According to a Hausa saying: Laifi tudu ne; ka taka naka ka koma hangen na wani, which implies that man overlooks his fault to see the fault of his fellow man. This applies to all other entities above the individual man.
Since the vicious gale of terror stormed Nigeria about four years ago, the federal government and the state governments have been buck-passing between themselves over whose fault it is at every given stage that facilitates and sustains the persistence and seeming intractability of the epochal phenomenon.
The two parties have engaged themselves in the blame game, sometimes ridiculously, sometimes irritatingly, but most times outright devastatingly, considering the ugly fact that the game ends up terrifyingly futile in terms of defeating or, at least, containing insurgency.
The public have always been sickened by the piercing sound of the federal government blaming the affected state governments of being lackadaisical in discharging their responsibility of watching the movements of people among the various communities in their respective areas of governance, sensing suspicious movements akin to those of terrorists and reporting same to the federal government for prompt appropriate action; and the state governments blaming the federal government of procrastinations, dithering and, sometimes, glaring absence of any required will to battle and quell terror with the required force of its military.
Both parties accuse each other of playing appalling politics with the terror issue, in spite of the massiveness of the ensuing carnage and its undesirable ripple effect on vital bases of the existence of the Nigerian entity.
There was nothing new, therefore, when, last on Wednesday May 22, 2013, the Nigerian government, with the instrument of its mouthpiece, the Information Minister, Mr. Labaran Maku, accused the Northern state governments of failing in the required community mobilisation for efficient information gathering to help track down the movements and quell the activities of terrorists in the region.
Maku, tenacious in his usual self since the explosion of the first terror bomb in this country, emerged from the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, tongue-lashing the Northern states governors for doing little to surmount the current security challenges characterised by the perilous activities of terrorists.
What does this blame imply? If the Northern states governments had been up and doing in the required community mobilisation for the gathering of the desired information on the vicious moves of the insurgents and reporting same to the federal government with the desired promptness and accurateness to facilitate the first-tier government respond rapidly by deploying its armed forces to the location to tackle the situation, terror would, by now, have been subdued. Insecurity would, by now, have been history in Nigeria.
When blaming the ‘blood-thirsty and malicious’ federal government, states governments have never openly owned up to their failure to install efficient mechanisms to sternly monitor and finely comb the flashpoint communities to glean the required information on the activities of terrorists. They have, to this day, even failed to clear themselves of the allegation that a substantial population of the terrorists have been discovered to be sons of the soil in the affected states.
The governors of the affected states seem at pains to admit their failure to see potentially dangerous situations and nip them in the bud with the force of the Nigeria Police in their respective states in their capacity as the chief security officers of the states. All they do is blaming the first-tier of government squarely for their woes after every carnage.
The federal government, on its part, fires its own salvoes at the ‘dull, weak and politically malicious’ state governments for failing to effectively monitor and report suspicious moves, and playing politics with the insecurity situation in their respective states.
Meanwhile, the insecurity situation has been escalating to more fearsome dimensions, manifesting in several unthinkable forms and spreading to more states from its initial Northeast five with a daring formidability that mocks Nigeria’s fame as the single most formidable peace-keeping operator in Africa, showcasing the strongest and best-skilled military. In the process, the carnages multiply by the day, depleting the Northern population by scaring percentages.
Both of them can successfully battle insecurity by coming together to lay all their respective strengths and weaknesses and design a mechanism of effective collaboration and corroboration with each doing well what the other requires it to do to help quell the disastrous insurgency that is currently spreading like a wild fire.
The more they waste precious time in their blame game, the more the situation worsens.