Several years ago, Boko Haram elements operated almost at will in parts of Kogi State, notably in the Igala and Ebira country, terrorising communities, blowing up prisons and setting free the inmates, and manufacturing the infernal bombs with which they wrought their signature devastation and ruin.
They were flushed out unceremoniously.
The terrain was never hospitable anyway, and they were too thinly dispersed to duplicate their vicious grip on the Northeast.
Recently, however, residents of the capital, Lokoja, caught more than a whiff of Boko Haram’s ideological soul mates, the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), propagated wittingly or unwittingly by the state’s pathetically insecure governor, Yahaya Bello, product of a process that made a mockery of law, logic, common sense, and elementary decency.
Residents of the city woke up one morning several weeks ago to find that, in the dead of night, some unidentified persons had bulldozed and pulverised just about every roundabout that beautified the landscape and eased the flow of traffic. Where they once stood, dusty, unsightly gashes stared at passers-by like open wounds.
At this writing, no one has been arrested and charged with willful and malicious destruction of public property. There is therefore reason to believe that if the demolition was not ordered from above – decreed personally by the governor, that is — it was surely carried out with his blessing.
This conclusion is strengthened by what is being said in official circles that the structures were defective not just structurally but also aesthetically, and that they had to be taken down.
But where is it documented that they were accident-prone or constituted safety hazards? And why was that determination not communicated officially to the residents.
Why, for that matter, did the structures have to be taken down, in the night, all of them, and in one fell swoop? Why were they not taken down one or two at a time, and a schedule for their reconstruction published?
In any case, how can a demolition derby be the priority of a government that cannot pay its employees their wages or pensions, sustain existing services and maintain public facilities — how can this be the first order of business of any government, even a clueless government headed by a an inconclusive governor aided by a legislature that is more inconclusive still?
Scarce funds that should have gone to serve more productive ends will now have to be appropriated to rebuild structures that should not have been demolished in the first instance.
Nigerians are used to seeing wrecking crews tear down all manner of structures on the grounds that they were built without official permits, failed to comply with specifications, constituted a danger to public and environmental safety, or that the space was required for overriding public purpose. But a government demolishing with petulant disdain public structures erected with public funds duly appropriated — perfectly innocuous, functioning structures for that matter?
This barbarous recourse takes political brutalism to a new low. It calls to mind the depredations of the Taliban in Pakistan, and of ISIL in Iraq and Syria. The one has been smashing up monuments erected unto Buddha, and the other has been smashing up ancient artefacts that have over millennia stood witness to the civilisation of the Arab world.
To be sure, the parallel is inexact. But the conclusion is not far-fetched that the Kogi demolition derby springs from the same mindset as the depredations of the Taliban and ISIL. It will come as no surprise, therefore, if inconclusive Governor Bello in one of those muggy nights for which Lokoja is notorious, dispatched his wrecking crew to smash up priceless artifacts of Nigeria’s colonial history dotting that city, among them Lord Lugard’s residence and Bishop Samuel Ajayi’s vicarage.
Before Bello does so, it is necesssary to remind him that he cannot remain an inconclusive governor forever. He will conclude his tenure one day, probably sooner than later. Then, he will lose the immunity that has shielded him from prosecution for a contemptible crime against public property.
The claim that the Kogi structures were torn down because they were judged unsafe or inappropriate is puerile. By whose lights, it is necessary to ask again, were they so judged? And by what metrics?
The real reason must be sought in the insecurity of the governing class, and the fetishism in which they have consequently sought redemption. Exercising power without anything that can be called a mandate, Bello has more reason than any of his predecessors to feel deeply insecure, and therefore to resort to voodoo.
When I was visiting the other day, the word out there in the streets of Lokoja was that Bello’s strategists – an ecumenical team cutting across all creeds — had divined that all the roundabouts in the town were infernal booby traps under which lay some of the most infernal objects conceivable, interred there with the dastardly objective of making Kogi ungovernable.
Deep inside one of the more prominent structures bulldozed, I gather that they found two corpses placed back to back and facing opposite directions. The horrible symbolism did not escape the crack diviners. The Ebira, the ethnic group which Bello belongs, were to be locked into permanent enmity with the Kogi Yoruba, the so-called Okun, who constitute the political base of the rival claimant to the governorship, Abiodun Faleke.
And this was just one of the malevolent designs encoded in more than 20 roundabouts to which the Kogi authorities took the bulldozer and the wrecking ball that muggy night.
I was told that a room in one government office had been out of bounds for as long as anyone could remember. There was no formal decree to that effect; it was simply that everyone high and low had learned to avoid it from a healthy instinct for self-preservation.
Not Bello. Acting on orders, one of his aides shot a stream of bullets into the lock in a bid to force it open. Whereupon, I was told, a viscous red gushed out of the bullet holes as if from a geyser. Forensic experts have been working since then to unravel the mystery of the viscous red fluid. Their findings will no doubt be of interest to students of the para-normal.
The bodies found deep inside what used to be a roundabout before Bello came inconclusively on the scene is a different matter, however.
That site is a crime scene.
Bello should have had the crime properly investigated with a view to bringing the perpetrators to justice. Who were the persons entombed in the scene? How did they meet their gruesome fate? Who placed their bodies there? Who supervised the project, with what kind of inducement, from whom?
I don’t envy him.
In the Muhammadu Buhari era, life even after the most conclusive governorship is uncertain enough. An inconclusive tenure that throws up the prospect of criminal prosecution for malicious damage to public property and destruction of evidence at a crime scene has got to be the ultimate nightmare.
NATION
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