Once again, and within the very short spate of four years, Nigeria has been thrown into deep mourning arising from the kidnapping and mass abduction of its youth. Hooked by the official hype and hoopla that the pernicious Boko Haram sect has been completely defanged and degraded, nobody ever believed that this damning occurrence was a possibility.
It was all beyond the purview of realistic imagination. After all, it has been said that thunder does not strike twice in the same place. But here is thunder striking twice and with devastating and disarming ease, and in the same Yobe State, too. The regularity of accidents is a function of the irregularity of the accidented.
So, while we are still searching for the bulk of the Chibok girls, the Boko Haram insurgents have now added the Dapchi girls to their horrific tally. It doesn’t get more eerily chilling than this. Like a historic nemesis, Boko Haram has once again deflowered the flower of our youth and defiled our virginal political innocence about the fate of a country seemingly wedded to calamity. Coming at a time when significant swathes of the country are foaming with blood occasioned by ethnic and religious hostilities, nothing can be more alarming in its apocalyptic possibilities.
As a nation, we have never appeared more vulnerable; as a people, we have never felt more collectively naked. If the almighty Nigerian Armed Forces, arguably the most formidable military machine in Tropical Africa, could be subjected to this systematic humiliation by a rag-tag militia, then something is wrong, very wrong. Something has gone awry in Nigeria.
In the end, perhaps nothing can beat the merciless acuity of General Godwin Alabi-Isama’s characterisation of Nigeria as a traumatized nation. In a TVC early morning show this last Tuesday, the plucky war veteran lamented the general anarchy and anomie threatening to overwhelm the Nigerian firmament. The old Brigadier could not have been more perceptive.
As hostage-taking and mass abduction take the front burner of national discourse once again, it is perhaps appropriate to add that the Nigerian state itself has become a hostage to misfortune. Increasingly authoritarian, it is less and less authoritative with its massive writ over the nation severely circumscribed by malfeasance in all its ramifications.
Nepotistic corruption and its corollary of squalid incompetence reduce the moral and psychological writ of a state leaving in their wake massive alienation and creative contempt on the part of the citizenry even as armed critiques from disaffected groups render huge chunks of the nation ungovernable with the compromised state unable to adjudicate with fairness and wisdom or rein in its own errant employees.
Statism without moral authority and political integrity leads to stasis and authoritarian distemper. As the Nigerian state predates on its own citizens in an attempt to keep the appearance of seriousness and solemnity, it also becomes a prey to monstrous national and international forces beyond its capacity to coerce and forcibly contain.
The state as a hostage is not a funny sight to behold. In order to mask its inner insecurities, frailties and failures; in order to ward off hostile international interlocutors and sundry local predators, the state resorts to comic solemnity. But even its enervated frown is a jocose distortion of the face which provokes howls of hilarity from the populace. In its grim buffooneries, the state becomes an object of infernal jokes; comic put-down and cosmic comedy.
In its utter disorientation and appalling helplessness, the state often brings the burlesque of horror on its own head. In the twenty first century, it is on official record that the Nigerian federal authorities abandoned the presidential sanctuary to rodents, halting presidential proceedings for a whole week. Increasingly, animals come to the rescue of besieged humans.
Snakes and monkeys are said to swallow humungous funds salted away by executive thieves. The serpentine stalkers are now accorded the status of revered royalties in some communities. In this new animal farm, snakes are the superior sub-species. Our poor animal cousins must be tired of this monkey business. Pythagoras, the ace Greek philosopher who first advanced the thesis that the soul of our grandma may happily inhabit an animal—according to Shakespeare—, must be shedding tears of joy in his grave. Haba, since when has it become a crime to come as a snake?
The greatest loser in this comedy of horror would appear to be President Mohammadu Buhari and his re-election bid. In boxing parlance, it is obvious that the president has taken a bad beat. Even an amateur political psychologist can glimpse behind the general’s glacial imperturbability, the trauma and torment eating away at him.
In his quiet sober moments, the general from Daura must be ruing the day he decided to trade the evergreen memory of his first coming for a civilian bid for the presidency in a post-annulment Nigeria whose ethnic equations and historical disequilibrium have dramatically deteriorated. The magnitude of disaster this time around is likely to offset the magnificence of the first coming.
In its uncanny cunning and the unfathomable cruelties of its tricks, history is a merciless master indeed. This time around too, it has decided to play a cruel trick on the straight, ramrod general. Up till this week and the Dapchi disaster, there were many Nigerians willing to overlook General Buhari’s manifest failings and weaknesses as a leader in the interest of the stability and security he has brought to a hitherto nation-threatening situation. Even his worst critics are compelled to give him stellar grades in the security department and his hands-on approach to the Boko Haram crisis.
But all that seem to have vanished in a bonfire. If the developments can be traced to General Buhari’s mortal enemies, they could not have chosen a more devastating and damning moment to strike. If on the other hand, it is the handiwork of fate, then it is obviously summoning whatever remains of the general’s reserve of courage, resilience and statesmanship. Without this extraordinary reserve of character, the re-election project is fatally doomed, an invitation to greater national calamity whatever the outcome.
Rather than expending valuable energy and resources in a re-election bid which is taking the nation nowhere except to the edge of the apocalypse, President Buhari may find it more profitable to spend the remaining part of his tenure on a spiritual, political and historical stocktaking which may yield the insight as to why the procedure he has adopted this time around and the type of primordial personnel he has chosen to work with have failed him and the nation miserably.
As this column has noted several times, this is not the time for election-mongering. This is the time to look at the fundament turning the nation into an unviable project and an ungovernable entity in progress. As long as the current organogram of the nation subsists, no government at the federal level can or will succeed.
The forces holding Nigeria hostage are legion and for the sake of analytical clarity they can be isolated into some major segments. First, it is obvious that somewhere, there is an international conspiracy bent on dismembering the nation, fracturing it into a collection of anomic statelings and autonomous tribal enclaves which may spell doom for Africa and the Black race as a whole.
To fight this menace on a unified front, you need the emergence of a truly nationalist pan-Nigerian ruling class such as appeared briefly in the run up to independence and which disappeared in the sectarian chaos that led to the first coup. But as we have discovered after forty years of civilian reconfiguration of the nation, no unified nationalist class can emerge from the current structural chaos of the nation.
Consequently, this leads us to the second and major hostage taker of the Nigerian post-colonial state. This is the statist gridlock that has turned Nigeria into a vast political garrison with civilian subalterns thinking they are emancipated citizens. As it is currently configured, Nigeria is an architectural nightmare; a magnificent but uninhabitable edifice that is also a continental health hazard because no one knows what will finally bring down the roof.
This structural misconfiguration has a logical and genetic offshoot in the security architecture of the nation which renders both state and nation very vulnerable indeed. A security architecture which is as lopsided as it is severely limiting and self-constricting can never excel in the surveillance responsibilities necessary to secure the sustenance, stability and ultimate survival of the nation. More dangerously, the sealed state it superintends is open hostage to internal and international adventurers bent on bringing the nation to its heels.
We can see this security nightmare in the service rivalry, the professional perfidy, the fierce mutual distrust and the open trading of blame and tackles between the police and the military in the aftermath of the Dapchi tragedy. Either through internal sabotage or superior local surveillance, it is obvious that the Boko Haram people were aware of the movements of Nigerian troops and knew the precise moment to strike with devastating precision.
In the course of his telephone intervention this past Tuesday, General Alabi-Isama bemoaned the summary abrogation of the old E-Branch of the Nigerian police by the military authorities. Because it is closer to the ground and could mix and slum it out with the local populace, Police intelligence is often superior to military intelligence in civil espionage and it could be critically counterproductive if it is not deployed as a result of service resentment and rivalry.
More than fifty years after, one continues to marvel at the E-Branch report of the Nzeogwu mutiny in all its painstaking and chilling clarity as well as its superior fidelity to actual facts. Not even the most elementary details escaped the constabulary spooks. In the aftermath of the Orkar coup of 1990, it was obvious that the police were aware of the suspicious stockpiling of arms in Ikorodu but decided to let the military authorities fall flat on their face as a result of service resentment.
Several decades after, the security nightmare continues to haunt the nation and has now brought international shame and obloquy in the aftermath of a double-whammy mass-abduction of innocent pupils. When it becomes the remit of the United Nations to appeal to local insurgents to free abducted pupils from murderous captivity, the nation itself is not far away from a UN trusteeship.
What a day that would be for the most populous and prestigious Black nation on earth! If this looming catastrophe does not concentrate our mind, one wonders what will. In the event, the most pressing hostage problem in Nigeria is the fact that the hegemonic feudal ruling class has allowed its fear of modernity and modernization to take it hostage and it has decided to take the rest of the country hostage along.
This is perhaps the most serious hostage taking ever witnessed by the Black person. It is proving far more devastating than the slave trade. As long as the situation persists, Nigeria will remain a captive nation. Nothing, and in particular this bogus federalism, will work. No election will survive the initial euphoria. As its vital components begin to feel the heat of terminal decline and desuetude, many will want out. The most daring colonial experience in nation-formation that the world has seen will be crying for euthanasia.
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