It was a professional job. It was meticulously planned, carefully executed and the result was perfect. I bet they are still clinking glasses now, celebrating the willful massacre of Ndigbo, the expendable factor in the Nigerian equation. They chose the new Luxury Bus Park in Sabon Gari, kano, the hub of Igbo transport businessmen and traders who commute therefrom to different parts of Nigeria, moving goods to and fro the large commercial city of Kano.
They chose the right time, about 4.30pm last Monday, March 18, 2013. It was peak period for Igbo traders who are wont to travel by night to different parts of Nigeria to buy and sell. The murderers must have kept their surveillance at the park waiting until a few of the luxury buses were fully loaded and ready to depart. The signal must have gone out that the hour of slaughter had come; and the killers drove into the park, purporting to be passengers and with their vehicles right in front of the luxury buses, they detonated not one, but two massive explosions.
And the luxury buses, about six of them, were pulverized with their human cargo – mainly Ndigbo. They were blown to pieces and roasted like rams right in their seats where a few minutes earlier they waited patiently and made prayers for a safe trip. Some of them had been travelling this way for over a decade trying hard to make meaning of their ill-fated Nigerianness. Yes they knew they could die in their struggle but not by a sudden, ghastly Armageddon.
One of the buses was said to be fully loaded and ready to leave: that is a 52-sitter capacity plus about a dozen ‘attachments’. This totals over 60 passengers in just one bus. If we add the casualties in other buses and the usual bus park crowd, we begin to have an idea of the overall carnage which may not be less than 75 deaths as some newspapers have reported and about twice as much injured. Who is to talk about the goods, cash and property damage? Some of the luxury buses in the fleet of Gobison, Ezenwata, blessed Chimezie and New Tarzan are said to be brand new.
The second ‘pogrom’: this bombing of the luxury bus park is reminiscent of the pogrom against the Igbo race in Northern Nigeria in 1966; that orgy of killing of innocent Igbo civilian men, women and children following a failed military coup. But today, nobody has planned any coup, at least not these hapless Igbo traders whose only offence is that they are Ndigbo doing their buying and selling in Kano. They have been premeditatedly slaughtered because they are Ndigbo and they are dispensable. It is apparent that the Islamist terrorists and their elite thinkers want to make more impact in their fight against the Goodluck Jonathan administration. Their calculation is that by using Ndigbo as cannon fodder, Ndigbo would react spontaneously, fighting back and escalating the crisis. This must be the callous calculation of the masterminds of the Islamists. But they are disappointed, Ndigbo are not cowardly murderers of innocent, defenseless people.
This is not the first time Ndigbo have been savaged so tauntingly. Luxury buses bearing Ndigbo have been torched many times. Igbo clusters like the Catholic churches and some markets have been callously targeted to vicariously push Ndigbo into violence and blood letting. Since all previous efforts to score a point by slaughtering Ndigbo failed, and emboldened by the fact that they got away with such murders, they did it on a much larger scale this time.
And of course, there won’t be a whimper from any quarter this time either. As far as the president is concerned, it is just another explosion. His media aides have sent out their now pro-forma condolence news release which they must have used over a hundred times in the last two years: “ President Goodluck Jonathan has condemned in strong terms, yesterday’s bomb blast in…. Blah, blah, blah.” Everyone else follows suit in the ensuing chorus of puerile condemnations. The day after the blast, the president was seen doing what he loves best: receiving so gleefully, some foreign ‘dignitries’. By the third day, he was threatening Nigerians that the so-called fuel subsidy must be removed. Such was the importance attached to the life of a Nigerian especially of Igbo stock.
Nobody spares a thought for tens of families who have been thrown into mourning; who have lost their fathers, mothers, children; people who have lost their entire livelihood and whose lives have been damaged forever for no fault of theirs. While body parts still litter the Kano motor park some people are begging for amnesty for the murderers. What about bringing some succor to the victims of the blast? We have canvassed several times on this page that a committee be set up to cater for the victims of the burgeoning terrorist activities and ameliorate their pains but nobody cares. We have said on this page that southeast governors should create a databank of the victims of this madness, but nobody is doing anything. Since Ndigbo seem the major casualties of this crisis what are the southeast governors doing? Why have they become brain dead on this serious matter? It is most confounding that while the criminals are canvassing and are about to be compensated by way of amnesty, the real victims – Ndigbo, cannot articulate a coherent position or response on this matter even now that it has become a pogrom of sort. There is even a design to bury the evidence quickly and cover the material facts.
Solution to Boko Haram menace
Meanwhile, same Monday after the senseless murder of Ndigbo in Kano, Muslim umbrella body, the Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) insists on amnesty for the Boko Haram terrorists. How much more insensitive can a people be in the face of the bodies of fellow compatriots still smouldering in a kano motor garage. The call for amnesty which was made by the secretary-general of the JNI, Dr. Khalid Aliyu was coming on the wings of the recent call by the Sultan of Sokoto for dialogue with the sect.
Since President Jonathan has indicated that he would not dialogue with ‘ghosts’ and rightly so, here is EXPRESSO’s simple solution: let the federal government empanel the Sultan, the JNI and some northern governors to dialogue with the Boko Haram and present their report/demands in four weeks. The rest of Nigerians would gladly consider the demands and take it from there. If they need an ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF NORTHERN NIGERIA, so be it, so long as the Sultan and the JNI elite sanction it, I don’t think the rest of us would mind. We would simply have streamlined the debate to the question of boundary adjustment. And there are precedents to cite: North and South Korea; North and South Vietnam and recently, North and South Sudan. Nigeria as constituted is not sacrosanct.
LAST MUG: Jonathan and his fuel subsidy: our dear president has threatened us that the ‘subsidy’ we the elite enjoy must be removed otherwise Nigeria will fail. He and his economists are one-track-minded about this matter but they refuse to accept that we are trapped in this cycle of ‘subsidy’ because we do not have refineries; they refuse to see the point that all other oil producing countries refine their own products and export more of refined products; they refuse to see the failure of NNPC not being able to work out our refining system the way other national oil firms like Petrobras, etc, have done. Why don’t we subsidise local refining instead of foreign refineries? If Jonathan was a visionary leader, he would have ended petrol product importation in this last two years. Yes, he ought to have solved the ‘subsidy’ problem by now.
