By Tatalo Alamu
We have said it many times in this column that the mismanagement of diversity— ethnic, cultural, religious, regional and economic — will eventually spell doom for Nigeria. It was just as well, then, that it was as the Amotekun imbroglio was reaching its pulsating climax that the Boko Haram struck, forcibly reminding the nation of unfinished business.
In a horrific and blood-soaked video resonating with savage taunts and catcalls, the maniacal and bloodthirsty sect sent forward images of the summary decapitation of the abducted chairman of the Christian Association of Nigeria in Adamawa State, Reverend Indimi.
It was not a sight for young children or the squeamish. The calm but obviously disconcerted cleric was earlier seen making a frantic appeal for his life to be spared. It was not to be. The homicidal sect stuck to its chilling execution timetable. Once again, Nigeria foams in blood and at the mercy of a murderous sect that is totally immune to reason and conventional rationality.
The Boko Haram insurgency has been going on for a whopping ten years, despite the claims by the federal authorities that it has been virtually degraded. When the fact is considered that the civil war which ended fifty years ago lasted only three years, we can begin to imagine that the nation is faced with a unique type of hostility and existential threat which was not factored into conventional military textbooks and the ORBAT of colonially derived national armies.
In a great irony of history, one of the heroes of that civil war, the brave and intrepid General Mohammed Shuwa, met a gruesome end in the hands of the murderous sect as he roused to confront some of its members who had invaded his household in Maiduguri. Last week, the Emir of Potiskum was forced to trek for an hour in the bush before help came. That was after his motorcade had been overwhelmed and overpowered by the rampaging marauders.
Although it is true that it has been largely dislodged from its former territorial strongholds, the heinous sect is still able to strike at will, bleeding and draining the country without any compunction and robbing it of critical resources needed for economic growth and infrastructural development.
But we need to keep a reality check. It could have been far worse but for the bravery and courage displayed by men and women of our armed forces. At the height of its menace, the Boko Haram insurgents dislodged and deposed traditional rulers in at least four districts of the Maiduguri-Yobe-Yola perimeter. One or two were openly murdered.
At least for now, that daring and egregious assault on the nation’s territorial sanctity has been largely contained. Boko Haram is still able to strike at will because it does not require set-piece battles to do so. As a matter of fact, part of the strength lies in the ability to avoid set-piece battles, except the odds are overwhelmingly in their favour, relying very much on the superiority of their local intelligence gathering.
Over the years, the Boko Haram insurgents have proved to be masters of asymmetrical warfare. This is irregular and unconventional warfare for which a regular and conventional army is ill-equipped and ill-trained. There is no training school for asymmetrical warfare, although one cannot be entirely sure that the plucky and punitively proactive Americans are not studying the modus operandi somewhere.
In asymmetrical wars, the army cannot be conventionally deployed or arranged and arrayed in regular formation. Everything depends on grit, sheer brutality and relentless improvisation. Often, the crude generalissimo is the master of the refined general as the Vietnamese taught the Americans and the French earlier.
It should be remembered that in all the instances in post-colonial Africa where conventional colonially originated national armies have been overwhelmed by rebel forces, it has been through asymmetrical warfare: Uganda, Rwanda, Zaire, Ethiopia, Chad, Congo Brazzaville, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Libya. If national order is quickly restored, it is all well and good, if not it is apocalypse loading as we have seen in Somalia and Libya.
This is the critical threat an obviously revamped and reenergized Boko Haram poses to Nigeria’s territorial integrity and continued survival as a nation, particularly with the collapse of the Maghreb corridor and the influx of Middle East mercenaries from the inferno of Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
A disaffected Iran may be looking for trouble in order to teach Nigeria’s Sunni-dominated government a lesson in geopolitical power-play. There may also be some global powers bent on superintending the unfinished business of the eventual dismemberment of Nigeria as we witnessed during the civil war.
Judging from the operational daring and the renewed menace of the Boko Haram insurgents, proxy warfare as perfected by the Iranians and mastered by their assassinated military idol, General Quassem Soleimani, may have berthed in Nigeria.
In proxy wars the main combatants stay away from the battle field while rag tag militias and rebel sects acting on their briefs are primed into battle. When the Yemeni Houthi rebels unleashed missiles on Saudi oilfields, everybody knew that this was just a continuation of old hostilities between the Sunni sect and the Iranians. If this war of all against all were to be enacted on Nigerian soil, given the volatile social and religious equations, we may be in for a rough ride indeed.
We have no one to blame but ourselves. Is Nigeria fated to become a permanent killing field? The Boko Haram insurrection is a product of the mismanagement of ethnic, regional, political, economic and religious diversities. This had been simmering below the surface as a little local difficulty until the grossly mismanaged extra-judicial killing of its leader in 2009 exacerbated the tension and turned it into an international cause celebre for equal opportunity merchants of murder and mayhem.
This was why one could only wait with baited breath as the Amotekun imbroglio reached its crescendo, and while sterling statesmen looked for an acceptable solution and face-saving device, to see whether the authorities, in a moment of feudal hubris, would tip the nation over the edge of the cliff. It was a close run thing and ended with a typical Nigerian fudge with the authorities having their way and the South West people having their amotekun albeit in diminished branding.
While the face off lasted, the fate of Nigeria itself seemed to hang in the balance. The truth which our political leaders need to factor into their future calculations is that had a referendum being held for ethnic self-determination even at this moment, an overwhelming majority of Yoruba people would have opted out of Nigeria.
This would have been nunc dimittis for Nigeria. The fat lady would have been called to the stage. Sticking to objective analysis while avoiding the drum of ethnic triumphalism, it should be obvious that the magic key to holding Nigeria together lies in the South West. The west provides the binding glue that holds Nigeria together.
This is not due to any exceptionalism or superior qualities. The reason is simple. When you drive a normally tolerant and accommodating people to the wall where there is no further room for manoeuvring or shabby compromise, they fight back with shrill ferocity and a no-further-nonsense daring.
With the east severely alienated to a point of internal mass-exile from Nigeria, with the Ijaw nation becoming restive all over again and with the middle belt choking and chafing under the yoke of feudal peonage, all that remain is for the Yoruba people to pull the plug.
When you drive a nation to a point where two of the three major nationalities want out, the colonial fraud is no longer sustainable. So while the statesmen who looked for a solution behind the curtains ought to be commended, the stark partisans who furiously threw their hat into the ring in heroic defiance ought to be congratulated for clarifying and crystallizing the case against hegemonic obduracy.
Mismanagement of ethnic diversity does not lead to revolutions. It only leads to dismemberment and radical anarchy. This is why the old class analysis fails us in all its shrill hectoring and portentous scare-mongering. A hard look at historical developments suggests that unlike the ethnic and religious maelstrom of post-colonial Africa, it is only in racially and ethnically homogeneous countries such as France, Russia, China and Cuba where the mismanagement of economic diversities led to outright revolution.
There are two important take-away from the amotekun fracas and the potentially perilous business of the mismanagement of double-digit diversities in Nigeria. Whatever the degree of mis-federalisation imposed on Nigeria by the colonial authorities and military rule, a modern nation-state cannot be ruled as a feudal enclave without the constituting units throwing off the yoke of penal servitude at some point.
The restless roving spirit of the modern nation-state will ensure this and will ensure that no man can call a nation his ancestors’ estate for long without fatally contravening the founding ethos and originating spirit of the modern nation-state. Let those who have lessons to learn from Nigeria’s recent history learn and learn very fast.
The second lesson is the classical imperative of federalism that Nigerians ought to have internalized from their founding fathers as they moan and groan under the yoke of the misbegotten federalism imposed on them by military despotism and the colonial authorities. No two federating states are ever alike even where they share the fundamental features. Federalism is never given. It is defined in action, in dynamic contradiction and in the clash of conflicting and countervailing notions of the nation. This is the greatest lesson from the Amotekun rumpus.
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