The abduction of almost three hundred female secondary schoolpupils from Chibok in Bornu State two years ago represents a new low in the struggle to preserve the sovereignty and sanctity of the Nigerian state. But the amateurish and cack-handed response of the federal authorities, the evident lack of federal will andthe sheer dilatoriness of the rescue efforts so far, also confirm why state implosion was inevitable in Nigeria.
Columnist apologizes ahead to readers who may find some of theimagesand expressions deployed in this column this morning rather coarse and emotive; a breach of the code of civility and restraint; a capitulation to gross and repulsive sensuality. It is true that this column is modeled on the canons of intellectual rigour and dispassionate analysis. But there are times when it is imperative and even healing to give free rein to one’s emotions particularly when and where reality defies cold logic and reason.
The title of the column is not original. It is adapted from two pieces from Norman Mailer,without doubt one of the greatest American writers of all time and a relentless social gadfly and hell-raiser extraordinary: The time of our time and The time of her time. The first is an epic romp through major events of American time while the other was written much earlier. With its whiff of the female reproductive cycle and the monthly maelstrom virtually all women are subject to, The time of her timeis the story of a monstrous male predator preying on the weaker sex and not so innocent women.
Two years ago as the Boko Haram insurgency reached its peak, two hundred and seventy six girls from Chibok Secondary School in the north eastern fringes of the country were forcibly abducted from their school in the dead of the night and then frog-marched straight back to the Stone Age. It was a crime against humanity so chilling in it is audacity, so brazen in its psychotic daredevilry and sectarian dementia that one is still at a loss about how anybody could even contemplate such a thing.
For those who are sensitive and whose capability to imagine human suffering on an outlandish scalehas not been blunted by the Nigerian condition, the Chibok tragedy is a severe blow at the deepest level of psychic disruption. No one born of a woman, who have female siblings, or who have fathered female children will fail to be disturbed.
Dear readers, is it the horror of imagining pubescent girls being matched through arid wastelands in the dead of the night by homicidal sickos, the insanitary hell of their primitive incarceration, the collapse of personal hygiene or the anguished cries of physical violation and the sheer bloody mess as psychotic virgin-hunters arrive in the time of their time? What type of human beings are these people, what species of humankind do they belong to?
Yet two years after this monstrous heist, it is as if the girls of Chibok have been neatly airbrushed out of history and memory. The official body language suggests that they are treated as tragic and unavoidable war casualties. It is obvious that the government would rather the matter die quietly and the girls expire unsung because of the crying shame and embarrassment it constitutes for the federal authorities. No state worth its salt or even the name will treat its valued citizens in this callous and indifferent manner. Civilized states have been known to stake their entire national honour and military prestige in rescuing a few nationals trapped in hostile circumstances, but not so the post-colonial state in Nigeria.
This past week, it has taken a foreign media outfit, this time the CNN, to show how derelict the Nigerian federal authorities have been in their responsibility to their citizens. CNN showed a clear montage of some of the girls in captivity, which means that contrary to official disinformation that the girls have been dispersed and scattered to the winds, a cluster of them still remains together, and they are alive if not exactly kicking.
Some of the girls appeared to be in fine fettle and one or two even managed a smile, a case of smiling at grief. The traumatized mothers, craning their neck in sheer disbelief, finally collapsedin hot sultry tears. If the living are this distraught, one can then imagine the agony of mothers who have gone to their graves not knowing whether their beloved daughters are alive or safe in sub-human captivity.
The unyielding political adversaries of the current federal administration may demur, but there can be no doubt that General Buhari has shown far more resolve and national muscle in battling the Boko Haram pestilence to a standstill. At the moment, the insurgent sect is effectively degraded as a viable fighting force and potent threat to national security. This is in sharp contrast to Buhari’s fey and feckless predecessor who was seen on prime time national television dancing azomto or whatever it is called the very next day the Chibok girls were abducted. This is discounting his presiding over the arms bazaar in which funds meant for buying weapons to fight the homophobic sect was shared among party loyalists.
The problem with the Buhari administration is that it has shown a reluctance and stoic unwillingness in coming up with an ideological protocol, a deep conceptual template for combating the clear and present danger this pernicious strain of Islamic fundamentalism represents to the political and spiritual health of the nationand its survival as a corporate entity.
So far, there is no clearly enunciated intellectual disavowal of the primitive and pre-modern prejudices which drive the genocidal sect and which have found a fertile nursery bed in the north of the country. This is the ideological bedrock of the periodic anti-secularist assaults on the modern nation-state of which Boko Haram is merely the latest and most horrid manifestation. The result has been the economic and spiritual devastation of large swathes of our northern landscape. This time it is Boko Haram. Next time it may be something more catastrophic.
There are those who believe that President MohammaduBuhari himself harbours patriarchal and paternalistic ideas about women and their role in society which are only a benign variant of the violent and homicidal virus that drive the Boko Haram insurgency. As proof, they point at the virtual absence of the fairer sex in the engine room of the Buhari presidency. Since this is a question of cultural conditioning and political habitus, it is a very sensitive matter indeed. A man’s religious code cannot be subjected to withering assault simply because he happens to be the president of a country.
Objectively however, this seeming presidential contradiction leads to several salient issues which open the backdoor to the dreaded and testily ignored National Question once again. First, it speaks to the cruelly asymmetrical and mutually contradictory nature of the elite values which drive politics in Nigeria and the inability of the nation to cohere around a set of core national values.
Second, since other elite factions from other parts of the country in which women have wrested higher prominence and visibility have teamed up with General Buhari in a national project of state redemption, a harmonization of political, economic and spiritual values is imperative if national support for the well-meaning but politically hobbled retired general is not to suffer a severe hemorrhage henceforth.
Finally, even more than what it means for the whole nation, the allure of the Buhari presidency at this particular historical conjuncture stems from the widespread belief that the retired general is the only one with the integrity, the mass appeal and the heroic courage to carry out the fundamental political, economic and spiritual reforms for the core north which will align its core citizenry and increasingly restive denizens with the dictates and imperatives of a modern nation-state. If Buhari fails in this venture, the apocalyptic meltdown that is bound to follow will make the Boko Haram scourge look like a child’s play.
The harmonization of core values cannot be achieved by mere presidential diktat in a country riven by ethnic, religious, economic and regional polarities. It is time to fashion out an organogram of national core values through dialogue-driven initiatives even as the war against corruption proceeds apace, failing which a disaggregation of the political structure into a quasi-confederation arrangement is inevitable. Nigeria is stalled and disabled by a series of overlapping and interlocking contradictionswhich can only be prised apart and reset by delicate and superior political engineering.
The Boko Haram tragedy is merely a most hideous instance of these national contradictions. It took its time to warn and prepare us but as usual we failed to be warned and to be prepared. It is now obviously impossible to bring back all the girls at once, but since a military solution is frankly out of the question, the government should bring a kind of closure by seeking international help to negotiate for the release of the girls even if it means entering into dialogue with the more benign faction of the murderous sect. Poor girls, it is time to bring back the violated cycle of their time.
NATION
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