It is incredible but true. Nigeria suffered yet another embarrassment with the attack on the country’s elite military training institution, the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) by armed bandits on Tuesday. The criminals who were said to have come in military camouflage in a vehicle around 1.00a.m. drove straight to the officers’ quarters where they started shooting sporadically. In the melee, two officers, Lt- Commander Wulah and Flt- Lt Okoronkwo were killed while Major Datong who was abducted was later found dead. Of course many others sustained injuries. Yet, all the bandits escaped unhurt! This, for me, is the real tragedy. Major Bashir Muhd Jajira, the academy’s public relations officer said in a statement that “the security architecture of the Nigerian Defence Academy was compromised early this morning by unknown gunmen who gained access into the residential area within the Academy in Afaka. During the unfortunate incident, we lost two personnel and one was abducted.”
Then the usual efforts to track down the culprits after they had bolted commenced. According to Major Jajira, “The Academy in collaboration with the 1Division Nigerian Army and Air Training Command as well as other security agencies in Kaduna State has since commenced pursuit of the unknown gunmen within the general area with a view to tracking them and rescue the abducted personnel.”
This is part of the embarrassment that a country suffers when, rather than call a spade a spade, it continues to deceive itself by calling it a farming implement. It is the kind of embarrassment a people suffer when their leadership tries to deodorise terrorism as banditry because blood is thicker than water. Unfortunately, banditry has now become a festering sore. We had thought that the election of President Muhammadu Buhari, as a military general, in 2015 would yield a better handle on the insecurity plaguing the country, especially in the tail end of the Goodluck Jonathan years. But alas, we goofed and goofed big time. Insecurity has worsened under the Buhari government like we never witnessed in the country’s annals.
For sure, there is no country that is crime-free or hundred percent secure. Crime has been with man perhaps since creation. Even in the advanced countries, security breaches do occur. But then, some progress would have been made in tracking the culprits. How could bandits just enter what should be an elite military institution, kill two officers, abduct a Major and none of the intruders was killed or arrested.
True, the root of the ignorance and poverty responsible for the general insecurity in the north in particular lay in the past. But then, President Buhari cannot absolve himself of blame in that system that condemned the children of the poor to Almajiri because he is part of the northern elite. Not only that, he once served as military head of state. What steps did he initiate to check the practice before it became the malignant tumor that it has now become? There must be a reason why things have gone out of hands security-wise. This is aside President Buhari`s partiality in handling the farmers’/herders’ crisis when it started, in favour of the latter. Perhaps it is for the same Karma to manifest and rubbish whatever he has achieved that he has stuck to the idea of preserving an antiquated grazing route for the herders. We do not have to tell a military general that nothing good can come out of a country that is as insecure as ours because, as I have always said, a child that is not trained (educated) will end up selling the house built by his parents. Nigeria has committed too much resources to fight insecurity without significant result, and despite the heavy toll on infrastructural facilities. This is the most painful aspect of it. It is the entire country that is bearing the brunt of the northern elite’s indiscretion and corruption of the past that have combined to produce those who are now making it impossible for us to sleep with our two eyes closed.
The brazen manner that the bandits attacked the NDA is significant; it should tell us that virtually nowhere is safe in the country. To the average Nigerian on the street though, insecurity has become a daily companion. In fact, Nigerians have to thank God when they sleep in the night and wake up in the morning because that can no longer be taken for granted. When you go in peace and return in peace under the Buhari administration, it is a privilege. When the immediate First Lady, Patience Jonathan, talked about the ‘blood they were shedding’ in order to make her husband unelectable, we never knew that was a child’s play. With almost daily reports about scores being murdered in cold blood by criminal herders, bandits and terrorists, we now know better.
The attack on the NDA has come and gone; but not so its lessons. We would only allow the matter to be swallowed in the womb of time at our collective peril. We must answer some pertinent questions: how were the bandits able to gain entry into the academy? Are there closed circuit television (CCTV) in the place? Are they functioning? Were the activities of the intruders well captured on the CCTV? If, as the army claimed, the security of the institution has been compromised, by who? And what is the extent of the collusion between the criminals and the insiders? Was there any follow-up on the reported intelligence reports that Boko Haram flags were sighted at the Afaka Forest close to the NDA and Kaduna airport?
Questions. Questions and more questions.
We must find honest answers to these questions if we ever want to solve the riddle of the insecurity plaguing the land. Otherwise, no one should be surprised if some government houses in the country become the next targets of the bandits.
If things continue this way, with bandits launching attacks on critical facilities without consequences for them, not even the seat of power can be declared impregnable for the dare-devil bandits or terrorists. If the bloody civilians in power cannot see this even if standing on a very tall Iroko tree, the military instincts in President Buhari must be telling him this. Although the question may also be asked if the president is entitled to sound sleep when his electors can only be sleeping and waking like cock, due to insecurity. Apologies to the legendary Fela Anikulapi-Kuti.
Doctors’ exodus
As with most bad things in Nigeria, brain drain did not just start in Nigeria. It probably gained momentum in the Babangida years, when Nigeria’s experts in all imaginable fields began leaving the country in droves in search of greener pastures abroad. Doctors probably topped the list of them all. Again, as with most other bad things, our doctors are now being recruited right here on our soil, preparatory to being taken to Saudi Arabia to get commensurate pay for their sweat. The recruitment, according to reports, which was being handled by a consultancy firm, Meeds Consultancy, took place at the Ladi Kwali Hall of Sheraton Hotels, Abuja, from Tuesday to Wednesday, last week, before it was reportedly suspended by operatives of the Department of State Services (DSS) on Thursday. Although the secret police has denied stopping the exercise, there is still need for explanations as to why the recruitment was abruptly suspended. Again, was Marcus Fatunde of the International Centre for Investigative Reporting (ICIR) arrested at the venue and later released? If so, by who? Is it true that the newspaper which reported the story contacted the DSS spokesman, on telephone and via sms for their own side of the story without response? Obviously some things don’t just add up here.
No doubt the Federal Government ought to be embarrassed by the wide media coverage the interview enjoyed. This is especially so coming at a time that resident doctors in the country were on strike, with the telling effects on hapless patients also dominating the media. Indeed, it is double whammy for a president who, as a military officer overthrew a civilian government in 1983 with one of their excuses being that “our hospitals had become mere consulting clinics.” Yet, in his own second term as civilian president, and 38 years down the line, the country’s healthcare has taken a plunge for the worst. It is not only about lack of tools for doctors to work with, or lack of medicaments but also about inability to pay doctors good wages in a country where nonentities whose only credential on their call cards is “professional politician” cart home millions monthly in the name of being law makers. The government could not find answer to the resident doctors strike. Rather, it took the striking doctors to court. I wonder whether our politicians think Nigerians are so daft that they don’t know how things are going.
Yes, we may frown at a foreign country coming to our soil to recruit our doctors. But that is where, for me, the sympathy or patriotism ends. A lizard cannot penetrate a wall if there is no hole there. If we cannot give to doctors their due, then we should not be bothered if the doctors are being enticed with better packages elsewhere. It is money that is speaking. Anywhere in the world, it is the rich that always snatch the wives of the poor. A delicious pot of soup is a function of how much went into preparing it. As my people say, obe to dun, owo lo pa!
If the government felt sufficiently embarrassed by the ugly development, it should know what to do. Muzzling the recruitment exercise is certainly not an option unless the government wants to keep our doctors in servitude the way it wants to be treating other professionals, except the professional politicians.
Welcome back
Prof Ishaq Oloyede, registrar of the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) finally resumed in his office last week Monday, thus putting paid to speculations about whether he would be reappointed or not. Oloyede took charge at JAMB on August 1, 2016. He completed his first tenure of five years on July 31 and honourably handed over to the most senior officer in the establishment at the time, Mr Fabian Okoro, director, information technology services. Tongues then began to wag: what the hell could be happening? Had people adversely affected by Oloyede’s policies finally won, despite the unprecedented achievements the man had recorded in so short a time?
For sure, you cannot travel the way Oloyede did in JAMB without stepping on powerful toes. I was one of those who felt politics had trumped common sense and sanity in the interregnum that the world was left guessing as to Oloyede’s reappointment. Indeed, at a point, I recollected the question I asked him at one of JAMB’s fora, I think late 2019 or early last year, before the advent of COVID-19. I had asked him what he would do should he be promoted into irrelevance just to stop the train of progress that he had put in motion at JAMB. Or, what he would do should government refuse to reappoint him. His answer was that he would simply return to the classroom from where he came.
