By Dan Agbese
And so we live on edge. Our country is awash in a flood of blood. The blood of our compatriots, old and young. We hear the groaning of the wounded and the moaning of the maimed. We hear the weeping of the bereaved. And we hear the chorus of condemnations. Only this Wednesday, the Executive Council of the Federation devoted its 50-minute meeting to the condemnation of the killings in Kano and Jos. It is official – from Labarun Maku, minister of information.
It could hardly be worse for our country. The giant of Africa is bleeding and bleeding badly. Boko Haram was thought to be a small group of religious fundamentalists, merely doing what such characters do – engage in a vain attempt to set back the hands of the clock. When the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua dispatched soldiers and the police to root them out and rout them, he thought the group was no more than a huge pimple on the temples of the country. He was mistaken.
Boko Haram proved otherwise with its reach and capacity. The evidence is in its unmistakable handwork – the flood of tears, the dead, the wounded, the maimed and the bereaved. Only last week President Goodluck Jonathan told the regional summit on security in Nigeria held in Paris: “This unconventional war has so far claimed 12,000 lives, with more than 8,000 persons injured or maimed….”
These figures are now clearly outdated. More people have died and many more injured and maimed since Jonathan gave his speech. The killings have also spread, widening the theatre of what Jonathan called “the unconventional war.” These killings have been going on and increasing in intensity, spread and horrendous dimensions since 2009.
There is no way one can put it nicely: We are overwhelmed. Our leaders are stupefied. The confusion that attended the initial and continuing poor response to Boko Haram has festered. It is now compounded by the increasing deficit of truth about the conduct of the war and the fate of the abducted girls. We rely on foreign reporters to get the facts. Yet, in the face of the clearly incontrovertible facts unearthed by them, the president’s men still believe they have something to gain from persisting in the folly of deceiving the people with their own manufactured version of truth that contradicts the facts.
Truth suffers in all cases of violence. But for the president’s men to make it a virtue in our current situation in the clearly misguided belief it would make their principal look good is to compound the confusion and make the people dismissive of their government. I plead with the president’s men not to make the government lose its credibility.
Sometime last month, the governor of Borno State, Kashima Shettima, said that the Boko Haram insurgents were better armed and more motivatedthan our armed forces. The president’s men not only condemned and insulted him but also took it upon themselves to lecture him on the implications of what they regarded as his unpatriotic statement and what a well-armed and motivated army looks like.
The president’s men did their duty to their principal. Sadly, their condemnations of the governor and their gratuitous lesson did not change the fact. Boko Haram has consistently proved its capacity to dictate the theatre of “the unconventional war” with mind-numbing successes against our security forces.Chibok, Nyanya 1 and 2, Kano, Gamboru-Ngala, Gwoza, Maiduguri and Jos this week, underline that fact. Their successes owed largely to their superior arms and high motivation in carrying out a misguided mission.
It could not have come as such a big surprise, therefore, when Major-General Abdullahi Muraina, chief of accounts and budget of the Nigerian Army, said three days ago, according to The Punch newspaper of May 22, 2014: “Currently, budgetary allocation for the military is inadequate to meet the contemporary security challenges and also cater for the welfare of the Nigerian Army.”
So, here we are. Prosecuting a war, conventional or unconventional, costs money, a lot of money. Soldiers, brave as they are, are not magicians. They cannot fight with bare hands. They need to be properly armed and, indeed, better armed than their enemies. It is the business of government to so equip and motivate them. What has the federal government been doing in the face of the cocktail of security challenges confronting this country? I wonder. So should you.
Jonathan declared a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states to contain Boko Haram in May last year. It did not prove to be the quick fix he probably expected. He extended it for another six months when it expired in November. Still, the situation gets worse, not better. He has now extended it for another six months.
What difference would it make? It does not take rocket science to come to the conclusion that if the fate of the poor school girls abducted by Boko Haram 39 days ago in Chibok had not brought the international community to our aid, the next six months of the emergency rule would still end without our armed forces bringing Boko Haram to its knees.
I believe Jonathan does not even have an option in this matter. He must respond positively to the needs of the security forces without further delay. The international community will not fight the war for us. Our men and women in uniform still have to do it. It is not such a gratifying evidence of our national progress that whereas our country that rose to the challenge of its dismemberment by prosecuting a civil war to keep it united, cannot defeat this insurgency. We are talking here about the Nigerian Army that has consistently proved its mettle in theatres of international conflicts since the late General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi commanded the UN peace keeping force in the Congo sixty years or so ago.
Someone should tell the president and his men that the blame game is over. Even if Jonathan still subscribes to the political interpretation of Boko Haram, he has now acknowledged that “Christians have been killed; churches have been destroyed; Muslims have also been murdered and mosques destroyed.” So, this is not about his political ambition. It is about his rising to the biggest challenge of his leadership.
Many years ago, another young man faced aneven more critical challenge to the country and its people. He did not shrink; he did not waffle; he did not engage in the blame game and scapegoating. When he heard the call of his nation, he stood up and answered: “…I shall do my duty to my country.” He did.
That was General Yakubu Gowon.
Jonathan, by his admission, is not a general or pharaoh.
Still……..