(Nigeria’s humanitarian crisis as a meal ticket to foreign NGOs)

There is a formula for writing the story of the northeast. If you are a Nigerian journalist, you stick to the script. You are expected to fawn and grope through lattices of horror and contrived apprehension to present a humane story, often tailored to the funding needs, schema, politics, and administrative ego of United Nations’ multilateral agencies and other international non-governmental organisations (INGOs).

You may be tame or sensational in your reports but whatever you do, do not ever reveal the duplicity characterising INGO operations.

Not a few journalists are familiar with the process; they are too awestruck by patronage from the INGOs perhaps, hence you never get to read of the treacherous politics and decadence sullying their operations across dystopic expanses of the northeast  – this of course is a discussion for another day.

The recent press release by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reasserts the nature of its interest in Nigeria and West Africa. The organisation predicts famine in northeast Nigeria and Burkina Faso “if conditions worsen.”

It reads, “In the West and Central Africa region alone, up to 69 million people are expected to need humanitarian assistance in 2023 amid concerns that north-east Nigeria and Burkina Faso, which are experiencing extreme hunger, could slip into famine if conditions worsen.

“North-east Nigeria remains one of the world’s largest humanitarian crises, with at least 8.3 million people in need of assistance in 2023. The scale of suffering borne every day by women, men, and children across Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe States remains undiminished; urgent action is needed now more than ever. Addressing the needs of 5.4 million people will require close to US$ 1.2 billion.”

This extract from the press release answers my poser, last week, about the body of INGOs domiciled in the northeast. “Has there been any improvement in Nigeria’s fight against terrorism?” I asked.

“What is your exit plan?” I persisted, “When would the crisis be deemed abated? Are we going to sit here and still talk about this in the next 10 years? Should Nigeria be wary of any plot to incite in the country a social humanitarian crisis like NATO and foreign NGOs did in Afghanistan?”

While the “humanitarians” cringed and refused to acknowledge any considerable progress in Nigeria’s military campaign against terrorism in the northeast, we must acknowledge that beneath their immoderate claims and shady riposte subsists more posers about Nigeria’s anti-terror campaign.

A “humanitarian” agent told me recently, in Maiduguri, that her country, a purported “superpower,” would influence the removal of the blockade preventing Nigeria from purchasing the weaponry needed to crush terrorism, if the country repeals its law criminalising same-sex marriage. To them, human lives are worthless compared to a minority’s sexual inclinations. Nigeria must re-examine its engagement with certain “superpowers” and their “humanitarian” agents vis-a-vis its distaste for such an agenda. It is sheer wickedness to deny Nigeria access to weapons needed to fight terrorism simply because it asserts its inviolable right to ban same-sex marriage.

And beyond the push to prosecute arrested Boko Haram insurgents, and rehabilitate abductees rescued from their strongholds, Nigeria must also devise a more inclusive and sustainable strategy to reintegrate rehabilitated insurgents into mainstream society, curb recidivism, and aid reconciliation of individuals and groups pitted on opposite sides of victimhood and villainy.

Nigeria must address the issue of corrupt elements among security agencies and prevent them from sabotaging the anti-terror campaign. The federal and state governments should equally work with security agencies to secure the country’s borders, to protect the country from external aggression and continuous infiltration of otherwise peaceful border communities by foreign terrorists and mercenaries.

The next president-elect has certainly got his work cut out for him. Irrespective of the victor at the February 2023 polls, all parties in the race as well as the entire political class, the press, and the citizenry, must unite to rout the seeds of discord blooming across the northeast and other conflict zones.

It is disconcerting to see Nigerians ignore the crisis in the northeast. It should worry discerning citizens that the country currently hosts over 245 “humanitarian” groups in the northeast alone. It should also worry the entire country that these NGOs are taking as much as a 10-year lease on properties in the region – it’s a scary reveal of “humanitarian” expectations and mission in the country.

What are they preparing for? An aggravation of terror to validate the spurious prediction of Nigeria’s disintegration in 2015? “If conditions worsen” as OCHA predicts, more than 245 NGOs would retain residence in Nigeria’s northeast; they would continually push to lengthen their stay in the region touting unverified data and specious justification.

But hosting them is hardly the issue, Nigerians should worry about the end game of each “humanitarian actor.” While seeming disparate in mission and outlook, they are all bound to a common purpose: a dateless regime in the country.

Asides from their professed “humanitarian” mission, there is a dark, seductive quality to the relief and ideologies promoted by these alien groups.

Their incursion into any target country hardly resounds like an invasion. It’s usually well scripted to alleviate established and speculated miseries of supposedly terrified communities and underprivileged divides – including the oft shady, divisive gender and sexuality campaigns sponsored by several “humanitarian” actors.

In the case of Nigeria, vast tracts of land in a fertile and resource-rich region (northeast) have been rendered uninhabitable for Nigerian households – no thanks to protracted terrorism.

The northeast crisis mirrors the Afghan nightmare. Even so, Nigeria careens on a suicidal path as the citizenry flirt with rage and dangerous freedoms. Local NGOs and media, in particular, are used to aggravate the crisis.

Social media have become a major source of warmongering for insurgents, separatists, and fake news aficionados; in truth, they are all terrorists. Those who spread fake news in a bid to incite carnage and hatred against any individual, tribe, social or religious group must be prosecuted as terrorists.

It’s about time we learned from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other victims of the ill-fated and obscenely romanticised Arab Spring. Yet no INGO or so-called superpower must be blamed for our inclinations to self-destruct.

Neither terrorism nor the 2023 elections shall be Nigeria’s masque of the proverbial red death. No matter how seductive it seems to silence hope and amplify our woes, we must shun the enticement of artifice and doomsday predictions, lest we wring life totally out of our fragile nation.

This minute, I retract narratives of Nigeria as a sand pit of carnage guzzling human blood to fertilise sprawling killing fields. So should every compatriot.

Nigerians must understand that we all have a stake in sustaining the Nigerian project. An interplay of poverty and misgovernance birthed protracted terror in Nigeria; it is a no-brainer that a citizenry dogged by oppression and persistently offered the short end of the stick would eventually yield to wild inclinations and propel Nigeria to self-destruct.

A similar perversion of governance and citizenship reduced Afghanistan to a prey at the mercy of imperial predators. Its occupiers’ stratagem resonated themes found all over the world, a conflict between definitiveness and dissolution of the state, until the bubble burst.

Before “conditions worsen” in the northeast, Nigeria must redefine and redirect its partnership with foreign actors hostile to our bid to end the insurgency and heal as a nation.

There is the temptation to make the tragic sense of things the touchstone of Nigerian politics. This desire to daub life dire, has for a long while, defined the tide of political partisanship and the transience of hope as a national ideal.

In the fracas of faith and filth, the negligible attains significance while the essential gets consigned to the fringes of awareness.

The moral and ethical issues of misgovernance, predatory corporatism, treasury looting, the toxic assets amassed by politicians and civil servants, to vulturine lending, to self-serving legislation, to anti-growth economic policies, insecurity and sky-rocketing inflation appear to be irrelevant in the arena of public discourse en route to the 2023 elections.

Instead, the partisan press, in fulfillment of its role as courtier, unfurls to the ungloved palm of doubtful patriots and dubious ethicists, hurling rant about which candidate may contest the presidency or not. Amid the noise, barely any news medium examines the aspirants for other political offices.

Consequently, the latter enjoy a free ride to power, heedless of the electorate’s wishes, and markedly detached from the sense of purpose and responsibility attached to the public offices they occupy.

As rival parties campaign across the country, politics gets intense as the major actors flout the rules and skirt around ethical tropes. Arise TV’s frantic broadcast of Bola Tinubu’s rumoured disqualification by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and its subsequent retraction few minutes afterward, on the same day, is incantatory of its partisan mind and nature.

It’s subsequent apology to Tinubu and the N2 million fine handed out to it by the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC), however, resound like a pat on the wrist to many a supporter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate.

But this piece is hardly about Arise TV’s curious practice but more about the tenor of engagement in Nigeria’s heated political space. The scalding rhetoric and venomous attacks on political personae exemplify the tragic sense of things in our heated spaces.

This tragic sense of things is a response to the Nigerian experience and it manifests in the electorate’s detachment from patriotic endeavour. As we approach the 2023 polls, the electorate must unlearn the apathy of the herd reengage progressively in the ongoing transition. They must ask the crucial questions.

Read Also: Leadership that Nigeria needs

Of the prospective candidates, whose politics echo our heartbeats? To what do they owe our reverence of them? By their citizenship, do they furnish pathways to empower disillusioned, jobless youths of Umukegwu, Akokwa, Urualla, Borno, Apongbon, Idumota, Agege, Agbor, Sango Ota, Sankwala, to mention a few?

Do they teach the youth to abhor greed, selfishness, god complex? Do they impress that, in the end, only Nigerians get to choose what becomes of Nigeria, not  a coalition of shady friends from abroad and black ops-activated humanitarian agencies?

The answer resonates in each candidate’s utterances and deeds. Transcendent moments and deeds are manifestations of an exalted intelligence. Who among the candidates possesses the  loftiest acumen? Whose antecedents in private or public office – or both – elicits the passionate tribute of a cheer? Whose past and present exploits incite the passing tribute of a sigh?

Despite the youths’ dissatisfaction with the status quo, do they project the moral character, strength, political literacy and intelligence required to make the right choice?

The ongoing jostle for political spoils is overtly ritualistic. Duplicitous analysts and the political class relentlessly pursue their selfish interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.

Even the self-appointed progressives have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice, as Dolores would say. Amid our suffering, they reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of power and political office.

Their virtues are short, and their vices extensive and implacable. Their lips, full of lust and laughter, attach to the country’s bosom like curled serpents that are fed from the breast. Every dispensation, they press with fanged lips where their reptilian predecessors have suckled.

Nigeria thus becomes the doomed Cleopatra giving suck to their asps. When kicked out of office, they grudgingly recoil – but never quitting the corridors of power – to accord Nigeria the affliction of deadlier asps in the successive administration. Nigeria would never be rid of them until we set our grief’s needlepoint astride the prick of pain.

Of the aspirants, I see a true progressive, a patriot, and misunderstood titan. I see men enslaved to power and god complex. I see voyagers hampered by baggage from a past and present that would forever haunt them. Even the ‘new kids on the block’ come forged as minnows and bathetic ogres.

I see a colossus whose handlers paint a ravishing portrait of him even as critics dismiss him as yet another genome of leadership, dastardly and base like the Casanova lost in the folds of the bearded meat.

I see an electorate wrought of two extremes: cynical and apathetic. Very few candidates excite passion and hope, save the dangerous fits thrown by their pawns and puppets on the social media.

It’s about time we identified the contender jostling to handle our heartfelt yearnings as his tuberous burden. Who among the candidates is best equipped to resolve Nigeria’s economic woes and most pressing conflicts?

Many Nigerians are probably living through one of the worst decade of their lives. They read of bloody genocides at dawn, poverty and strife in the next city – many more live through such. And as usual, an economy patched with foreign loans, fleeting growth and duplicity.

It took a perfect gathering of bad leadership to get to this moment. It would take an imperfect cannonball of a man to lead us through, to survival. Who, among the candidates is wrought of such fibre?

What we should be interested in is a president-elect capable of fostering the type of education and skilled force Nigeria needs to power her industry. We have no need of a big and egocentric President in hard times; what we need is a humble man of great depth.

We need a president who would be forever indebted to Nigerians, for giving him the opportunity to serve. We need one now as today is spitting out monsters and tomorrow portends the birth of a thousand trolls.

We are done believing in the dignified duplicity of treacherous men. We need a president who acknowledges that today, everything is broken, and that the very system that produced him needs to be fixed in a way that wouldn’t make deity of him and sacrificial lambs of the Nigerian people.

We need a president capable of speaking gently and intelligently too. A president who listens. Nigeria deserves a man who internalises the citizenry’s griefs in order to end them.

We may identify such a leader by his antecedents and present conduct. Let us seek the candidate who would become the blank screen, on which Nigerians of vastly different stripes may rally and project their agonies and wants. And he wouldn’t lose his head.

The president we seek believes in justice, equality and the rule of law. He is pious without being self-righteous. He is responsible, tolerant, and in many ways, more evolved.

We need such a character to drive a practicable and all-inclusive plan of national rebirth; a proposal of shared targets and intentions with broad based support and the moral and political will to implement its mechanisms and ends with profound understanding of law, governance methods, economics and social organisation of humane statehood.

For those enthralled with the placebo aspirant, the 2023 elections will end in a splash of spittle and a curl of the tongue inwards.

Yet en route to the polls, Nigerians fondle splinters of fury into fragile fictions of change. Many a placebo seeker reenact the parable of the frantic electorate who would burn Nigeria to charred rubble to birth nirvana out of rage.

Their passion connotes spurious purpose. What Paglia would liken to the still heart of a geode rimmed with crystalline teeth. Their bromidic chant resounds as a soothing lullaby; it’s akin to rubbing a lantern to make a genie appear.

Amid the racket, dreams of progress bloom like a fictitious retreat. An emotive simplicity. It’s a  Nabokovian invention of rarefied detail, as Gardner would say.

Incensed by the fiery mantras: “Sustain the Change!” and “Change the Change!,” citizens march to both real and taught indignation. At the 2019 polls, many submitted their mandate to a leash of cash, bigotries, and incoherent sound bites. Three years on, they are still howling from dawn through dusk, threatening tumult atop soapboxes of rage, forgetting that the storms they incite consume Nigeria’s bliss.

Some make good their threats, anyway, deploying hate speech, kidnap for ransom, armed banditry, internet thuggery, and terrorism, while the press sensationalises the tragedies they incite in reportage that stretch beyond the photographs of trodden deaths.

It’s all part of a recurrent script. Some would call it the Naija-theory of things. I would call it the therapy of the mob; the deputation of evil from one social class to the other.

The heathen dialectic of Nigerian politics depicts the electorate’s mind and nature en route to the 2023 polls. Many Nigerians will vote for tribes, money, and random bigotries. Many would vote to actualise established and latent hostilities, using their voter’s cards as a weapon to torment a rival ethnic group or religious divide. 

Both the 2015 and 2019 general elections fulfilled such horrid stereotypes. The electorate, severely divided along ethnoreligious divides, voted for Muhammadu Buhari and Goodluck Jonathan, and then Muhammadu Buhari and Atiku Abubakar respectively, in fulfillment of the ugliest sentimentality.

Few voters could convincingly articulate their reasons for choosing their candidates. True, a depressed economy, sky-rocketing inflation, and embarrassing corruption across tiers of government substantiated the debate for and against each contender.

For most voters, however, the decisive factor was the religious affiliation and ethnic root of the contestants. The malady subsists to date. As Nigeria prepares for the 2023 polls, the electorate separates into two factions, spawned by ethnic and religious bigotries. Whatever their frantic narratives, they are inmates of familiar mental jail cells.

Education is the key out of such captivity. Such enlightenment must, however, be tempered by native intelligence, knowing that intelligence could be morally neutral. It can be used to further the exploitation of the electorate by predatory leadership, or it can be used to defeat the forces of oppression.

Where intelligence is docile, the educated man evolves like a bitch; a scrawny, sheeplike mutt, led only by wild instincts and subservience to a crafty, self-seeking shepherd. Political tyranny is bodacious and corruptive of intellect thus the unstated ethic of sheepish intelligentsia to amass a fortune while justifying the dominance of their oligarch masters.

Come 2023, Nigeria must elect competent leadership or resume foraging in the desert end of our green pasture. At the moment, youthful segments of the electorate display political illiteracy that is embarrassingly far-flung and sentimental. In response, rival parties re-invent a political devil in each other, to exploit voter ignorance and intolerance.

The youth rant that they have been excluded from power at the state and federal levels even though they have populated Nigerian politics for 62 years as rhetoricians, thugs, murderers, arsonists, vote buyers, and sellers.

There is an urgent need for the country’s enlightened youths and elder statesmen to seek each other out in wisdom and coalesce into more definitive roles. True change can only be driven by true patriots vying on dependable platforms. Platforms matter as much as the candidates. Failure to get this right has often foisted on the electorate, limited choices.

Our situation demands urgent, proactive steps by progressive change-makers. Nigeria must choose the candidate with the most visionary and realistic manifesto. The one whose candidacy furnishes a foundation for the unity of ideas; the one whose social agenda strengthens the ideals of progressive enlightenment, common progress, commonwealth, and moral autonomy.

Nigerians must shun the placebo aspirant. Like the fictional child character of  James Barrie’s 2015 fantasy film, “Pan,” his passion is borne of illusion, cunning, and pixie dust. Nigeria must shun such a fantasist because no matter the tenor of his rhetoric, he is impervious to authentic humane experience. He is an emotional cripple whose passion to serve is driven by frantic delusions of self-worth and an overvalued realism of his grandiloquence.

In truth, he weaponises a dark sentiment, luring the masses into a dark cycle of duplicity. His exaggerated gestures and confessions of love are an assertion of dubious lust. He moots no self-sacrifice, only refinements of domination.

Beneath his artifice subsists a frantic hankering for unearned privileges and spoils of power. He is the manipulative candidate using ethnic bigots and embittered segments of the electorate as pawns. The latter by default are inclined to furnish his pseudo patriotism by playing the role of a systems manager.

Revolutionary movements fail in Nigeria because the arrowheads continually cloak their measures and homilies in hostilities and platitudinous rants – such hackneyed dialect is a barrier to effective communication and progress.

It is the same dialect adopted by political, and corporate players to cheat the electorate of their votes and rig the financial system in the obscure, cryptic language coined by their propaganda labs.

Education, I reiterate, is the key out of such a mental jail cell; more realistic learning divorced from the pricey occupational training by which tertiary schools turn several youths into mindless certificate-seeking machines.

If the ongoing transition has revealed anything, it is that vast segments of Nigeria’s youths share kindred spirits with the political class whose oppressive leadership they seek to unseat.

It’s commendable, however, that they have summoned the courage to demand better leadership and a higher quality of governance. Yet constraints of savage origins hatch into their midst courtesy of the demons within and outside.

As Nigeria approaches another definitive moment in her history – the February 2023 general elections – the electorate should be wary of ideals that are deemed beneficial simply because they allow them to defy established power.

Such misappropriated sentiment is currently being weaponised by separatists turned accidental patriots; many of whom have adopted their presidential candidate on the strength of his cunning and predisposition to tell lies for applause.

Through the mayhem, the privileged are perfecting their Plan B to ‘Jakpa’ or relocate abroad. Thus this message is for the millions without the luxury of an overseas refuge: it is about time we cautioned our youths to desist from inflaming the polity be it as internet warmongers or cannon fodder for physical carnage.

We need a peaceful country to successfully fight and defeat corruption, governance failure, power outage, infrastructure collapse, and substandard health, and education among others.

If we truly seek change, we must achieve a unity of mind and common purpose by constructive participation in the political process.

This minute, Nigeria stews like a cauldron of scorching realities. Amid the sweltering pot, politicians, entertainers, social influencers, industry titans, the political hooligan, military chiefs, and the fabulous cabal, jostle to assert their stakes in the forthcoming elections.

All bets are hot, whether plotted or not, as rival parties wager over political actors en route to the 2023 polls.

Of the contending actors, however, none elicits as much dread as the boy thug; the child bandit, insurgent, and gangster personify our reality check. Each is a child cradling dreams that may never manifest even as he evolves to become our greatest nightmare.

Childhood to the boy thug unfurls as flaming turbulence in which he plays puppet and pawn to treacherous puppeteers. As Nigerians march to the polls in February next year, there are worries in several quarters over what devious purposes Nigeria’s boy thugs would be deployed to.

Consider the sad case of Aliyu Jatau. At my first encounter with him a few months ago, the 17-year-old pulsed with memories of hell bespoken. In Zamfara, Jatau disclosed to me, his dream to become “a very big rice farmer.”

But he embraced banditry and strife, and his life transformed into a constant blur of anti-bullet charms, AK-47s, mindless rape of women and girls, and bloody raids on defenseless villages. Caught in the fast thrill of the forest, he often tells himself, that he’s on a mission to rescue his mother and sisters abducted by fellow bandits. A mission from which he remains far removed.

The 17-year-old revealed that his gun is “occasionally for hire” to interested politicians. Jatau, tenting humanity beneath his whim, spooled a disconsolate yarn of Nigeria’s retreat to bestial nature.

Like many boys of his age, he was robbed of his innocence by a “bandit god.”

His childhood is an epic in which innocence plays little part. Jatau’s narrative evokes dual inspiration: he is at once a bright boy and a gun-wielding bandit.

Life as a bandit oft becomes heated and extremely dangerous but child bandits like Jatau are ready to die with the gun. In their reckless, macabre life, peace is overrated and school is a terrible bore.

Their loaded rifles spit nutriment to their malnourished minds. In their world, bullets glow like ‘dabino’ and a rocket launcher excites their thirst for mayhem. Strife has poured into them its metal and chaos in queer doses. And they will give them back, first, in bitty slugs of rampage. Then, in mammoth dispensations of carnage and bloodlust.

More worrisome is their idolatry of terrorist leaders, bandit kingpins, and warlords; this sacrilegious worship of criminals by the teenagers represents a troubling heft of empathy for the wild and atrocious.

The teenagers’ grotesque dreams, deliberate or accidental, are a manifestation of our failures. The boy thug sees in and sees out of our carnage of values and nationhood. But he is both the victim and villain. He is an innocent minor, orphaned, and abducted to the terror boot camps holding about 10,000 boy bandits and insurgents in Boko Haram and armed bandits’ campaign of terror across the northeast and northwest regions.

He is the street urchin (omo osanle), gang-banger, and cultist terrorising Lagos suburbs. He is the impressionable boy prematurely hurled into toxic adulthood. He is the young adult frozen in the labyrinth of becoming. He is both poseur and voyeur, spectre and terror.

Brainwashed, he unfurls in his puppeteers’ gloved palms like a half-blind marionette, seeing only what he has been taught to see. He learns to live by aspiring to terror.

He is Nasir Kwatarkwashi, 16, who dreams of becoming a bandit kingpin. He said, “I don’t need to go to school. What will I be if I go to school? A teacher? Doctor? Engineer? Fighters make all the big money. They have all the power. Politicians fear them. The government fears them. See, my father was a politician. He promised to make me a councillor. He is dead now. Bandits killed him and my stepbrothers. Then they took my stepmother away to be their forest wife. Bandits have all the power today. I will become a bandit leader, make big money and retire very young.”

Likewise, Aminu Badarawa, 18, “would like to be a bandit,” in order to live largely. “I will be rich. I will make money and live in Dubai. I will keep one family there and one family in Nigeria. When I am away, my boys will work for me and collect,” he said.

Down south, in Lagos to be precise, teen gangs including the One Million Boys, Fadeyi Boys, Ereko Boys, Akala Boys, Ijesha Boys, Awala Boys, Shitta Boys, Nokia Boys, No Salary Boys, Japa Boys, Koko Boys, the much dreaded Awawa Boys, lay siege to various parts of the coastal city. These teen gangs maintain a strong presence on the mainland and Lagos Island.

What started innocently as groups of minors begging people for money eventually metamorphosed into gangs of fearsome teenage cultists, rapists, and armed robbers terrorising Agege,  Iyana-Ipaja, Sakamori, Ibari, Ashade, Dopemu, Ogba, Ifako-Ijaiye, Abule-Egba, Ifako-Ijaye, Agege, Isale Oja, Ibari, Akerele, Papa Ogba Ashade, Aluminium Village, Ibeju Lekki, Ajah and other parts of Lagos Island.

They rob with guns, machetes, daggers, and weaponised cutlery, forks in particular. They also rape young girls and women. Most of the gangs nurse a morbid fascination for raping women old enough to be their mothers and young girls.

Rape is a crucial part of their initiation rites. It helps to groom fearlessness in even the youngest member. Prospective initiates are ordered to rape a certain number of girls or a particular woman they intend to shame.

If there is another storm that Nigeria should be worried about, it’s the influx of teenage boys into terrorism, armed banditry, and cultism. There are too many boys pretending to be hard men.

In my previous encounter with Mustapha, a child insurgent in Borno, I learnt that many boys from Zamfara, Kaduna, Sokoto, Katsina, Borno, and Yobe States are taken for training at Boko Haram’s forest boot camps in Chikungudu.

There is a reason Boko Haram and armed bandits’ creed of violence and wanton genocide is resonant among brainwashed minors. The compelling nature of the grievances articulated, and the pervasiveness of poverty justify the boys’ rationale for embracing a creed of carnage.

A history of corruption and neglect at the federal, state, and local levels of government, among others, is a major source of widespread dissatisfaction towards politicians, the legal system, and law enforcement.

These sentiments thrive in greater depths and concentration in the north, where armed bandits, insurgents, and their sponsors, cash in on the situation. Boko Haram offers them a passport to paradise, telling them that their religion is under threat; together, with bandits, they manipulate the sentiments of little boys and teenagers, luring them with food, money, and freedom to abduct and rape girls of their choice and women old enough to be their mothers.

Government and law enforcement agencies explore ambitious themes of amnesty and deradicalisation for repentant insurgents but the jury is out on whether such templates would resolve the scourge of boy bandits of the northwest and the teen gangs prowling down south.

As Nigeria heads to the 2023 polls in a few months, the following measures may be taken to address the problem of the boy thug.

The most prescient portrait of imperialist desertion of a colony under siege was the United States-backed NATO’s sudden withdrawal from Afghanistan.

As the country’s capital, Kabul, fell to the Taliban forces on August 15, 2021, the world stared with abashed horror and revulsion at the most defining imagery of the Taliban takeover: the occupation forces shoved back hundreds of frantic Afghans struggling to get a spot on a departing aircraft, while Taliban goons flogged hundreds more with horsewhips, ordering them to go back and live obediently under the new tyranny.

Afghans clung to the side of a departing U.S. military jet as it rolled down the tarmac to airlift out of the country. Some of them fell to their death as the aircraft gained altitude, according to agency reports.

The U.S. authorities estimated that at least seven people died during the chaotic evacuation at the airport, including several who fell from the military jet.

Many Afghans dreaded living under the Taliban’s brutish dictatorship as the sect’s leadership assumed de facto control of the country and immediately pronounced it the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.

The Afghan nightmare mirrors the Nigerian situation. At the moment, the country careens along a suicidal path, at the behest of citizenry flirting with rage and dangerous freedoms.

Too many individuals and groups have thrown caution to the wind in support of their preferred candidates en route to the 2023 elections. Conversation degenerates to a melee online and offline as warring groups trade expletives – and sometimes hurl actual death threats as a function of partisanship.

Yet the 2023 elections shan’t be Nigeria’s masque of the proverbial red death. No matter how seductive it seems to silence hope and amplify our woes, we must persistently look to the sunnier side of things.

We must shun the enticement of artifice and doomsday predictions, lest we wring life totally out of our fragile nation.

Read Also: 2023: Sylva declares APC complete takeover in Bayelsa

Currently, Nigeria is a sand pit of carnage, guzzling human blood to fertilise sprawling killing fields. The citizenry’s lives drain with every breath, leaking from every pore.

Like the predatory oligarchs, youthful Nigeria manifests as another ogre, a jaded generation turning thumbs down on the mainstream, at first for survival, and ultimately for their own amusement.

A citizenry mired in oppression and wild inclinations would eventually propel Nigeria to self-destruct. A similar perversion of nationhood and citizenship reduced Afghanistan to prey at the mercy of imperial predators. Its occupiers’ stratagem resonated themes found all over the world, a conflict between definitiveness and dissolution of the state, until the bubble burst.

As the US/NATO forces frantically pulled away from a stunning rout, the Taliban seized nearly all of Afghanistan in one week, despite the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. and NATO over nearly 20 years to bolster Afghan security forces. The former’s sudden withdrawal has left too many Afghans disillusioned and scared as an old but familiar monstrosity stirs into a beast rendering their homeland a dystopic wilderness. The beast now waits in every glade, returned to its wild perch in nature.

Would Nigeria learn from Afghanistan? It’s about time we understood that nobody could love our country more than we do. No Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron, or Liz Truss, could ever love Nigeria more than Muhammadu Buhari. These leaders of the so-called developed nations, like their predecessors, would always see Nigeria (and the rest of Africa) as a mere tool for preserving their country’s enlightened self-interests. It’s as simple as that.

No foreign media would ever aspire to utmost social responsibility in reporting Nigeria; that is a role best served by patriotic segments of our local press. Have we a patriotic divide in the Nigerian press?

Journalists in particular must desist henceforth from inflaming the polity via incendiary statements and reports. The lust for NGO patronage should never incite them to mortgage national interests for hard currency – whatever the slant of their greed and their sponsors’ professed intent.

Social media, in particular, has become a major source of warmongering for separatists and fake news aficionados; in truth, they are all terrorists. Those who spread fake news in a bid to incite carnage and hatred against any individual, tribe, social or religious group must be prosecuted as terrorists.

We do not need another civil war. We must not give the doomsayers the opportunity to gloat; since their prediction of Nigeria’s collapse by 2015 failed, they had been left smarting in shame and earnestly committed to Nigeria’s death watch.

It’s about time we learned from Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the victims of the obscenely romanticised Arab Spring. Neither America nor Europe must be blamed for our inclinations to self-destruct.

Carter Malkasian, author of The American War in Afghanistan: A History, served as a civilian advisor in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to him, throughout his travels with U.S. military commanders around Afghanistan, he saw numerically superior and better-supplied soldiers and police suffer incessant defeats by poorly resourced and unexceptionally led Taliban.

While the U.S. and Afghan forces fought for hegemony and money respectively, the Taliban soldiers were inspired by faith and the promise of a divine nirvana – however spurious. They were united in belief and purpose as they fought to thwart a common enemy: the American soldiers of occupation and their Afghan enablers.

May we not face a similar threat from Boko Haram, ISWAP, armed bandits, and spurious separatist groups.

Corruption was part of Afghanistan’s problem. The military and police suffered as their commanders and government officials pocketed their pay, hoarded ammunition, and sabotaged the counterinsurgency operations.

The Afghan nightmare evidently mirrors the Nigerian situation. Thus we must scorn poisonous interventions by countries whose major interest is to abolish our sovereignty, plunder our resources, and strip us bare to devious elements.

It is about time we actualised a culture of true ideals against petty passions and sordid objectives. Let us begin to build that proverbial bulwark of citizenship with an ideal of patriotism untainted by wantonness, ill-bliss, power, and gratuitous rage.

The ongoing jostle for political spoils at the 2023 polls is the most incantatory of our political games. It is overtly ritualistic. Devious oligarchs comprising politicians and serving public officers relentlessly pursue their selfish interests amid widespread suffering and bloodshed.

The electorate – comprising the masses and self-appointed progressives – on the other hand, have shunned the lilies and languors of virtue for the raptures and roses of vice as Dolores would say.

Politicians and the electorate jointly reconstruct Nigeria into a narrow commune, beholden to their selfish interpretations of citizenship, power, and democratic dividends.

Our homes, families, worship houses, schools, communities, to mention a few, produce and sustain our affliction by corrupt leadership and followership. We must surgically excise from within our penchant for corruption and yearning to self-destruct.

At the moment, the average Nigerian manifests the electorate’s detachment from patriotic experience. Most guilty is the Nigerian in his youth. He samples dissent but will not commit to progressive intent. Rustling ‘wokeness’ out of tired bromides, his sterile passion stifles patriotic fervour.

We must live wary of the nature of youth participation in politics – perhaps because they have become a significant force in contemporary society.

The youths personify the core of the Nigerian spring but if their passions pulse with uninspiring badges, notably toxic dissent, mindless bigotries, and predisposition to mayhem, Nigeria may crash and burn sooner.

Where youths serve as cannon fodder for violence, the possibility of progress is forever muted. And hope is consequently eunuchised.