Tag: Nigerian Army

With the hosting of a foreign flag on what is supposed to be Nigerian soil in the little known northern town of Gamboa, and with the security forces showing little appetite for swiftly terminating the disgraceful affront, Nigeria is effectively partitioned. Whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we want it mentioned or not, a great horror movie is unfolding not just for Nigerians but the Black race as a whole. Yet like paralysed participants in the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, the German horror film, we appear too dazed and confounded to comprehend what is going on.

To be sure, this is not the first time Nigeria would be so symbolically dismembered. The Biafran flag was hoisted on a larger swathe of the nation and for a longer period. But not with this kind of psychotic daring and in your face bravura. In any case, Biafra never left anybody in doubt about its intention to secede from Nigeria. It was a textbook secession. The hosting of the flag was the final act of formal consecration after the declaration of independence from Nigeria.

As far as rituals of secession go, the leadership of Biafra adhered scrupulously and rigorously to internationally stipulated norms and independence was formally declared after a Consultative Assembly mandated the old eastern region leadership to lead its people out of Nigeria. Thus, the former Colonel Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, freshly cashiered from the Nigerian Army, became the leader of a new nation. The rest is history.

In the case of the Boko Haram insurgency, a rag tag militia has now snowballed into a full blown military force that has gravely imperilled the territorial sanctity of Nigeria, and one that is bent on imposing its weird form of a theocratic state on a substantial swathe of the nation if not the entire country. There is no Northern Consultative Forum as such in sight. There are no Boko Haram officers to be dismissed as yet. The only thing we have going is President Jonathan’s offhand declaration that there are already Boko Haram cells in the sanctuary of his own administration.

Yet the insurrectionist sect has succeeded beyond its wildest expectation, laying to waste and complete ruination the northernmost fringes of the nation. If the federal forces were to withdraw from this troubled and tormented region at this minute, we might as well say goodbye to Nigeria as we know it.

In a development that points at some international conspiracy beyond the government’s tenuous grasp on reality, the murderous sect has the entire north within its rifle sight, and it seems able to strike at will any target of choice even in the federal capital of Abuja.  It is now beginning to probe the Southern underbelly of the nation in what promises to be an apocalyptic endgame for Nigeria. History has become a nightmare from which we are trying to wake up.

At the purely symbolic level, the cost to the psyche of the nation and its fabled military has been quite prohibitive and out of proportion. The old northern establishment has had its totems and escutcheons of political and spiritual authority completely devastated and ground to dust. The state and its paraphernalia of authority and coercive disincentives have been shown to be incapable of protecting, not to talk of maintaining, the territorial integrity of the nation.

At the last count, the Boko Haram sect has accounted for General Mohammed Shuwa, a civil war stalwart and one of the finest officers of the old Nigerian army. It has killed the Emir of Gwoza, with his fellow traditional travellers being lucky to escape after they were dramatically abducted in broad daylight.

It almost succeeded in dispatching the late Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, until natural death mercifully intervened. It has summarily liquidated scores of notable politicians and clerics. It has successfully cordoned off a huge chunk of the nation known as Sambisa Forest. Meanwhile, it continues to hold in maniacal custody dozens of female pupils summarily rounded up in the middle of the night from Chibok, despite all national and international entreaties.

It has continued to cock a snook at the federal authorities, treating them with implacable contempt, even as it spurns all offers of negotiations. From its redoubt, it has continued to issue threats undermining the fundamental raison d’etre of the state. Perhaps as an uncoordinated response to its deep humiliation, the military are beginning to show a dangerous edginess and a nervous disregard for civil populace and its ranking authorities. For political astrologers reading the horoscope of impending national calamity, it doesn’t get more bothersome.

Last Wednesday, the chicks came home to roost, or rather the crocodiles gathered once again on the banks of the River Kaduna. A desperate and determined suicide bomber almost succeeded in eliminating General Mohamadu Buhari, another civil war veteran, former military Head of state and persistent presidential hopeful, from the political equation. Looking at the scene of carnage and combustion, it feels more like Islamabad or Afghanistan than Nigeria.

The horrific consequences of Buhari’s elimination and in Kaduna of all places are better left to the imagination. For the better part of the Fourth Republic, this formerly pleasant and placid former capital of the old north and administrative seat of Lord Lugard has known its fair share of sectarian and religious upheavals. A tense truce prevails, but the city remains effectively partitioned between a Muslim north and a Christian south.

In a clumsy and inarticulate manner, Kaduna mirrors the endemic fault lines of the nation itself, and its sorry and sordid history of elite-manipulated divisions. Yet it has not always been like this. In its heydays of glory, a breezy and cosmopolitan Kaduna that welcomed all and which served as the headquarters of the Nigerian military cum political complex and its emerging lions mirrored the strengths and possibilities of this gifted nation.

Anybody who has spent his prime in Kaduna in the glorious seventies like this columnist, must know what we are talking about. It was pure bliss and blessing on the scale of the beatitude. As a fresh post Youth Corps graduate, Snooper spent a whole year in the cosy and plush ambience of Tourist Lodge  on Dawaki Road. The owner, Idris Morrow of the fabled Morrow bread, was as eccentric and impossibly kind as they come.

Snooper recalls launching into a tirade in Yoruba language one afternoon about the quality of the food and the possible racket that was going on to the hearing of Idris Morrow. Alhaji Morrow sat glum, stony-faced and seemingly inattentive. At dinner later, Idris Morrow walked up to yours sincerely in his inimitable dancing gait.

“Omo mi, se o ti jeun?” (My son, have you eaten?”) Idris Morrow asked with a furtive smile in Yoruba as Snooper froze in his seat . Idris Morrow then calmly sat down and explained that he was actually born in Lagos and had lived in Yaba. “The problem with you boys of nowadays is that you are impatient”, the old man concluded with a grinning flourish. Thereafter developed a father and son bonding with the great man initiating Snooper to the rarefied social circuits of the Kaduna power aristocracy. Every Saturday, our first port of call was at Mrs Akilu, the wife of the late respected technocrat.

There is a sense in which it can be claimed that the history of modern Nigeria is irretrievably wedded to the history of Kaduna. It was from here that Lord Lugard proclaimed his famous and infamous Doctrine of Dual Mandate which forcibly grafted the new nation to the apron strings of the metropolitan order. It was also from here that the late Ahmadu Bello began his great feat of social engineering which saw to the emergence of a new northern political, military and technocrat elite which placed the north at premium political advantage.

But it was from Kaduna again that Ahmadu Bello’s feat provoked its violent political antithesis when a group of impatient young majors rose in brisk fury and radical distemper to abridge the First Republic. Forty eight years after this set of crocodiles swam out of the River Kaduna to consume everything in sight, Nigeria has known neither peace nor durable progress. It has been forty eight years of solitude and still counting.

It is just as well that this great city is named after the humongous crocodiles that once lazed away on its muddy bank. Only god knows what havoc these fellows must have cost the unwary natives. But their human incarnation have cost the nation even more. The Nigerian political elite are a bunch of crocodiles who cry while feasting on the entrails of the nation. But this meal cannot go on forever.

Had General Buhari been killed last Wednesday, the crocodiles would have swum out of Kaduna river again in what might have become a Nigerian version of Hiroshima. We thank God for small mercies. But let this remind the political elite of how close we are to the precipice of no return. While the madmen in our midst only need to be lucky once, the nation has to keep being lucky.

For the Daura-born general, it is a win-win situation. If the attempt on his life can be traced to the Boko Haram sect, it will from now on be extremely stupid and irresponsible for anybody to cast him in the satanic role of a fanatic and sympathiser. If on the other hand, the assassination bid can be traced to some other rogue elements, it may have the unintended consequences of softening Buhari’s image and solidifying many undecided Nigerians behind his cause.

What the general should now do his to parlay his new found authority of personal  outrage into playing an even more constructive role in the rescue of the north from its self-inflicted wounds and the redemption of the nation from an own goal. He doesn’t have to be fixated on the presidency. What saved him from that mortal embrace may yet turn out to be a higher calling.