By Rilwan Balogun
Who will save our land from this reign of holocaust? The alarming wave of insecurity in Nigeria, particularly of recent, is tragically sinking Nigeria from being 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 students kidnapped in Kankara, Katsina. The level of insecurity in Nigeria has gone beyond a stage where no political orator can cover as 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 protracted insecurity in Nigeria that 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 vocabs like banditry, kidnapping, brutality, injustice, massacre and holocaust due to the unwavering insecurity that has now become the new normal to condone in every nook and cranny in Nigeria. Who is damn worried about the reigning insecurity in Nigeria? 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 patriotic to the course 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 from the ravaging Northern Nigeria, where there has been a grim heat of this wanton destructions is collectively hell bent to short-changing the poor masses from 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 illegitimate 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 with enduring reign of impunity permeating all the regions of a geographical expression called Nigerian society.
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 sent in a horrific gory of war and hellish contraption in an inhumane society of ours called Nigeria. I mean what can be more horrendous than slaughtering of able human beings whose lives were cut short simply because they were not cleared by the authorities of the Nigerian Army before going about looking for their daily sustenance? What can be more gallingly insensitive than a government who shows 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. It saddens, that our dear country is littered with the blood of innocent souls who actually were neither the decision makers nor ones who were saddled with the implementation 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!
I was deeply flabbergasted when further I heard that Local Government Elections were being conducted on this same day that this tragedy struck in Zabarmari. It’s staggering that our devious political elite still deemed it fit to conduct democratic elections in a country where what is currently being practised as a system of government is farther from being called a democratic system of governance. Conducting so called elections amidst a raging conflagration is a clear confirmation of typical Nigeria’s politicians’ shenanigans that they are more concentrated and recalcitrant in enriching themselves even at the behest of our existential annihilation.
The Presidency’s mega phone, Shehu in his bid to justify his paid job even chose to speak from both sides of his mouth by spewing 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 need be obtained before embarking on farming in an area that is claimed to have been liberated from the colony of the insurgents. Wait, does this really make any sense to any rational thinker? Do the farmers in other state in the country need be cleared first before farming on their lands? What did the government mean when it claimed that the Boko Haram had been defeated? This is madness, insensitive, I mean government gone mad!
Just like business as usual, the National Assembly had 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 maze of a ruse, dominated by insensitive and clueless buccaneers, who never take serious the canons of the grundnorm chief among which is fundamental and constitutional right to protection of lives and properties its citizens.
Year in year out, Billions of Dollars have been siphoned all in the name of unfaithful course to security, our able soldiers have been wasted, and scores of our citizens have been slaughtered with no tactically solution at sight. The summary of the whole rigmarole routinely indulged in by the Nigerian government is that, they have the irascible conclusion that they shall keep recycling same thing over and over with 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. Rotberg further accentuated that primary public good is the provision of security within a territory and when this good is provided a number of other goods can evolve. Violence, predatory government, loss of control over territory, criminal violence and holocaust are idiosyncratic for a failed state. It is crystal clear even to the blind that this government has woefully failed us!
Balogun is a Lagos based lawyer and public affairs analyst.
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