Tag: terror

I will not dare to think that this grave we dig today shall bloom tomorrow. But it could. Nigeria could become that mass grave we dream to bury the shoots of nationhood and bliss nurtured by men we may never measure up to. But this is hardly about the founding fathers in whose hands Nigeria pirouetted and prospered.

This is about you and me. This is about the Boko Haram terrorist group and the violence and death it perpetrates. This is about our clueless and selfish leadership. This is about predatory forces from abroad running amok and unchecked all over our sovereignty. This is about perverted international news agencies sowing seeds of chaos and interminable bloodbath in our doubtful minds. This is about devious news anchors attacking our minds with coordinated lies and deadly propagandas.

And this is about our knack for playing stupid, predictably and self consciously. This is about our knack for turning logic on its head to complement our innate greed and perversions. Nigeria dies on our watch, today. This minute, every civil dream and seed of State evaporates, because we have submitted our will to humour our wiles and the machinations of friendly predators from abroad.

We think Nigeria is a mistake. But Nigeria was never a mistake. It is never the mistake. You and I are the mistake. You and I are the emblems of hope serving as crops of wrath where covetousness and deceit whets inhuman appetites. As you read, the myth of war and secession holds fast. Despite the bitterness that trails the Nigerian civil war, characters that ought to know better acidly pronounce the necessity of war and violent secession like the next best thing that could ever happen to you and me.

This myth holds particularly among the youths because it is all they could manage today. War and separation remains appealing to the Nigerian youth not just because politicians, activists and journalists of vulpine intent and intellect claim it’s our next best alternative, our youth lust for war and secession because the idea offers fleeting moments of sentimentality that reinforces their dreams of acceptance and self-worth. Even those who know it to be a farce are loath to jettison that infectious romanticism that gets them giddy as overfed cattle gorging on barn supplies.

The youth are told that the only times in their lives that they would be worth something and enjoy a hopeful reality is when they agree to serve as cannon fodder for the total balkanization of the Nigerian State. They do not know the import of the politics they perpetuate. It’s not about defending the interests of a minority tribe nor is it about paving the way for a more responsible and humane government. It’s about working for some devious activist, politician, diplomat and public officer who works for some rich and privileged cabal with all manners of interests across international boundaries.

Today, we perpetuate the politics of the hashtag. So what if Michelle Obama, Cameron, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and so on pose with the hashtag: “Bringbackourgirls” before the camera; how does their show of solidarity resolve the several ills afflicting us?

No foreign financial or military aid will resolve our problems. No degree of idiotic mumbo-jumbo by American clowns like McCain, Amanpour and company will rectify the many ills afflicting us. Hence we can give the McCains of the world as many thumbs up as we like, claiming they are only sounding the knell of truth; truth is, we would only be affirming that indeed, Nigerians are just another pitiful specie of “black monkeys…lower mutants on the totem pole of black skinned brutes,” “clueless niggers,” “nitwits” and so on as many Caucasian racists had severally described us in the past.

I agree that the nation needs to sit down to deliberate over the most dependable and progressive path forward. However, it would be the greatest fraud and disservice to you, me and posterity if we claim that splitting Nigeria according to America’s ultimate game plan remains the most practicable solution to our grief.

It is alright for a people to determine what course of action would best serve their interests but it would be suicidal for us all to believe that our travails shall end in a new Biafra, Federal Republic of Oodua or United States of Arewa. In every new, independent nation we build, there shall be no secure civilization or the usual securities by which a nation thrives. That is because whatever new States we create shall comprise of ignorant, turbulent proletariat stymied by crushing poverty and interminable penchant to play dumb. Such manner of working class or grassroots would as usual be dominated by the same ruling class whose insensitivity and wile are responsible for our travails today. And of course, the so-called “super-powers” that incite our breakup today in the interest of the commoners, will queue solidly behind all manners of tyrants they succeed in installing in our fragmented States.

As it is now in contemporary Nigeria, every new leadership we have in every new nation we create shall effortlessly dominate us and impose upon us their children, relatives and political associates while they make labourers and thugs of the youth by whose blood, bestiality and sweat whatever the new nation was achieved.

The choice is ours to make; we either choose to remain a bunch of fools and clueless agitators or we could choose to leave the current leadership to the madness it perpetuates while we chart fresh paths to the future of our dreams.

Some of our greatest problems in this country, besides corruption, are racism and greed. However, the Nigerian youth need not be handicapped by these but we seem not to know that. It is time to heal. It is time for the Nigerian youth to take their rightful place in the scheme of things. I will never tire from saying that it’s about time we sought and identified our own candidate – the untiringly just and humane candidate. And let it be known that we shall never find such candidate amidst the coven of predators to whom we have learnt to serve as prey.

In order to heal, the Nigerian youth need to create and unite under a socio-political platform immune to and jealously guarded against the madness of materialism, racism and intractable wile.

We need to identify the demons that drive the ruling class and dispossess our minds of every vanity that makes us habitable to similar fiends. The tragedy of our generation subsists in our seemingly uncontainable prospects and our desperation to be lorded over and contained, at a price. We are more endowed in intellect and humanity than the current ruling class. Thus let us not continue to serve as disposable pawns in its politics of bitterness and plunder.

If this unusual and unpredictable development is to flourish amid peace and order, reciprocal respect and budding intelligence, it will call for that truest and most dependable social surgery I advocate: revolution by the ballot system not through the gun barrel or coordinated chaos fed to us piecemeal and in vicious mouthfuls by the foreign media and predatory nations’ “intelligence” and “security” agencies.

• To be continued…

Remember this moment for what it’s worth. This is the moment when the neurotic tick-tock of midnight silences our whispers of dawn. This is the moment when velleity of hope submits to our maniacal dreams of tomorrow. This moment, Nigeria dies. Nigeria dies because we kill her. And our tragedy is instructive; it bristles with imprudence of a people caught in the vortex of self-inflicted tragedies: dead oil refineries, dying agriculture, substandard education, insecurity, bandit bankers, and rusty steel sectors.

Today, we witness an eighth tragedy: Boko Haram, a northeast terrorist sect. As you read, paths leading into Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States are littered with ghosts and entrails of lives horridly cut down by the sect; dismembered limbs, pierced eyes, ear slivers, jaw splinters, gouged lips, odd tibias, skin flaps, and toes clutter the roads like glowworms and slugs in the wake of bloody bomb blasts.

Just recently, the terrorist sect reportedly abducted over 250 school girls in Borno. In the wake of the incident, Nigeria flounders in a sea of seething protests anchored by civil rights groups, celebrities, and politicians. An interesting dimension to the protests however, manifests at the involvement of overseas politicians and celebrities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and media.

A fascinating feature of the protest is the trademark brandishing of placards bearing the inscription, “Bringbackourgirls” by protesters continually posing for photographs to be posted on the internet and published or broadcast in mainstream media. This aspect of the campaign gathers momentum in the wake of Boko Haram’s broadcast of a video showing some of the abducted girls; the leader of the group demands that the Nigerian government exchange some of their incarcerated members for the girls.

Prior to the broadcast of the video, the Nigerian leadership had come under virulent and wholly justifiable criticisms for its insensate response to the situation by the Nigerian citizenry. While it struggles to deal with resentment at home, disconcerting indignation and ridicule are hauled at the nation’s leadership from abroad; the unanimous verdict is that the President Goodluck Jonathan-led government is ineffectual, clueless and virtually non-existent.

President Jonathan, given his antecedents and characteristic incompetence, has no doubt earned the resentment and worldwide ridicule he continually suffers but what is utterly unacceptable is for the United States of America (USA) and its apparatchik of android ‘statesmen’ and enslaved media to exaggerate the Nigerian situation via undisguised insults and insinuations of greater chaos into the minds of the citizenry.

Consider for instance, US Senator, John McCain’s ridicule of the Nigerian president; analyzing McCain’s utterances, Ishaan Tharoor, a former Senior Editor with TIME Magazine, now Foreign Affairs writer with Washington Post stated thus: “An inveterate hawk, McCain always champions the U.S.’s ability to swiftly – and often militarily – change the facts on the ground in a crisis-spot, be it Iraq, Syria, Ukraine or anywhere else. But comments he made Tuesday, demanding yet another American intervention, deserve scrutiny for another reason: rudeness.”

McCain said to Daily Beast’s Josh Rogin: “If the U.S. knew where [the kidnapped girls] were, I certainly would send in U.S. troops to rescue them, in a New York minute I would, without permission of the host country…I wouldn’t be waiting for some kind of permission from some guy named Goodluck Jonathan.”

McCain’s juvenile and uncultured outburst comes in the wake of coordinated and very manipulative reportage of the Nigerian crisis by the American press. The onslaught by the American media features desperate attempts by the New York Times, CNN, among others to project Nigeria as a failed state deserving urgent U.S. rescue. It gets more interesting to see CNN’s Christiane Amanpour embark on the kind of insidious reportage she perpetrated throughout the Egyptian and Libyan crises. The highly prejudiced journalist manipulated facts and outright lies to justify America’s divisive role in the conflicts; the consequence is U.S.’s backing of a dictatorship in Egypt, the murder of Muammar Ghadaffi, and institutionalization of violence and bloodshed in the countries. It’s equally amusing to see the CNN reporter that travelled to Chibok in Borno to interview families of abducted girls struggle to affect compassion for the affected families; her pitiful effort is laughable for its futility and obvious desperation to produce a touching, Emmy award winning scene for the camera.

Why are Nigerian activists and the international community suddenly finding their voices and humanity now? Recently, Boko Haram, in the wake of several mass murders, killed 59 students, all boys, of the Federal Government College (FCE), Buni Yadi, Yobe State, while they slept in their dormitory. In the attack, which occurred around 2 am, the teenage victims were shot and burnt to death as the gunmen torched the hostel after spraying them with bullets. The howl of the students maniacally butchered in their sleep and the sorrowful tenor of their parents’ ceaseless cries mutually resonate a macabre plot of civilization gone awry even now. Why couldn’t every Nigerian come out to march against the terrorist sect and the Nigerian leadership’s insensitivity in the wake of the attack? Are the lives of the murdered boys so worthless and expendable? Were they less valuable to the Nigerian society than the abducted girls?

At the backdrop of Nigerian civil societies’ callousness and duplicity, the American press perpetrates its characteristic manipulative journalism, perpetuating in same breath, the notion that the Nigerian Military had been forewarned about four hours before Boko Haram struck. American politicians and media continue to pillory the Nigerian Military for its incompetence in dealing with the crisis even as they failed to accord the U.S. government and military similar treatment for ignoring security warnings about the September 11, 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack, several months before the incident – about 3, 000 people died in the attack.

Sadly, the coordinated assault and smear campaign launched by American ‘statesmen’ and media against the Nigerian government excites the applause of a greater number of Nigerian activists. The tragedy of the latter’s ignorance is accentuated by their inability to see through America’s sinister plot to aggravate the Nigerian situation via its state-sponsored psyops (psychological operations). This strategy involves a propagandist plot anchored on an Aggressive Cue-like media theory and disruptive security intelligence reportage.

Nonetheless, the “Bringbackourgirls” campaign gathers momentum as more people across the globe identify with it; all it takes is for a celebrity, politician or nondescript character to pose before the camera and brandish a placard screaming “Bringbackourgirls.” What difference does it make if Michelle Obama, America’s first lady holds such a placard before the camera? What difference does it make if celebrities worldwide do likewise? Of what consequence is infantile diatribe like McCain’s to the Nigerian state?

The consequences are discernible in President Jonathan’s jitters and frantic request for help from the U.S., Israeli and other so-called “first world” super powers. It will be great if the Americans, Israeli and so on truly “assist” with their “intelligence” apparatuses in rescuing the abducted girls and wiping out Boko Haram. It will also be appreciated if they can quietly leave Nigeria as soon as their “humanitarian mission” is accomplished. But this is wishful thinking no doubt.

• To be continued.