By Dayo Sobowale
I dedicate this piece to the slain Nigerian Chief of Army Staff, Lt Gen lbrahim Attahiru, who died in an air crash together with some of his colleagues in Kaduna recently .
I never met any of these gallant soldiers before, but my heart goes out to them and their families. May their souls rest in perfect peace Amen.
To the rest of us still living I urge a look at Shakespeare’s admonition of life in the play Macbeth. It goes thus:‘Out, out, brief candle, life is but a walking shadow, a poor player that struts and frets its time upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is like a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. Really I cannot vouch that this mood of grief has not affected the choice of the topic of the day, but life must go on, and as those perennial protesters used to say in those days – ‘A luta Continua’ meaning –the struggle continues .
I will build today’s topic around some personalities , institutions and events and will try to show how misinformation can bring about or stop events and make or mar personalities, institutions and leaders generally. In Nigeria, the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives lamented the poor state of security in the nation. The Speaker reportedly said Nigeria’s house is on fire and we are under attack. That surely is from the horse’s mouth and you know, both know, what they are talking about. In the UK a religion editor of the BBC was condemned by the findings of an Inquiry headed by a judge for faking documents to lure the brother of the late Diana, Princess of Wales to arrange an interview with Diana, which turned out to be the Waterloo of the much loved Princess culminating in her death two years later.
In the Sahel where Boko Haram holds sway against the Nigerian military in the North East, the Head of the French Army lamented that a UN report on the fight against Islamic fundamentalism is attempting to query the legitimacy of the fight against terrorism, in which France is the arrow head of helping its former colonies like Mali , Niger , Chad and many others in the Sahel.
We shall also look at the new turnaround of the Biden Administration on the origin of the pandemic, when the new enterprise or inquiry will most likely confirm what his predecessor had highlighted but was not given any credibility because he was the one crying wolf on China.
We go back to the issue of insecurity in Nigeria and affirm that the issue is a well flogged one and that the SGF recently assured Nigerians that the government is on top of the situation which should be believable, except that the statistics on disturbances and attacks nationally is not abating . The new consolation now is the appointment of a new Chief of Army Staff, Major Gen Farouk Yahaya . We welcome him on board and wish him the best of luck. For now we keep our fingers crossed and expect very soon, a huge reduction in the spate of kidnaps, herdsmen attacks and pillaging, all over the nation .
We go to France where the French army has reportedly 5100 troops across the Sahel fighting Al Quada and the Islamic state group all of which are affiliated to Boko Haram. A UN report just published blamed the French army for killing 19 civilians at a wedding during an air raid. The head of the French, army General Francois Lecointre who has been to the Sahel several times , told the French newspaper Le Figaro that the UN reports ‘contained errors and signs of bias and were designed to turn local people against the French army’.The general said the report was an attack on the legitimacy of French military presence in the region . It is not difficult to see the similarity between this UN report and those of Amnesty International on the Nigerian Army and Police many times portraying those fighting terrorism on behalf of Nigeria as violating international humanitarian law when the terrorists use civilians as human shield to attack the Nigerian army. That is what this French general is pointing out and the UN should find out the ethnicity or religion of the writers of such a report and ensure they are not biased in favor of the fundamentalist terrorists.
Read Also: Why Buhari did not attend late COAS Attahiru’s funeral, by Presidency
Religion matters in the war against terrorism and is a huge factor in our inability to defeat Boko Haram so far. Israel was able to survive the thousands of rockets fired from Gaza in the last 11days war because it has technology called Iron Dome to deflect the rockets or put them out. But Israel also has technology to detect the source of rockets and bomb it, regardless of whether it is a hospital or a wedding party . That may be decried as inhumane but it is equally as bad as using civilians as human shields.
The French general warned that Europe will still be fighting in the Sahel in the next 10 years and European forces will have to be more involved. Otherwise, he concluded, “the Sahel would become a zone of chaos with destabilizing illegal migration to Europe out of control.” So the Europeans have come to nip destructive migration in the bud in the heat of the Sahel. Nigeria should borrow a leaf from their security book and carry the fight to Boko Haram in the deep Sahel and not be waiting in Maiduguri for Boko Haram to detonate bombs with suicide bombers .
The BBC should equally have taken more care in giving the job of Religion Editor to Martin Bashir who used fake documents to incite Diana that the royal family was trailing her and she turned on the family in the Panorama interview of 1995 . Even though Bashir is a British citizen and educated in England he is of Pakistani origin and a Muslim. It is a clear case of the failure of Multiculturalism in Britain and a good example of a deep lack of integration of Muslims into Europe. This has led to women in Europe being careful of where they go and when, as they fear attacks from prowling men roaming the streets of Europe in the name of migration without acculturation and integration .
Again, one must question the decision of the BBC hierarchy to make a Muslim a religion editor in a largely Christian nation. It was a huge risk that has literally torn the royal family apart and the British monarchy is the gem of British democracy,take it or live it . By now the BBC must have known that the hood does not make the monk.
I round off with the new interest of the Biden Administration and of course the CNN in the possibility that the pandemic crept out of a lab in Wuhan China . This was a view rubbished throughout Trump’s tenure by the CNN and the anti-Trump media simply because Trump said that was the origin .To me it does not matter how the pandemic started either in a lab or a market. It has certainly done its worst and killed 3.5 million people globally. Of what use is it blaming China for it now like Trump did and he was silenced and voted out ? I think the phrase that ‘ the devil findeth work for idle minds’ is at play with this new Biden Administration. But care should be taken that China does not panic and do something nasty as it has already accused the Americans of trying to take power from the ruling Chinese Communist Party of China by discrediting it as the source of the pandemic in the quest for a biological weapon. Surely, the pandemic has wrought enough havoc and we should not allow an all-out war on pandemic source, to be its aftermath . That would be a fatal mistake and costly military misadventure for the post pandemic world.
Once again, from the fury of this raging pandemic Good Lord deliver Nigeria.
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