By Gimba
Kakanda
There’s no indignity as having the news of a people’s miseries and deaths denied, played down or unsympathetically politicised. The only tragedy worse than this may be the absolute lack of strategy or, as some have said of the ongoing counter-terrorism fights, the will to end these many killings. The past few weeks have been ordinarily Nigerian – an existence I now liken to nightmare. The most frightening, especially to the ruling class, were the ease with which Abuja was threatened, its security arrangement openly undermined, not once, not twice, in a short time: the attack of the headquarters of our biggest intelligence-gathering agency in broad daylight and the bombing, twice, of Nyanya, a suburb of Abuja. Outside the corridors of Abuja, it was actually the abduction of almost 300 schoolgirls that has sparked a fashionably viral hash tag campaign – #BringBackOurGirls.
The online campaign has turned into physical protests, attracting the attention of the international community, and active participation of conscientious people all over the world. In Abuja, obviously the nation’s second largest hub of internet users after Lagos, the campaign has become a daily convergence for series of meetings – and so far two marches to offices of concerned security chiefs have taken place – where deliberations on the fate and freedom of the abducted girls are made. The success of Abuja’s #BringBackOurChild campaign is attributed to various factors of which the social class of the campaigners is the top. A friend playfully dubbed the campaign “The Ajebota Awakening”, but in fairness, these are the only people, largely members of the (comfortable) middle-class, worthy of being listened to by government of which they’re either beneficiaries, previously involved or friends.
All the revolts against the establishment ever initiated by the masses were discriminately crushed by security personnel. The only revolution a hungry people know is called riot; It’s destructive, and costly. Because they’re immediately possessed by anger the moment they take to the street to protest an injustice. So, statistically, a successful revolt of the masses is impossible, in fact unthinkable, in Nigeria. This is why it’s advisable to applaud the efforts of the “middle-class”, the similarly oppressed people, now strutting to challenge the authorities to #BringBackOurGirls.
This is also why I do not understand those who have condemned the participation of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s wife and daughter in the #BringBackOurGirls campaign. What we call activism is actually a campaign against, or reaction to, perceived injustice, social and political. This is why I do not understand the “I wish I were an activist” armchair critics to whom a rise against national threat is a responsibility of a few. See, activism is not a profession; it’s an instinctual response to a failed system. And if you’ve not been really rattled by the happenings in Nigeria, that’s because you’ve run out of compassion!
The participating Atikus are, in my understanding of ethics, more responsible and relevant than their critics tweeting from bedroom and offices in this dangerous time. You may call their involvement a publicity stunt, but publicity, attracting the eyes of the world to our wounds, is what we need in this agitation for purpose, for the meaning of being (a Nigerian).
There’s something painfully hypocritical about the Nigerians condemning the United States of America’s offer to support us in curbing this escalating terrorism, having all understood that our indigenous counter-terrorism measures.
I don’t understand this: you accused Goodluck Jonathan of being an Abubakar Shekau masked, and even ridiculed the efforts of the understandably unmotivated Nigerian soldiers dying to protect you in the Northeast. In a bid to end this mischievous conspiracy, the accused accepted the offer of “neutral” forces to intervene. Suddenly you feel the President has been innocent, and that it’s actually the expected Americans, through their compliantly evil CIA, who have been messing up this polity all along. I wrote against our hypocrisy on the Boko Haram when some of us became uncritical disciples of Governor Nyako-promoted conspiracy theory.
So spare me the history lectures, I don’t even mind having this godforsaken country colonised again, with every damned institution under a racist Conrad, every school under an erudite missionary – a bumpy reverse into a century past.
Are we the only race ever possessed by these crises of spiritual, ethnic and national identities? Have we no wisdom to manage diversity? Why are we so innately savage? As long as we’re incapable of running an institution, there’s no shame in “stepping aside” for the actually sympathetic savages to assist us. Of course, this too is a conspiracy theory – a script of the American “occupiers!”
As for those who have already prophesied a catastrophe as the aftermath of foreign interventions, what would be more catastrophic than having abducting minors savagely raped, continuously and without a mean or will of rescuing them? Nigeria is already a catastrophe for those who have stopped living in denials, and with the coming of foreigners, I guarantee that our deaths are now going to be televised, documented and no longer seen as lies and propagandas by mischievously insular politicians. We must now begin to end the hash tags, for everyday is an unbearable torture for our sisters and daughters in captivity. Hash tags don’t cure, they don’t even prevent. The just sensitise. May God save us from us!
