The Concourse
Our self-sabotage and the foreboding future
By Soney Antai, a serial awards-winning columnist
Whatever folks allow or relish in over a long time oftentimes become a culture that may define them and shape their future. At that point of ritualised usage, the utility of activities, practices, and observances may not count, but their longevity become their validation. That’s why traditions die hard and their evil versions are almost always chains we started wearing as ornaments, only for them to become hard to break off with the passage of time.
Recent weeks have been, to every decent, real human being and Nigerian patriot, filled with sadness and apprehension for our country. Fulanislamists, seizing students, teachers, and murdering those they could, with the backing of their home and foreign enablers, ran riot over several schools and places in the north. Bad as those were, the incidents didn’t seem to bother our ruling politicians. So, the cold, crude, deadly criminals seem to be dictating the pace of peace and security in our country. They have successfully infiltrated our military, have some top government officials backing them, and of course, their hatchet men like Gumi, are all over.
By their aggravated evil-vending escapades within the period, they were in some way sending a message to US President Donald Trump that his threat meant nothing to them. But I don’t think such bravura is because they truly believe that they can withstand the Americans, but that they have their sponsors in government who would twist truth, falsify facts and ferry them off danger whenever the Americans, if at all, would swoop on Nigeria’s troublers, “gun ablazing.”
These people have become thoughtless beasts – clearly inhuman – and so, go on committing this evil without any iota of compunction. To add to their inhumanity, they do all this in the belief that there is some being somewhere whom they are pleasing by what they are doing. Could anything be more preposterous than that?
Curiously, it was during this time that Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) George Akume told a bewildered, beleaguered and benighted nation that President Trump’s threat was responsible for the spike in the number of terror attacks across the North. For the SGF, therefore, if only Trump had kept away his sticky nose away from the killing field our country has become, the blood hounds would not have increased the bloodletting. Well, I hope the busybody Donald Trump minds his business, while we mind ours of cutting deals with terrorists, never minding their victims.
It seems to me that when some people stay for up to a decade or more in political offices, they assume omniscience, arrogate to themselves untouchability, and become gravely detached from reality. Come on, how can you blame a caring neighbour who witnesses your house slowly burning down while you run around in circles neither demonstrating knowledge of the source of the fire nor displaying any seriousness in putting it out? And meanwhile, many in your household are trapped, suffocating and gropping for the exit door to escape the fire with little success!
Why does the government allow Ahmad Gumi to go about justifying the killings by his kinsmen? For this bandits’ victimhood mastermind, the terrorists are suffering and are only reacting to this by killing others. In spite of such splendiferous idiocy, no Northern politician or Islamic bigshot even as much as asks him to stop the rubbish? When did hunger justify food theft? Who is responsible for the so-called problems of these terrorists? Is it their victims or people like Gumi, who are clearly insensitive to the plight of the victims of these killers, many of whom are dead, or lost their farmlands, loved ones, homes and means of livelihood? Why is Nnamdi Kanu in jail, but the sponsors of these murderers, who are known to the government, are not brought to justice?
We saw the charade of the release of kidnapped students from the Kebbi Girls’ School and the kidnappees from the Eruku, Kwara CAC church. In the latter, the terrorists killed three persons before taking away 38 others, now freed. The Inspector General of Police is quoted as saying the murderers were not arrested because they on their own decided to cooperate with government. Good stuff! So, the murderers can now keep their guns, roam free and kill at will another day. Where is accountability for actions? What reliefs do the kidnappees have for having been kidnapped, or the families of those murdered?
By the way we are going, we are heading towards a state of banality of terrorism and an atavistic drift to the state of nature. Could you ever imagine a terrorist killing an Assistant Commissioner of Police, seizes his uniform, dresses up in it and attends a so-called peace meeting that way, and the governmentis not alarmed. Such only bespeaks of a future where darkness would be the inevitable new normal; where insecurity would be monarchised. Then, insecurity would become a Frankeisten and the victimiser will became the victimised as anarchy would have had a free fall here.
May such day never come upon us!
