As Nigeria still in a primitive milieu, the pre-government era Thomas Hobbes called the state of nature?
The state of nature that preceded the Social Contract, by which citizens theoretically give up part of their freedom to a Leviathan, in exchange for general protection?
And is it not from this root doctrine that the state, its chief agent, the government, and the security apparatuses like the police and the military, the government’s enforcers of law and order, issue from?
These questions are imperative because though Nigeria has a government, the state of nature appears to have been with us for a long, long while.
Not long ago was the murderous and crazed Boko Haram, blood thirsty criminal hiding behind Islam and its doctrine. The tragedy, however, was the society was daft enough to buy the fraud, of criminals wearing a religious cloak.
It proved immensely fatal, because at the height of that madness, no less than 20, 000 innocent souls were slaughtered, besides millions of others internally displaced. Even now that Boko Haram is being defeated, the casualty still mounts, in terms of victims of suicide bombings.
The latest of these blights of wilful criminality is the so-called Fulani herdsmen who, all of a sudden, graduate from cattle sticks and light arms, such as knives and daggers, to AK 47, and are not at all shy of using these weapons to kill, maim and rape — all with reckless abandon!
But why would a cattle herder carry guns and not simple weapons for self production, since moving in the jungle, with their cattle, is their vocation? And, by the way, why not modern ranches but this murderous nomadic expeditions?
Many have claimed the AK 47 angle can be explained by merciless and killer hustlers, who often attack the herdsmen, kill them off and snatch their cattle.
If true — and there is nothing to prove it is not — that is a great crime that must be condemned. More than than: the Nigerian state must find an antedote to the menace of rustlers, for every law-abiding citizen is entitled to lawful protection of his assets by the state.
Still, cattle rustling cannot justify the mass and merciless killings by these criminals, who cloak their criminality as “Fulani herdsmen”. Whether Fulani, Yoruba, Agatu, Tiv or Igbo herdsmen, whoever kills another must be treated as a murderer; and should face the full wrath of the law.
But because these criminals had successfully hidden their crime behind “Fulani herdsmen”, everyone parrots their identity, not their heinous crime. Now, the various atrocities of routine killings have climaxed in the Enugu massacre.
Yet, people still don’t see them as criminals that must, posthaste be punished by the law to act as deterrent to other putative felons, but some near-invincibles, that could even have rogue protection from the state, simply because a Fulani man happens to be sitting president. But that is pure nonsense, since the president does not cut a devious picture of one who would aid and abet mass murder.
That is why the Nigerian state must go after those criminals and make the point that, we, as a civilised community, would not tolerate the barbarism of entering a community and mowing everybody down like game.
Let this be the last time such sacrilege would take place. Enugu 48? Never again!