I have been watching with keen interest the brouhaha that the $1bn sucked out of the Excess Crude Account to finish off the Boko Haram madness has generated in some quarters. The withdrawal of the controversial amount was approved at the recent meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) with state governors in attendance.
First to fire the salvo was the loquacious Governor of Ekiti state, Mr. Ayodele Fayose. Fayose, forever on the lookout for any opportunity to excoriate President Muhammadu Buhari and his government, queried the rationale behind the huge withdrawal just to finish off a rag-tag army it claimed has been routed and/or degraded some months back. Many Nigerians and commentators have since queued behind Fayose to kick against the draw-down.
On the surface, the attackers have a good point. If the Boko Haram insurgency has been defeated so conclusively, why should the government deploy so much financial energy in pummeling a dead horse? But have the Boko Haram warriors been thoroughly degraded to the extent that every North-easterner can now go to sleep with both eyes closed? The answer is NO!
Yes, the insurgents have been weakened. They have been harried from communities they once lorded over. Their Caliphate has been overrun. They once had virtually all the local government areas of Borno state, save Maiduguri, the state capital, under their iron thumbs: they even made several futile attempts to seize the ancient city.
The Sambisa Forest which was once the impregnable fortress of the terrorists may have been eviscerated of the criminal elements. A sizeable number of the abducted Chibok girls may have been rescued. The insurgents no longer carry out attack on mosques and churches, institutions, motor parks, market places, relaxations spots, military and police formations freely like before and blowing up prisons to free members in captivity among the countless atrocities that defined the group in its “heydays”.
At some points in this country, Moslems were fleeing from Mecca to Medina, Christians were scampering from Jerusalem to Jericho, while non-believers were running from pillar to post, so to speak, as the Boko Haram infestation spread across the North and even beyond like the Ebola epidemic. The running rate may have reduced, but it is obviously not yet uhuru in the once beleaguered axis held down by the terrorists until this regime emerged in 2015.
When you aggregate the aforementioned successes, President Buhari can pound his fragile chest like a gorilla and declare that the war against the Boko Haram has been won. Yes, the war has been won but what about the battle? The battle is far from being over. Boko Haram’s modus operandi of bombing or suicide-bombing soft targets should be seen as a cobra that has been halved but still has its head intact. The hard truth is that a total victory over terrorism is difficult to achieve as seen in places like Afghanistan since the 80s.
History will never be kind to those who failed to kill off the insurgency at its inchoate state!
The Vice President, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, has rushed to douse the fire, explaining that the huge sum would be spread across the entire security architecture of the nation.
Whether the VP’s clarification is an afterthought to control the “damage” depends on which side you stand. One cannot but give the government the benefit of the doubt.
The argument in some quarters is that the $1bn should have been channeled into building schools, hospitals, roads, etc. However, we should not forget that when the Boko Haram hostilities were at their peak, all the terrorists needed to do was to hand over some litres of petrol and N500 to a street urchin and nudge him to go and raze down a whole school or brainwash a teenage girl and then strap him or her with explosives to blow up institutions as experienced in the University of Maiduguri, the Federal Government College, Buni Yadi in Yobe state among others. So, putting effective security in place should not be a matter for debate at all.
What might have triggered off the alarm over the $1bn is certainly the experience we had with the $2.1bn approved for the Jonathan administration to fight the Boko Haram menace. There was a time when our troops were fleeing the warfront in the face of superior firepower of the insurgents.
When Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno state spoke truth to power, lamenting the under-arming of the federal troops and poor funding of the war, he was rewarded with the withdrawal of military personnel assigned to him. And as if to expose him to the danger of travelling by road, the Maiduguri International Airport was shut down by the federal authorities.
It was curious to note that many people jumped into the $2.1bn train in spite of the fact that the approval was coming in the twilight of the last administration. Everyone agreed that the Nigerian military had been depleted in all ramifications: obsolete armaments used to prosecute the Civil War in the late 60s except those procured during the Shagari regime which had been rendered old-fashioned in the 21st century warfare. In terms of firepower, our military was languishing in the nether regions.
Ironically, the pitiable situation was brought about by several years of military rule. Successive military leaders deliberately weakened the system so that their regimes could not be assailed by the equally ambitious colleagues. They were satisfied with building a strong laager around themselves at the expense of national security. And so when the Boko Haram madness crept in on us under Jonathan’s watch, our defence muscles had been so emasculated to respond to the challenges effectively.
The $2.1bn which was meant to retool the military came at the wrong time: the eve of the 2015 general elections. How the bulk of the money was misapplied is a familiar story. Those political hyenas who partook in the bazaar are currently being dragged all over the place by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
It is perhaps the fears of the $1bn going the familiar way that sent panic into those who are traducing the government for dipping its hands in the badly depleted Excess Crude till. Once bitten, it is said, twice shy. If the funds travel the same way the $2.1bn did under Buhari’s watch, leaving us at the mercy of the merciless remnants of the Boko Haram and other criminal elements swarming all over the country like ants on sugar, you can be rest assured that he will lose my vote, come 2019… that is if he decides toss his cap into the ring.
