If you do not yet know the manner of characters that populate our legislative houses, I will suggest you Google, and read the House of Representatives proceedings of Thursday, 1 February, 2018 as it relates to the Excess Crude Account and, in particular, the approval for the removal of $1 billion from the Excess Crude Account by the National Economic Council to fight the Boko Haram insurgency.
You can accurately decipher their seriousness, or otherwise, from the motion below from which resulted a resolution to its Committee on Finance to probe the Excess Crude account, momentarily forgetting, I suspect, that many of their probes end up in outright ignominy, with the probing members emerging the hunted.
The motion, sponsored by Hon. Ken Chikere (PDP Rivers), is to the effect that ”the Federal Ministry of Finance should ensure that the sum representing 13 per cent of the $1 billion approved by the National Economic Council on 14 December, 2017 to fight Boko Haram insurgency, is deducted, and paid to oil producing states in Nigeria in compliance with section 162(2) of the 1999 constitution.”
In our current circumstances, no legislator who knows what he is doing, or a house critically aware of the country’s dire security situation ought to have given that motion a moment’s attention.
Why?
Any legislative house worth its name should, by now, have been well aware that in a report submitted to President Muhammadu Buhari “Security agencies have said they have uncovered the presence of Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) fighters in Nigeria and that they are already killing and maiming people in Benue, Kogi and Edo states”. They should also have been seized of the fact that the group is already reportedly operating within some North Central and South-South states, using foreign terrorists. They are also believed to be recruiting young men into their fold a thus creating tension along ethnic, religious and regional fault lines”. Indeed, many of them are reported to have been arrested in Akoko Edo, Okpella and Benin, the Edo State capital. They have also been found in Okene in Kogi State.
Given the above unsavou-ry situation, should this be the time for any serious legislator to start playing silly ethnic games, knowing full well that Boko Haram is Islamic State’s tap root to Nigeria and that with the Dormer’s defeat in the Middle East, Nigeria would be most attractive new haven with Boko Haram as ready allies? When will these legislators be serious? Deep down, do these politicians care for anything besides their hefty salaries and allowances?
If mere herdsmen have put the country in a tailspin for the past many weeks, is it expecting too much from these legislators to know that the Islamic State would almost completely terminate Nigeria as we know it, given their long stand up to several world powers in Syria and Iraq?.
Just in case they do not know what Islamic State is, let me paraphrase my article of 1 September, 2014 on these pages captioned: “Islamic State (IS): The World’s Next Scourge And Why We Must Be Alert”, for their elucidation.
“If Al-Qaida and its allies have killed in hundreds of thousands, the way the Islamic State, (IS), is going, it may account for millions killed by the time the world finally gets clean with it, if ever. Without a doubt, the world is permanently in a flux but if anybody had suggested that the world was going to contend with anything worse than al-Qaida so soon after the US dispatched Bin Laden, we all would have told that person to perish the thought. This is not to suggest that there hadn’t been chilling predictions, post Nostradamus, but they were mostly that: predictions that may never come till the end of time.
But no more. They now mushroom like over ripe pawpaws falling off the paw paw tree.
Talking about post Nostradamus predictions, there had been many and they keep pouring in. Indeed, 2014 vows to bring the hardest times for mankind. The predictions are terrifying as the world would, according to them, be shocked by natural disasters, assassinations and incurable diseases, and doesn’t Ebola come to mind. The year is believed to be a turning point in the history of humanity. Plagues, wars and disasters threaten the world according to Baba Vanga, a famed Bulgarian prophetess. A blind mystic and clairvoyant, she foresees an epidemic of skin cancer that will decimate the planet’s population and according to the Ukrainian engineer who deciphered Nostradamus quatrains, 2014 will be engulfed in violence. Famed seers have even seen the beginning of World War111 and Mr Putin appears to be working unerringly towards that end now that Russia has deployed troops in the Ukraine.
However, if all these are in the future, not so the mind boggling violence the IS (Islamic State) continues to visit on mankind. Its militants recently besieged a village in northern Iraq, gave the residents a deadline to convert to Islam and when they refused, more than 80 men were killed and the women and children of the village became their slaves; this in addition to several weeks of crucifying Christians, beheading their children and burying others alive. Although it started out like al-Qaeda on an extremist hard line, adhering to global jihadist principles, al-Qaeda has, since February 2004, closed all links to the Islamic State because of its extreme brutality. Indeed, only two weeks ago, a British-born member of the group was reported to have beheaded the American journalist, Mike Foley, in a horrendous act of brutality that would hardly be equaled. Its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, claims to be a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad and has proclaimed himself the Islamic “caliph”. Caliph, meaning successor, is a title used by Sunni Muslims for those who led Islam from the death of the Prophet to the 20th century. When Turkey was made a secular state after World War I, the caliphate was abolished. Now al-Baghdadi claims to have reconstituted it in himself. He is calling on the Muslim world to move to his Islamic State to support his movement. Militants are already carrying the IS flag in Indonesia and across North Africa. Jihadist groups around the world are deciding whether to switch their allegiance from al-Qaeda to him. Al-Baghdadi has announced his group’s intention to march on Rome and Spain, seeking to establish his caliphate across Europe. When he was transferred from American to Iraqi custody in 2009, (from which he was later released), he told his American captors, “I’ll see you in New York.”
For us as Nigerians, the most important part of this story, and its relevance is this: ‘Now that al-Baghdadi claims to have reconstituted it in himself he is calling on the Muslim world to move to IS and to support his movement’. The potency of this statement and its probable dire consequences arise from what we have come to know about our intelligence community. Naturally, one would expect that a country of Nigeria’s economic standing and place in Africa would, by now be on top of everything concerning the Islamic State. Indeed, going by the experience of how some Nigerians so easily hung on themselves everything concerning the Islamic world, be it in Iran, Afghanistan or Tajikistan, it should not be out of place to expect that there should be in place, as you read this, a desk specifically dedicated to Islamic state affairs in not only our Ministry of External Affairs, Defence Intelligence or at the ubiquitous DSS. But that will be the day!
Given that it is not unknown for Nigerians to actually make their services available to organisations like Al-Quaida, and with the entire Northeastern part of the country now being ferociously buffeted by Boko Haram, it should stand to reason that our intelligence community, if not the presidency, should now be fully engaged with all the ramifications of Islamic state activities. But as I indicated earlier, it would be the mother of all surprises if Nigeria is giving this ogre the importance and seriousness it deserves.
It would be quite a shame if the country would sit on its hind legs and wait until Nigerians head to Syria and Iraq to be trained in all the technicalities of decapitating fellow human beings, causing and fuelling urban terrorism and putting the entire Nigerian government to fright, not to talk of completely destabilising the economy before our government starts running to foreign countries for assistance.
The Islamic State (IS), formerly the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in its self-proclaimed status as a caliphate claims religious authority over all Muslims across the world and aspires to bring much of the Muslim-inhabited regions of the world under its political control beginning with Iraq, Syria and countries which include Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Cyprus and an area in southern Turkey. The Economist reported in June 2014, that “it may have up to 6,000 fighters in Iraq and 3,000–5,000 in Syria, including perhaps 3,000 foreigners manly from Chechnya, France and Britain’.
With a territory bigger than Britain, and assets worth more than 2Billion dollars, oil resources, gold bullions and massive kidnappings from which to easily increase its current holdings and the well known attraction of the young and employed who are relentlessly being recruited via a massive propaganda on the social media, it is obviously a short distance from recruiting hundreds of young impressionable Nigerians who, like the recruits from Europe, will not think twice before returning to Nigeria with their newly acquired capabilities in inflicting complete mayhem on society.
If Boko Haram is this keen on completely annexing the Northeast, it will not be unreasonable to believe that, if care is not taken, if the Nigerian government does not take appropriate, creative and proactive measures like keeping on perpetual watchlist, the movements and activities of Nigerians who may stray into this weird and dangerous organisation, Nigeria may be heading into the mother of all troubles.
God forbid.
- Islamic State (IS): The World’s Next Scourge And Why We Must Be At Alert in Nigeria’ for their elucidation
