The year 2020 was unusual. It was a time when life was turned upside down with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social distancing and wearing of face coverings became part of everyday life.
The phrase âthe new normalâ summarised the way people would live going forward. But there was a sense that the so-called ânew normalâ was temporary because vaccines would facilitate a return to life as we knew it.
Indeed, the vaccine breakthrough achieved in November 2020 made many look to 2021 for respite from all the disruptions wreaked by coronavirus â the anxiety, sickness, deaths, job losses etc.
As the year winds down all those wishes now look like pipe dreams. Rather than being in retreat, COVID-19 has thrown up a nasty surprise in the form of the Omicron variant that has so far proven to be no respecter of double vaccination and booster shots.
Yesterday, I ran through President Muhammadu Buhariâs message heralding 2021 and there he was again reiterating his governmentâs intention to focus on security, economy and anti-corruption issues.
This year would go down as one of the toughest the country has faced regarding insecurity. The president and his men keep talking of how Boko Haram/ISWAP have been degraded and are now focusing on soft targets.
Degraded or depressed, the insurgency in the Northeast is still alive and kicking, knowing when to embarrass the government. Take the recent mortar attack on Maiduguri on the very day of Buhariâs visit to the city. The optics could not have been more awkward for an administration that claims to be on top of things.
Of course, there were interesting developments with the leadership. The bloodthirsty Abubakar Shekau, star of many maniacal insurgent propaganda videos, was finally killed after many premature reports of his demise. His successor Abu Musab al-Barnawi was also swiftly put to the sword.
Itâs immaterial whether they were taken out through the efforts of the military or as a result of internal factional upheavals, whatâs important is these disruptions in the headship of the terror groups, along with the more aggressive efforts of the Nigerian military, hit their morale hard.
Outside of the Northeast, banditry spread like a rash in the Northwest and the abominable became accepted as normal. Who would have thought that the day would come when a bunch of ransom-seeking gunmen would invade schools and abduct hundreds of students at will?
One of such schools was the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) â the countryâs elite military training school. When bandits breached its territory and abducted a couple of officers, it was a massive embarrassment for the military and the administration.
While the government talks of how much itâs working to address the problem, including embarking on the dubious legal rigmarole of branding bandits terrorists, families of the hostages were paying kingâs ransoms to set the captives free.
From the hapless Kaduna Bethel Secondary school students, to those from the School of Mechanised Agriculture at Afaka and Greenfield University, hundreds of millions were handed over to faceless criminals.
Confirming that what unfolded this year in northern Nigeria was far from normal, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Matthew Kukah, in a Christmas homily declared the region was now firmly in the grip of evil. He said it was swiftly being transformed into âArewanistanâ â an unflattering comparison to Afghanistan and the other stans.
Government supporters would dismiss him as a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) bishop and professional critic, but they donât dispute the fact that in 2021, rivers of blood coursed through the North like never before.
It wasnât only the usual suspects that were getting agitated. The influential Daily Trust wrote a hard-hitting editorial proclaiming that in Buhariâs Nigeria life had become cheap. The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) accused him of lacking empathy â never venturing from the cosy confines of Aso Rock to visit any of the scenes of the many killings in the North.
Some even vented their frustration by trying to replicate the successful #EndSARS campaign with their own #Northisbleeding. It was a half-hearted hashtag that didnât fly. That it didnât resonate is further evidence weâve come to accept the outrageous as normal.
Former Senator Shehu Sani captured the death of outrage in a tweet following another bandit atrocity. âForty-two people were gruesomely killed and roasted in Sokoto. This is an atrocity that could have triggered an outrage and utter condemnation of the failure of the government if it had happened under the previous administration,â he wrote.
Thankfully, the government hasnât claimed to have degraded the bandits. Itâs only threatening to crush them with its newly-acquired Super Tucanos as though these criminals are stationery targets waiting in an open field to be taken out.
But as the year closed, Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, came up with an interesting rationalistion for the banditry scourge. He said it was down to the poverty unleashed upon the country by the Goodluck Jonathan administration.
Letâs assume his thesis is correct. Governments are elected to address what their predecessors couldnât handle. Voters elected Buhari as a turnaround manager to clean up Jonathanâs mess, not to keep reminding us that the former administration wasnât up to the job.
Heâs had six years plus to make the difference. Those who set a four-year timeline for each presidential term believed that in that time you could do an awful lot to turn things around.
On the economic front, not even the worst pessimist could have predicted the virtual collapse in value of the naira against major world currencies. At some point it was close to exchanging for N600 to the dollar. That drastic drop affected virtually every area of life.
Finally, it was a very strange year in politics. The opposition PDP executed an untidy coup that toppled its erstwhile chairman Uche Secondus. As for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), it managed not to hold a convention as though it dreaded some undesired outcome would emanate from such an event.
And so an interim national convention organising committee transmuted into a self-perpetuating contraption that keeps kicking the ball down the line. Itâs worth remembering that Nigeriaâs very own Maradona once dribbled himself into a cul-de-sac.
It was the year when the undeclared race to succeed Buhari took off. Likely contenders began making moves that were the worst kept political secrets in town. The more they denied their intent the more the âgroupsâ pressing their case confirmed them. Hopefully, in a matter of months what has been done in secret would become common knowledge.
