It is not in doubt the Nigerian state is assailed by crises of multifarious dimensions.
Even as security infractions exert much pressure on the resources and capacity of the government to live up to its statutory functions, emerging tendencies raise suspicions as to whether there are contrived plans to push the country further into unmitigated disaster.
The presentation of certain reports on alleged criminal activities and security breaches in sections of the media especially the (ubiquitous and unstructured social media) is beginning to raise suspicion of an attempt to play up ethnic and religious sentiments to further divide the people and precipitate chaos.
This concern was shared by the presidency in its reaction to the killing of a lady identified as Fatima and her four innocent children by gunmen in Anambra State. The government had while condemning the atrocious act “cautioned against indiscriminate sharing of posts on social media so as to deny vested interests who seek to divide us and create disturbance the chance to do so”.
Fatima and her four children were killed while being conveyed on a bike after she visited her sister. Though no arrests have been made, media reports have largely fingered the IPOB for the senseless killings to which the organization has denied. Media reports have also tended to assign ethnic coloration to the killings prompting the Anambra State government to deny there is ethnic killing in the state notwithstanding the general insecurity across the country.
The incident created so much tension that a coalition of northern groups apparently believing that the killings have ethnic prompting, threatened reprisals. But the presidency cautioned against precipitate reaction, disruption of lives and livelihood or even retaliatory violence as its experts are “verifying the factuality and veracity of the claims accompanying the horrid pictures”. It urged citizens to avoid hasty steps or conclusions that could exacerbate the situation.
The position of the federal government on the horrific and dastardly killing of the poor woman and her four children is in order irrespective of the provocative tone of whatever claims made by those who recorded the scene. This is more so given the high tension generated in the public space by face value interpretation of the motive of the killings as well as the group suspected for it.
Since no arrests have been made and the group being fingered for the killings has denied it and others attributed to it in the past, it is only proper that our security agencies should investigate the regularity with which such potentially divisive posts are making appearances in the social media. They should not rule out the possibility of fifth columnists intent on simulating cataclysm of unimaginable proportion having a hand in some of them.
With sophistication in technology and the linkage of the National Identification Number NIN to all phone lines, our security agencies should by now, have the capacity to decode and trace the original source of such posts and have the culprit arrested. That is what is required to prove very conclusively those behind these posts and their motives.
This line of action is further dictated by a recent post attributed to a purported official of the Department of State Service DSS claiming to have resigned his position because of alleged swapping of motorcyclists arrested in connection with the killing of a sound engineer, David Imoh. In a widely circulated post, the purported DSS official said he was the team leader of security operatives that arrested 11 suspects, mostly northerners in connection with the murder.
According to him, after the 11 suspects were handed over to the police, they were replaced with six southerners who were paid N100, 000 to admit guilt. But the Lagos State police command denied the allegation tagging it “a cunningly- crafted work of fiction ill-intended by some unpatriotic persons and warmongers to cause disaffection and possibly ethnic war”.
The correlation between the position of the presidency in the circulation of the horrid pictures of the murder of Fatima and her four children and that of the Lagos State police command is very clear. They all speak of clandestine attempts to create bad blood; divide Nigerians and possibly precipitate ethnic and religious upheaval of unimaginable proportion.
That would seem the undertone of those two incidents irrespective of their repulsive and bizarre nature. Inexorably, we run a mortal risk each time we take such post on their face value. You will be shocked to know how divisive such posts are from the comments of Nigerians each time they appear on Facebook. They create fear; divide Nigerians along ethnic and religious lines and heighten the atmosphere of insecurity around the country.
It is an ominous trend that should be carefully watched in the management of the festering insecurity. The above incidents are not alone. Across the country, killings tainted with ethnic and religious imagery abound.
The recurring divisive messages and posts are indications of the regularity of heinous crimes that have reduced the worth of human life in the face of the inability of the government to stem the tide.
There is also the dimension of false alarms in ruffling peace and tranquillity in the country. A case in point was the recent allegation by the leadership of Miyetti Allah in Anambra State on the rustling of 300 cows and kidnap of 10 herders who were each asked to pay N4million ransom and one gun. But the accounts of the Anambra State police command and the local government chairman where the incident was said to have occurred put a lie to that narrative. The way the incident was painted including the fictitious demand for guns would suggest the alarm had a veiled agenda.
It is vital the authorities are circumspect of what use they put to some of the horrid posts in the social media purporting to have emanated from targeted groups and individuals. Such posts must be subjected to the weight of empirical validity for them to command credibility. But it says a lot about our security agencies that they get to know of such heinous crimes from media posts.