taken like the typical electrical power in Nigeria? Anything can happen and anybody can be hacked to death at any time. Factually speaking, there had been series of dastardly attacks in the region but the recent killing of over 40 rice farmers in Zabarmari, an outskirts of Borno State, was a horrific tale of. I mean, what can be more horrendous than the slaughter of human beings simply because they were not cleared by the authorities of the Nigerian Army before going about for their daily sustenance?
What can be more galling than a government which shows a cavalier attitude to the malicious killings of those who elected it into power? Maybe our leaders see no aberration in wasting the lives of their subjects. Our dear country is filled with the blood of innocent souls who were neither decision makers nor implementers of our laws. For crying out loud, do farmers make laws or are they the ones responsible for the moral decadence in the country? Poor victims of ruthless and impervious rulers they are!
On a prima facie look, Nigeria appears to be the most religious nation on earth, yet it stunningly seethes as the chief among those nations that embrace the most sinful acts, bloodletting and wanton murders. Nigeria as a country is studded with highly respected Pastors, Alfas and Traditionalists but ironically, we are the major violators of the most sanctified among the divine laws and injunctions. I am heartbreakingly worried just like every other compassionate human being by this reign of killings and I personally wonder whether our religious leaders are revolted by the killing of innocent souls that has become a daily event in our country. Do they even tell to their faces the spate of insecurity in the land? To further exacerbate our patriotic disappointment, the president’s spokesperson, Garba Shehu issued a terse defence, feebly release peddling the argument that the slain 43 local farmers were killed simply because they did not get the requisite clearance from the military. My question here is, why do the political elite choose to manage the affairs of Nigerians without humanity? It is evident that as a people, we have technically lost our sense of humanity to ephemeral assignments; we choose to be sycophantic in a matter that involves live and death. The Presidency’s megaphone, Shehu, in his bid to justify his job, even chose to speak from both sides of his mouth by saying that the slain farmers did not seek approval from the military before farming in a zone where he had claimed that Boko Haram had been technically defeated. What an inconsiderate defence! The first mega lie is that Boko Haram has been technically defeated, while the second is that clearance needs to be obtained before embarking on farming in an area that is supposedly liberated from terrorists. Wait, does this really make any sense to any rational thinker? Do farmers in other states of the country need be cleared first before farming on their lands? What did the government mean when it claimed that Boko Haram had been defeated?
The National Assembly invited the President, and if one may ask, to come and do what? You see, no one needs to be told that Nigeria’s political space is a ruse, dominated by insensitive and clueless buccaneers who never take seriously, the canons of the grundnorm, chief among which is fundamental and constitutional right to protection of lives and properties its citizens. Worst still, the pauperized masses are divided between the ethnic line in the lower strata, with each trying to lacerate whoever talks factually against the incompetence of “our” kinsmen who are in power even in the glaring face of wanton killings, mismanagement of the commonwealth, profligacy and botched security architecture in every part of Nigeria. Many regional forums, mainly from the elite in the North, inhumanely a destructive government headed and dominated by the Northerners in the back. I can’t fathom this and I am particularly concerned by the current spate of insecurity that has permeated every nook and cranny of our dear nation.
Year in year out, billions of dollars have been siphoned in the name of security. Our able soldiers have been wasted, and scores of our citizens slaughtered, with no solution in sight. The summary of the whole rigmarole routinely indulged in by the Nigerian government is that it will keep recycling same thing over and over while killings remaining unabated. I will conclude by saying that Robert Rotberg was right when he posited that a failed state is one that is consumed by internal violence and ceases to deliver positive political goods to its inhabitants. government has woefully failed us!
- Balogun, a Lagos-based legal practitioner, writs in via rilwanbalogun60@yahoo.com.
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