Monday
August 3, 2009 |
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Last week in London, a friend asked
why I thought the Umaru Yar’Adua regime deployed overwhelming force in
dealing with adherents of Boko Haram, the group that blames western
education for Nigeria’s woes. His question was informed by a sense of
history. He remembered the studied slowness with which this and past
governments had tackled outbreaks of sectarian violence. He also
recalled the frequency and openness with which armed robbers operate in
most states of the country.
“We never hear about the police showing up when armed robbers attack
banks in Ibadan , Awka or Benin City for hours,” he said.
Why, then, the alacrity and brutality with which Boko Haram was
decimated?
My response was that the cabal that runs – and ruins – Nigeria is not in
the business of protecting Nigerians’ lives and property. Their mission,
instead, is to use the instrument of the state – principally the army
and police – to sustain their ability to privatize the nation’s
resources.
This cabal, whose members style themselves stake holders, set out to
send a chilling message to all Nigerians. And this was the message: that
it would not brook any campaign to impede its access to lucre.
It was the second such message that the Yar’Adua government has
telegraphed this year. Earlier, the government had authorized a
slash-and-burn military offensive in the Niger Delta. The ostensible
goal was to rout militants who, in their attacks on oil installations,
had shown scant regard for members of the Joint Task Force detailed to
contain them.
In the earlier assault, as in the recent one, the Nigerian state beat
its chest after slaughtering hundreds of citizens, many of them unarmed
and defenseless, quite a few of them women and children. Apparently
scared to face the Boko Haram guru in court, the regime contrived to
murder him – and then to concoct an implausible account of the
circumstances of his death.
As the corpses of hundreds of Boko Haramites defaced the streets of
several states, Yar’Adua went off on his jolly way to Brazil . If
there’s a worse case of atrocious political instincts, I’d like to hear
about it. For Yar’Adua and his ilk, the majority of Nigerian citizens
are worth less than cattle. Why delay a foreign junket just because a
few hundred “cattle” had been hunted down and killed?
There’s no question that, for the cabal, the protection of its members’
looting rights approaches a sacred duty. There’s ample proof. Remember
how, in one breath, Yar’Adua and Speaker Dimeji Bankole told the nation
that former President Olusegun Obasanjo wasted billions of dollars on
so-called power projects – with nothing to show for it. Then, after a
panel of the House of Representatives launched a public probe that
unearthed shocking details of the power scam, the entire machinery of
the state went into panic mode. In a bizarre and shameless twist, the
cabal in Abuja worked in concert to protect a principle dear to its
members’ heart: the principle of thieving.
The collectivity of “steak holders” awoke to the grave consequences of
exposing some of their number. What if Nigerians arose and demanded that
all the players in the power scandal, including Obasanjo, Governor Liyel
Imoke and ex-Governor Segun Agagu, be compelled to face prosecution? The
nation-hijackers feared the domino effect of permitting Nigerians to see
the callous manner in which men entrusted with high office conspired to
defraud the nation. A new script was prepared: Tell Nigerians that not a
single kobo was misspent on power projects, much less stolen.
It’s such tortured manipulations of reality, such barefaced lies, that
ultimately fertilized Boko Haram’s central creed, a belief that secular
education was the culprit. The group’s critique may be wrong-headed, but
there’s no question that the depraved men and women who daily gnaw away
the nation’s promise and potential are a disgrace to their education and
training – western, traditional and religious.
Using superior armory, the regime has squelched the Haramites for now.
But let nobody imagine, for a moment, that this is the end of the story.
It strikes me, at best, as part of an opening act in what’s likely to be
a prolonged, multi-pronged resistance to a political system arranged to
aid and abet the mindless leeches who feed fat on the collective blood
of a nation.
Unless the cabal cultivates self-restraint and learns to curb its greed
– and nothing inspires confidence in this prospect – the nation better
brace itself for many more Boko Harams and other forms of resistance.
I suspect that the cabal’s victory will prove illusory and pyrrhic.
