By Emmanuel Onwubiko
My friend, a crude oil magnate who ironically still thinks like a socialist regretted that human life has been speedily degraded by the Nigerian civil and military authorities that the rest of the international community are at a loss what to make of it.
He said that in all of his recent foreign tours during the course of his business transactions in Western Europe and the United States of America, most people he met do not know whether to rate the persons who populate the Nigeria’s civil and military authorities as primitive people who are far removed from modern civilization.
But I quickly reminded him that Nigeria is a member of the United Nations and by so doing has signed on to almost all of the modern humanitarian laws that safeguards the sanctity and sacredness of human lives but he wouldn’t budge; even as he argued that the fact that for nearly six months that over three- hundred teenage girls were snatched from their dormitory in the girls secondary school in Chibok town in Borno state and the authorities have failed to rescue these girls and bring their abductors to pay for these detestable crimes against humanity, means that the civil and military authorities pay only but lip service to the legal obligations that they owe the Nigerian citizenry in line with the various provisions of the international humanitarian laws.
We had hardly rounded up our conversations when the most gruesome of all despicable crimes against humanity was reported in Baga, Borno state as carried out by the armed Islamist terrorists who were reportedly implicated in the killings of hundreds of innocent civilians and the number was conservatively put at 2000 by the international Non-Governmental organization- Human Rights Watch – quoting sources directly from the scenes of these vicious crimes.
Some other observers raised issues with the abysmal failures of the Nigerian military to crush decisively this rebellion by the armed Islamist terrorists which has raged for more than three years now. Why, for instance, is a small nation such as Cameroon able and ever willing to crush and defeat any incursions made against their populace by these same Islamist rebels based in North East of Nigeria but the Nigerian military – rated as the third largest in Africa – has been unable to defeat these terrorists and even allowing these rebels to seize virtually two states out of the 36 that we currently have?
In the last three years the civil and military authorities have offered reasons ranging from sabotage within the military for its inability to defeat the terror group but still others blamed the poor state of weapons in the possession of the Nigerian military for this apparent failure. But again there have been reports that the terrorists fighting Nigeria are actually making use of the weapons stolen and taken away from the Nigerian military whose members and operatives have been accused of cowardice in the face of advances made by these terrorists. Reports said that Nigeria spent over $6 Billion USD last year in the Defence budget making Nigeria the third largest spender in the defence sector in Africa. But the question remains where these weapons are and why is the Nigerian Military unable to crush these terrorists?
Speaking to the issue of the kind of respect and regard that both the civil and military authorities pay to the universal sanctity attached to the value of human life brings us to the recent media briefing by the military authority in Abuja Nigeria whereby the spokesman in an attempt to deny that up to 2000 Nigerians were not killed in Baga, Borno State did also committed the fallacy of appearing to say that the lives of 150 Nigerians mattered very little in the entire calculations even though he appeared to be saying that those who exaggerated the figure meant serious harm to the credibility of Nigeria as a nation State.
In Nigeria, regional War lords and politicians have been allowed the freedom to politicize these mass killings to such an extent that over fifteen thousand Nigerians have been killed and yet the military authority has still not thought it wise to massively hunt down these terrorists by attacking their base in the so-called Sambisa Forest. From this safe haven these terrorists have annexed several towns and villages in the North East of Nigeria and the military authority has continued to insult the intelligence of Nigerians by offering flimsy excuses.
Onwubiko is head of Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria and blogs @ www.huriwa.blogspot.com; www.rightsassociationngr.com, www.huriwa.org.