The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Sambisa

  • Boko Haram kills 45 in Borno village attack

    Boko Haram kills 45 in Borno village attack

    Boko Haram yesterday struck in Borno State in Dille in Askira Local Government Area of the state.

    The sect members overran the village in the early hours burning down churches, including Church of Brethren in Nigeria.

    Some houses and shops were not spared in the raid, which was said to have happened along the Sambisa forest area. Eyewitnesses said no fewer than 45 people were killed.

    The insurgents were said to have been come fully armed with explosives, anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers.

    The military also bombarded the insurgents, it was gathered. But details were sketchy.

     

  • Massive deployment of troops to Sambisa Forest begins

    Massive deployment of troops to Sambisa Forest begins

    •2.17b people join #BringBackOurGirls  campaign

    The Defence Headquarters has massed more troops close to Sambisa Forest in Borno State in the build up to the planned rescue of the over 200 school girls abducted in the state last month by Boko Haram.

    Though the military was silent on the actual figure, President Goodluck Jonathan said in Paris that about 20,000 had been sent to the North-East.

    The troops have succeeded in creating a blockade to restrict the sect members to the forest.

    It was gathered that troops were awaiting the outcome of the ongoing intelligence collaboration between Nigeria and the United States and other Allied Forces before their next line of action.

    A top military source said: “So far, we have carried out massive deployment of troops to the fringes of Sambisa Forest in readiness for the rescue operation.

    “The troops have laid siege to all routes leading to the forest. It is a kind of blockade restricting the sect to the forest.

    “Based on intelligence brief available to us from the military and foreign collaborators, we will soon rescue the girls.

    The source added: “A lot of air surveillance is ongoing in Sambisa Forest area to locate where the girls are camped.

    “The real mission is to rescue the girls alive. This is why we have not been able to engage in bombing of all parts of the forest.”

    About 2.17 billion people across the globe are said to have joined the #BringBackOurGirls  campaign, according Cyberschuulnews.com.

    The world’s population as at May 17 was put at about 7,230,723,512.

    Cyberschuulnews.com said: “One week after the whole wide world united in venting pent-up anger against Nigeria and its government, Google search picked up 2,170,000,000 hits for the #BringBackOurGirls, a social media campaign designed to build worldwide pressure to find school girls who were abducted in Nigeria.

    “And that came 3 weeks after it looked like the abduction of 276 girls (the highest of the various figures: 234, 239, 274, 276, ‘over 200’) which authorities in Nigeria mindlessly used as the number of school girls abducted by Boko Haram remained unresolved.

    “The sect had taunted the government with bombing, kidnapping, and threats over the internet with amazing helplessness as response of government and its might. ”

     

     

  • Sambisa and other Forests

    Sambisa and other Forests

    The heart of a de-civilized person is a jungle of violent impulses. The forest outside is a reflection of the forest within. There is a Sambisa Forest in every one of us. It is a metaphor for deformed and dehumanized humanity. The forest takes over every patch of land that is uncultured and uncultivated after some time. The jungle must reclaim its own. In order to endure, civilization must be kept in a state of constant cultivation.

    We have lost our civilization. This is why Nigeria is in desperate straits. No nation has ever been more profoundly unhappy in the real sense of absolute misery. There is a deep sadness everywhere. Savagery rules the land. Every day, we hear tales of unprecedented cruelty and sadistic behavior. Every day, we are regaled with acts of unimaginable barbarity.

    We cry for the abducted of Sambisa Forest. We moan at night for our defiled daughters. Anybody who has ever fathered a daughter must shudder at the plight of these girls. After a month in captivity, what will their sanitary state be like?  After four weeks in dazed detention, what is their psychological status? And now the dreaded question that torments one in the middle of the night: after four weeks with the hard men of this vile and vicious sect what else can one say about the virginal sanctity of these girls?

    It is a good therapy, then, to cry and wail and roll over ourselves on the streets. But much sooner than later, Nigerians will have to confront the demon within that has given rise to such a demonic society. The evil empire outside is but a reflection of the evil empire within. Sambisa Forest is the evil manifestation of the forest of a thousand devils that is the Nigerian project. Let us dwell on a few of these forests.

    The Boko Haram incubus did not suddenly jump on the stage from nowhere; neither did it come fully dressed. There had been frequent sightings and dress rehearsals in the Maitasine uprising in Kano, the Musa Makaniki revolt in Yola and the dramatic declaration of Sharia in some northern states that curiously coincided with the ascendancy of an admittedly bible-thumping Christian president from the South.

    In its purest and most classical sense, the Sharia regime is a more extreme and total version of Boko Haram. While Boko Haram denounces western education, Sharia anathematizes western culture and political civilization beginning with its legal foundation. Both are bound to come to violent collision with the secular state and the paradigm of the modern nation which are underwritten by western civilization and its triumph over competing modernities.  It is the military wing of this western civilization which conquered the Islamic conquerors of Northern Nigeria and forcibly brought them under the orbit of western political authority.

    There is a Sambisa Forest in the heart of an indigenous ruling class which allows the living condition of humanity to deteriorate to the feral subsistence and unremitting harshness such as we find in certain parts of the north. It is this poverty in extremis and its attendant hopelessness that fuel the hallucinatory delusions, the murderous, misguided and misdirected deviancy of the Boko Haram sect. Until this internal Sambisa forest is cleared of its malignancies, the external Sambisa Forest will remain as its necessary corollary and dialectical mirror image.

    The Northern Question is therefore an integral part of the National Question. The National Question has its social and geopolitical dimensions. On paper, political restructuring is easy. You can carve up a country into a thousand regions and prefectures. But how do we restructure the soul and mind of the contemporary Nigerian ruling class to make it amenable to the minimum standards of the political modernity that has been foisted on us? Can a ruler of Southern extraction have the temerity to disturb or disrupt the existing feudal relations of production in the core north without provoking a genocidal backlash?

    Whatever the current grandstanding by a doomed ruling elite, there is a Sambisa Forest in the heart of a ruling class which steals and cheats its way to obscene and indecent wealth and opulence while the rest of the country wallows in hunger, poverty and biblical misery. It is called government without governance; or the management of mismanagement.

    Now factor into this, the Sambisa Forest of pension thieves, the Sambisa Forest of fuel subsidy rogues, the Sambisa Forest of corrupt and untouchable ministers, the Sambisa Forest of religious charlatans of all creeds who feed on the misery of the disoriented populace, the Sambisa Forest of our elder “statesmen” who brought us to this sorry pass in the first instance, and the Sambisa Forest of economic cannibals in our midst, and you get a picture of a humongous monstrosity.  Let us by all means bring back our girls. But let them come back to another country. Otherwise, they will be abducted again.

    Last week, Balarabe Musa, the great Northern political savant and radical socialist, asked a vital and crucial national question to which no answers have been forthcoming. Why is it, Balarabe rued, that it is at this very time when we are said to be having a National Conference that our problems seem to be multiplying and atrocities against the nation seem to be proceeding apace? The answer is that we are not having any national conference.

    The great charade ongoing in Abuja is not designed to move the nation forward. It is nothing but a holding device; a talking contraption hastily and clumsily glued together to provide a strategic respite for Jonathan so as to allow him get back to the drawing board of his presidential preoccupation with ruling Nigeria until something gives. But as we have noted in this column, whatever respite gained will be transient and temporary as the old problems return with malignant vigour.

    If the gathering street demonstrations and the global attention being gradually focused on Nigeria are anything to go by, Jonathan will find himself and his presidency increasingly diminished and his remaining credibility and authority vastly eroded. There will come a time in the nearest future as the heat gets to the kitchen when a conclave of genuine Nigerian elders who have not sold their soul will pay him a crucial visit.

    Any national advantage and value that would have accrued from the National Conference appears to have been stymied and squashed between two antagonistic forces in a state of desperate and paradoxical complicity: the forces of the old status quo who want Nigeria to remain as it is in structural stasis and the forces of the new ascendancy who want Nigeria to roil in democratic deadlock until something gives.

    Taken together, the two forces constitute a structural and political Kilimanjaro for the nation. They have been carefully assembled by Jonathan and his men to make sure that nothing happens. The few voices of genuine patriotic concern have found themselves stranded by choice between the two reactionary behemoths. For some of them, this is a classic parable of how one can bring political peril on one’s self by the sheer irrational hatred of a particular individual.

    So as we gather on the streets demanding the return of our abducted daughters from the Sambisa Forest, let us also not forget how we got to this sorry pass where Nigeria has become an international poster boy for unspeakable evil. We must redeem ourselves first before the nation can be redeemed. There is a Sambisa Forest in virtually every one of us.

  • The road to Sambisa

    The road to Sambisa

    THE world is turning upside down. Man’s marriage to technology is in a strange turbulence, with all those machines that were forged to give maximum comfort turning agents of discomfort. Death ravages the world in a terrible rapacity that evokes melancholic thoughts on those end-time prophecies. Insanity is no longer an affliction of the drug addict and the wayward. It is everywhere – inside those glittering offices and in the dark forests seized by those preaching a return to the caves.

    South Korea is hobbled and humbled by a ferry disaster in which over 200 died. Many of the victims were students who had dreams of becoming stars. Their stars were dimmed by a shocking failure of technology. Weighed down by a remarkable sense of responsibility, the Prime Minister resigned.

    The disappearance of a Malaysian airliner with 239 passengers has confounded experts who have been battling to unravel the mystery. What happened? Sabotage? Failure of technology? Human error? Natural disaster? Nobody can tell – for now.

    These are just two of the big cases. To them add the mindless abduction of 234 girls in Chibok, Borno State, by Boko Haram gunmen and the sentencing to death in one fell swoop of 683 Muslim Brotherhood members in Egypt. And throw in Russia’s  rumbling in Ukraine. Then, think about so many cases of depravity that go unreported in the media. What picture do we see? A world that has lost its balance in all ways.

    Technology may have shown its fatalistic side in other parts of the world, but here man has launched an inexplicable battle against humanity, shredding the very essence of living, with every one of us as collaborators in one way or the other.

    Boko Haram has rammed a big fear into our hearts – and our heads, some insist  – and we all seem so vulnerable. Helpless. We watch in awe as the fiendish sect strikes, in all its bestiality, where it hurts most, killing ordinary folks struggling to get by and snatching away school girls who do not know the root of its rage.

    The other day in Nyanya, near Abuja , the seat of power and home of the rich and powerful, Boko Haram unleashed suicide bombers who killed 75 people at a packed motor park. President Goodluck Jonathan was at the scene to behold the canvass of blood and at the hospital to comfort the injured. The next day, he was off to Kano for a rally, dancing Skelewu and Azonto. From Kano, he stormed Ibadan to join Oba Odulana in cutting his centenary birthday cake.

    It is two weeks that the girls – there are also many other innocent people who do not have anything to do with whatever may have sparked  the Boko Haram insanity – have been kidnapped, yet life goes on normally in Nigeria.

    It has been difficult getting the scene off my mind. A man crying like a baby, as he tells Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima of his agony. He and other parents had hired motorcycles and headed for the Sambisa forest in a desperate mission to find the girls. They were warned to turn back or never return, he said. Shettima too was in tears.

    Apparently moved by the heavy criticism of what many saw as its lack of insensitivity – and a shameful assault on public sensibility – the Presidency summoned a National Security Council meeting where, it was learnt, the military was ordered to rescue the girls. Almost one week after, the job remains undone.

    Now, the anger in the minds of distraught parents and all those who still see us as members of the human community is beginning to show. There was a protest in Lagos on Monday. Another was staged in Abuja yesterday. That is how it all begins. From little sparks that are ignored as mere irritation to some fire that may be difficult to put out and then – God forbid – a conflagration.

    The Senate reopened on Tuesday, asking the government to ask for help from Nigeria’s friends. I think our neighbours too should be asked to choose on whose side they want to be on this Boko Haram assault. There should be no ambivalence.

    Whichever way the battle goes, Boko Haram has bombed and gunned its way into our national consciousness. Hundreds of miles away from the epicentre of its militancy, echoes of its activities reverberate. Thousands of motorists were stranded last week on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway when text messages started going round that Boko Haram gunmen had seized Nigeria’s busiest highway. A massive security blanket was thrown over the area. It all turned out to be a hoax. A truck tripped over and spilled its contents, which some hungry and angry youths descended on. The police moved in to disperse them. This sparked the rumour that disrupted business and pleasure all day.

    Did the owner of the goods start the rumour to move security agents to action, thereby saving him from those would-be looters? Why did it take hours for the security agents to debunk the rumour? Can Boko Haram actually launch an open attack in the South? These are some of the conjectural disputations that followed the rumour.

    Whichever way you look at it, Boko Haram has become a tool of fear, used by mischievous minds to attain certain goals. Besides, it has shown the fecundity of the Nigerian mind. In the misery – and the mystery – that has unsettled us all, many have found the inspiration for rib-crackers and moving lines.

    Consider this that was sent to me yesterday by a colleague: “A Lagos  bus conductor asked a passenger, wey ya money? The passenger replied, I be staff. The conductor, frowning, asked him, which kind staff you be?U be police? Passenger, ‘no’. Navy? No. You be soldier? No? You be Air Force? No. So wetin you be now? Abeg pay ya money. The passenger replied: I be Boko Haram.

    “All the passengers began to scream. Driver, are you mad? Oga Boko, sorry sir. No vex. We go pay for you sir. Driver, na next junction I go drop o. O wa o. I wan drop o!”.

    And this about the girls: “To mum, she’s an Angel. To dad, a princess. To brothers, a priceless jewel. To sisters, a best friend. To aunties and uncles, an adorable sweet child. I am certain everyone reading this has one – a girl child, a joy to the world, to be pampered, protected and loved. Over 200 of these precious ones abducted and taken away from their loved ones, forced to become sex slaves, cooks, maids and every unimaginable thing to dark, evil, demented, dirty terrorists. What a tragedy!

    “Yes, they seem far away in Borno, born to poor, ordinary people, but just like you, to them these gals are princesses, angels, priceless jewels and sweet, adorable nieces. Don’t be numb to the pain. Days now counting and still no word. No daily progress report or any kind of info from the govt. This is unacceptable. I cannot launch a rescue mission and neither can you, but our government can. The buck stops on their table. Let’s come together and demand action. Please, rebroadcast and mount the pressure. It works. Say a prayer and keep talking about it until the Federal Government takes action and brings them home. Don’t do it for me; do it for the girl child in your life.”

    The abduction of the girls has renewed the debate about the leadership question. Are we truly helpless? Do we have the military capability –  the talk that this is no conventional war  –  to overwhelm Boko Haram? Does the conduct of our leaders inspire the troops? Are we treating Boko Haram as a national emergency? What is the line between politics and national interest? How much compassion have our leaders shown?  Can this happen to the children of the rich?

    In fact, the talk in town is that when Mrs Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s mum was kidnapped, the government moved fast and she was brought back home. When President Jonathan’s uncle was kidnapped recently, he was rescued or released – whichever is appropriate – in no time. So was Ijaw Chief E.K. Clark’s son. Why is this mass abduction taking time to resolve? Who can imagine the traumatic experience of the girls and their parents? Do their parents still sleep?

    There have been so many suggestions on how to free the girls. Many of them seem feasible; some are merely emotional and others are just naïve. A fellow suggested that all of us 140 million Nigerians – politicians, civil servants, teachers, reporters, lawyers; all – should move into the dreaded Sambisa forest and demand the return of the girls or live with the shame forever.

    Should we all decide to hit the road to Sambisa, who will lead? This is the big question. The lesson of it all is that we need men; real men who will think first of their sacred pact with the people and not the glamour of office; men of courage and character; men of honour. Real men.

    Who will lead the way to Sambisa?

    Show of shame in Abuja

    WHOEVER organised yesterday’s rally in Abuja to urge President Goodluck Jonathan to run in 2015 has dealt his image a bloody blow. Those who carried those placards of shame are shameless. Are the women among them true mothers? The rally coincided with a protest staged by women, many of them in tears, over the abduction of over 200 girls in Chibok, Borno State. They are yet to be found – two weeks after.

    These times demand soberness – in the face of a bare-knuckle assault on our seeming empty claim to civilisation. The President should order his campaigners to take a break. The mood is not right.

     

  • Sambisa: Forest of a thousand myths

    Sambisa: Forest of a thousand myths

    Not many Nigerians know much about the Sambisa Forest. Our Maiduguri Correspondent, Bodunrin Kayode, in Maiduguri gives readers a glimpse of this mysterious forest which was once a game reserve.

    AMBISA Forest.

    Perhaps a few weeks or month, back the name Sambisa Forest meant nothing to many Nigerians. Not anymore. It has come to signify terror and home to the terrorist group Boko Haram. The forest is now a myth for so many people within the Lake Chad basin who have come to align the complex north eastern vegetation to the home of Boko Haram instead of the game reserve the colonialist meant it for. The colonial government had marked the forest out as a game reserve!

    Today, Sambisa has become one of the strongest bases of the Boko Haram insurgents who run back into its dark recesses anytime they have finished their slaughter of harmless citizens. Others in this part of the country rightly associate it with wicked and poisonous reptiles such as loud hissing rattle snakes and giant crustaceans crawling underneath the forest vegetation which is not more than sometimes 1.5metres in some areas while some areas could be as high as two metres depending on the size of the shrubs growing in that section.

     

    Homes to wild animals

    To Mohammed Bagoni, it is a forest where elephants used to stray in from Central Africa through some game reserve corridors. According to him, he remembers seeing those mighty beasts in the forest as a kid when his uncle worked inside the reserve while it was under the state government. The thick skin of elephants and camels make the animals to be immune to the characteristic thorns of the Sambisa Forest vegetation which is why they can go through unhurt even feeding on the very thorns which the uninitiated mortals fear and which makes them call the place a forest. For many young people who have never travelled beyond Damaturu, Sambisa is the only forest they have seen in their life time. Apart from these patches of forests the north is generally a vast land where one can drive endlessly without seeing much vegetation.

    For so many young people outside the savannah, it is indeed very strange to find a ‘forest’ in the middle of the savannah vegetation. How would a ‘forest’ be found in the north eastern axis of Nigeria? Are they not living in a desert full of sand from the great Sahara which has encroached badly from the receding Lake Chad region due to global warming?

    The question many ask no one in particular is: Why the Sambisa forest still remains intact as a game reserve when many other green zones in the Sahel have been overtaken by global warming? What is it that makes Sambisa tick so much that the insurgents tormenting people of the north east have taken solace inside? Is it so dark underneath the vegetation cover that it can hide massive boa constrictors which can swallow a whole human who dare to hunt inside like we hear in the tropical rain forests of southern Nigeria? Is there any mystic charm or juju associated with the Sambisa?

    To some people in Maiduguri, the Sambisa is a real forest game reserve located not far from the state capital. From about 14 kilometers off Kawuri Village, along Maiduguri – Bama Road you will begin to see signs that you are close to the lowest thorny bushes of the reserve some as low as half a metre. It is not the typical forest one sees along some southern states which could be as high as a hundred metres creating a primary, secondary and tertiary scenario but a single dimensional forest which is visible driving through the main road that connects Maiduguri, Konduga and Barma. Actually it also graduates from as low as half a metre trees to the extremely thick areas where human skins cannot penetrate without being hurt by thorns if you do not have a cutlass or something to ward them off. That is the nature of the forest which is being manipulated and controlled by Boko Haram who have become masters of the savannah. A few people liken the ferocious sect to the animals who hitherto lived in the game reserve!

    According to Professor Umar Maryah of University of Maiduguri, the forest covers an area stretching approximately 60,000 square kilometers across the north east from Borno, Yobe, Gombe, Bauchi states along the Darazo corridor, Jigawa and right up to some parts of Kano State in the far north.

    It harbours a sizable population of wildlife, typical of savannah habitats worldwide and a conducive environment for animals such as monkeys, antelopes, lions, elephants, as well as bird species such as Ostrich, Bustard and a lot of those migrating species.There is no Sambisa without the sustaining Game Reserve for hunters and farmers. This means that a lot of animals in the Sambisa reserve contribute to making the land very fertile for farmers in the surrounding villages to make big harvest from the land. The forest reserve has been handed to the Federal Government through the National Park.

    To the south of the Sambisa is Askira local government area, to the south west is Danboa while to the west is Konduga and Jere local government areas. The reserve got its name from a village called Sambisa bordering the Gwozo axis of the area.

    On the eastern flank of the Sambisa is Gwoza Local Government Area which is also a notorious hide out for the Boko Haram insurgents. The Gwoza Hills, with heights of about 1300 meters above sea level provides scenery and is made up of ranges of mountains known as the Mandara Mountains. These Mountains form a natural barrier between Nigeria and Republic of the Cameroun, starting from Pulka. They over look the game reserves by meandering towards Mubi and beyond in Adamawa State. They equally have a connection with the Mambilla Mountain which is also home to the Gashaka Game Reserve at its foot, which is also a corridor connected to the Sambisa Game Reserve.

    According to a source in the Borno State department for urban planning, “The Mountains around Gwoza have several streams, ponds, springs dotting out into settlements by various tribes including the Gwozas. This mountain has varieties of attractive animal species which can be spotted when they are grazing. They graze mostly in the mornings, afternoons and evenings including nights for night breeding species.”

    Professor Maryah of the Geography Department of the University of Maiduguri said lots of villages surround the Sambisa making it conducive for farming which is practised by the people who are at the fringes of the Sambisa. The Sambisa village by the reserve has tribes like the Gamarabu, Margis also found in Gwoza and the Fulani who use the area as a grazing reserve. They live a lot on fruits and stem crops such as sugar cane and date palms which are very common in the Sambisa forest. No wonder date palm called ‘debino’ in Hausa has become a major fruit which is served to new initiates who agree to join the sect to fight propagators of western education.

    Vegetables such as spinach, onions and tomatoes are equally common in the place while grains such as wheat, sorghum, rice and millet are also present in the place. There are also root crops and nuts which are grown by locals and taken to Maiduguri and Banki in Cameroun. These include groundnuts, cow peas, sweet potatoes and cassava. For the area around Jere Local Government Area, they equally farm Irish potatoes which is a common delicacy in Borno even in the markets of the insurgents in the Sambisa. Gum Arabic which is grown all over the savannah is equally very common in the Sambisa. It has become a major crop grown by the people along the corridor.

    Master of the environment

    Members of Boko Haram are well knowledgeable about the enormous endowment of the Sambisa Forest and have capitalised on the fact that even if military tanks must be moved into the place to dislodge them, it must be done with knowledge and tactics.

    For now the people living along the Sambisa corridor are very careful while some of them have left their villages for Cameroun and Niger thus making the new landlords – Boko Haram- calling the shots.

    “As a matter of fact, Sambisa is not the only hideout of the insurgents, it is just that before the kill and run antics of the Boko Haram, nobody will expect that some human beings will be hibernating with a bunch of blood thirsty occultist Nigerians and their foreign collaborators in there.

    “Those who are still there are at the beck and call of the Boko Haram just like the teenagers of Government Secondary School, Chibok who have now become the latest sex slaves of the insurgents. To produce children that will finally be initiated into their cults. The girls will be moved tactically from one base to another mostly in the night so that they cannot recognize where they were. They will finally end up in Sambisa or Algoni, the two most dreaded bases remaining for the managers of the nation’s security to bring down

    “It actually took the intelligence services a long time to discover that the game reserve had become a hideout for the sect. They waited three years until several lives had been lost before acting reluctantly on the intelligence advises.”

    The source added, “We in the intelligence were ready to penetrate the sect but they (the government) wasted too much time concentrating on irrelevances. Now it is too late, the intelligence guys are not ready to risk their lives any more after all the frustration from the managers in Abuja. We have given them all the information they need including the level of sophistication of the insurgents; it’s up to them to act.”

    The Sambisa Forest lost its innocence as a game reserve before 2006. The forest is believed to have super bunkers underneath the Sahel so that the new tenants (Boko Haram) will be well placed to complete their aim of taking over all the government houses in the north east after bringing down the few military installations created years back to protect the people of this region.

    The forest in many ways looks like the forest created by the Yoruba novelist D.O. Fagunwa in his novels. The question is: who will take the veil and the shrubs off the face of this forest of a thousand myths?