I always suspected that there was much more to the terror that has been convulsing Nigeria in the past four years than the facile rationalisation that all the analysts, domestic and foreign, have brought to the matter.
How, I have been musing: How can the desire of an extremist sect to Islamise Nigeria, the marginalisation of adherents and sympathisers of that sect, the corrosive poverty in Nigeria’s Northeast and the historic indifference of the authorities to it, plus Nigeria’s military contribution to the international effort to crush the revolt of the Touaregs in Mali – how can these factors, mere allegations at best, have led to the depredations and the devastation that have now become the fearsome signature of Boko Haram?
Is this line of reasoning not the product of the kind that led some commentators who were so caught up in the foam of events that they could not see the decisive element in the recent Ekiti governorship election – the stomach infrastructure factor that lay just beneath the surface in several precincts and was literally screaming at them in the others?
The whole thing just doesn’t add up. An explanation that can stand the most rigorous analysis will have to be sought. And it would most likely come from the nation’s most accomplished social scientists, I concluded with resignation.
Little did I know that our own Minister of Information, Labaran Maku, whom no one has ever accused of psittacism, has not only been seeking but has actually found such an explanation.
In the finest tradition of scholarship, his thesis is at once testable, parsimonious and heuristic. It is engaging and elegant, and it has the great merit of deriving from longitudinal perspective, as opposed to the snap-shot approach that is the standard fare of much social research.
Best of all, it explains the relationship among the component variables, it is predictive, and it serves as a reliable guide to action. In fact, I am almost prepared to say that it is the stuff of a genius.
Stated simply, Laban’s thesis, postulated at an interview in Lagos the other day, is that there is a direct correlation behind the series of terrorist attacks in the country and the various landmarks recorded by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration.
Whenever the Jonathan administration has had cause to celebrate an achievement – which happens all too frequently, I might add — bombs explode to distract Nigerians and portray the government in bad light, the highly cerebral minister was reported to have said.
This is no fanciful thesis. The empirical evidence Maku adduces is overwhelming and irrefutable. Hear him: “Immediately we rebased our economy and it was now confirmed that Nigeria was the largest economy in Africa, there were bombs at Chibok. Immediately they learnt we were going to hold the World Economic Forum, there were bombs in Abuja and its environs to make sure Nigeria does not get the economic benefits of hosting the World Economic Forum and discourage the world from coming here and to make the attack the centre point of international and local media. We also noticed that immediately after Ekiti, the bombs started raining again.”
I must here enter a word of caution to those who are ever so quick to jump to conclusions – usually the wrong conclusions. Maku’s thesis implies no causality. It posits no cause-and-effect relationship between President Jonathan’s achievements, coruscating as they are, and the barbarous exploits of Boko Haram and its confederates in murder. It merely establishes a direct correlation between them, the exact magnitude of which my sources say he is planning to reveal to the World Press next week.
From the thesis, it follows that the frequency of terrorist strikes in Nigeria varies directly as the accomplishments of the Jonathan administration in transforming Nigeria. It may even be the case that the volume and intensity of terrorist strikes on Nigerian soil also correlate directly with the magnitude of the central government’s accomplishments, but that is an investigation for another day.
For now, it is sufficient to know that each time the Jonathan administration chalks up another glittering achievement, another terrorist strike can reasonably be expected.
The policy implications of this seminal finding should not be lost on the Jonathan administration, the security services and the public.
Given the indissoluble association between new government accomplishments and terrorist strikes, it follows that if the authorities are truly minded to curb terrorism, they would have to freeze with immediate effect any project or activity that might lead them to proclaim success of any kind or move Boko Haram to suspect that the nation is moving forward.
The authorities would have to curb their predilection for taking the thought for the deed and for celebrating mere intent as glorious achievement. In short, they must stop creating the illusion of momentum, for that only incenses the Boko Haramites and drives them to murderous rage.
This means tamping down all those claims about the wonders that the Transformation Agenda and the Industrial Revolution and the New Automotive Policy and the New Agricultural Policy and the Cassava Revolution and the Rice Revolution and the New Rail and Water Transportation Policy have wrought, not forgetting the zillions of jobs they have spawned of will spawn.
It means the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its agent, the Federal Government, not winning another election, Ekiti-style.
It means not staging any international conference.
It means desisting from re-basing the economy again, no matter the provocation or the benefits; it means restraining all those rating bodies from ranking any Nigerian among the world’s richest people; it means not calling global attention to the largest fleet of executive jetliners in Africa and one of the largest in the world, is owned and operated by Nigerians, as President Jonathan has been doing.
It most certainly means summoning those overzealous Transformation Ambassadors to modesty. It means ordering them to desist from placing Dr. Jonathan in the same league as Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, Lee Kuan Yew and Barack Obama.
Armed with Maku’s hypothesis, the security forces can now calibrate with greater confidence the national threat level and accordingly mobilise first responders. Whenever yet another epochal achievement is being proclaimed from on high, they know it is time to sound the alarm and deploy their anti-terror machine against the Boko Haram strike that is sure to follow.
Residents of cities prone to terrorist attacks now have a reliable warning system: Take cover when the Minister of Industry declares that the all-Nigeria automobile that compares favourably with those built in Japan, Germany and South Korea and costs much less is about to roll off the assembly line. You know then that Boko Haram must be lurking in the neighbourhood.
