Sometime
around 1987, I visited Borno state for the first and the only time in my life,
I had gone on a business trip and that visit would leave a very distressful and
phantasmagorical image in my mind till date. It was actually the first time I
felt I had travelled far away from my comfort zone, like I was in a foreign
land that was not part of Nigeria, and where I felt that I had no control at
all over anything. Let me say that before then, I had travelled to other parts
of the country; I had been to Jos Plateau State, Kaduna, Zaria, and almost all
the states in the west and some in the east, but in none of them did I feel so
strange and so unfamiliar, as I felt in Borno state.
It
might logically appear that I am saying all these because of the terror that
has overtaken parts of Borno State today with the constant terrorist activities
of the dreaded Boko Haram sect. but those of you who know Borno State very well
would know places like Gashua, Baga, Gambaru, Kukawa, Giri-giri etc. As a young boy
I had heard about Gashua before finally having the opportunity to visit it, it
was the town where the Despotic Nigerian military government took social and political
activists and opposition members to, for detention, our own version of
Guantanamo bay if you like. A very hot and inhospitable desert town where people
appear to be ages behind civilization.
In fact, I remembered we stopped at Gashua in
one small hotel which name I no longer remember to pass the night before
leaving for Giri-giri, it was months before the Muslim Id el Kabir and we had
set out to buy a trailer load of rams we intended to sell in Lagos since we
were informed that they were cheaper in this part of the country, but what I
was not expecting was that Gashua would even appear a paradise compared to
where we were going to be eventually buying the Rams and goats. We were taken
in a jeep to a desert border town between Nigeria and Chad, known as Giri-giri.
My God, never before then had I suspected that a place like that could be part
of Nigeria. It was such places where you never stopped to ask yourself how on
earth the people there were surviving, no edible fruit bearing trees, no farms…
just an arid land.
I am sure that the only time the Nigerian
government at the time remembered that this part of the country falls into the
Nigerian landscape was only when they arrested persons like the late Chief Gani
Fawehinmi, the late Fela Anikulapo Kuti and other political activists and
political prisoners and desired to make life much more unbearable for them at
the Gashua prisons, otherwise, the people here were abandoned to their fate, I
can almost also swear that even some of the state Governors who have ruled
Borno State do not know and have never been to some of the so called remote
towns in the state. Little wonder why President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was
asking where Gwoza is in Nigeria, recently.
As we got to Giri-Giri, we selected the animals
we wanted and two Fulani Herdsmen were appointed by the local chief to help us
lead the flocks to a nearby town where they would be loaded into the truck for
onward journey to Lagos. I noticed the many loopholes on these border town,
people trooped in and out that one could not tell who were Nigerians and those
who were not. Everyone who spoke Hausa or Fulani language was considered a
northern Nigerian especially in the south where I come from but that is far
from the truth because nomads cross the Sahara desert every day from
neighboring west African countries like Ghana, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and other
places into Nigeria through the porous northern border, in fact the northern
Nigerian people in Borno State and other northern border towns still continue
to maintain a biological relationship with their counterparts in our neighboring
countries.
To most northern Nigerians, I am most likely a
foreigner compared to a Hausa speaking Chadian, or a Hausa speaking Nigerien or
Cameroonian, so Boko Haram could not have thrived better in any place other
than these border towns where they will always have the assistance and
collaborations of their siblings on the other sides of the borders. I can
almost also assure you that majority of those fighting on the sides of the Boko
Haram are not Nigerians but foreigners who have entered into the country with
the connivance and assistance of some unpatriotic Nigerians. True, poverty and
ignorance are two catalysts in this problem called Boko Haram but there is no
doubt that there is a political undertone to the nefarious and ghoulish
activities of the Boko Haram.
But the good news is that the sect is mostly
based in Borno State especially in the Border towns and around the Sambisa
forest where it often sets out to carry out a guerrilla kind of operations,
which means that if there is a honest commitment on the part of the Nigerian
government, the opposition, the entirety of the people of northern Nigeria, our
armed forces and our neighboring countries, a joint and a coordinated attack from
all fronts, with accompanying air strikes can be carried out on the stronghold
of this group to destroy them once and for all, the continuous overtaken of
towns in the region by Boko Haram is a very bad news to all of us. There is no
way that I will also believe that influential persons in Nigeria are not
involved in the activities of this dreaded sect which is why it is really
proving difficult to carry out a convincing attack on the group. Like I have
warned severally except if the government of the day has another plan, vis-à-vis
the dissolution of the Nigerian entity, if not I think it is dangerous to
continue to concede any part of the Nigerian territory to the Boko Haram, it is
not only a shame but a ruin on the part of our government as it could become the empire of terror as the Al Qaeda controlled zone in Afghanistan, moreover we are still on time to be able to flush out this group before they are joined by other similar groups and it becomes even more difficult to be able to manage the situation. The issue of Boko
Haram should not continue to be treated with stupid sentiments and blatant
passivity and submissiveness on the part of the Nigerian government.
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