Someone asked me recently why an externally
well rated nigerian military, 47 in the world in terms of effectiveness and
strength cannot flush out the dreaded
terrorist group, Boko Haram from our geographical landscape and a lot of
reasons came to my mind, the first being that the Nigerian government has
refused to accept that the Boko Haram sect is an outstanding enemy in all
fronts as has been manifested with the brutal and appaling killings of innocent
nigerians, including the abduction of over 200 innocent school girls still in
their custody, 116 days later. And that a blunt military approach using the
full strength of all our armed forces is neccesary if indeed we are serious
about fighting the Boko Haram.
Although the nigerian government has
manifested outrightly its commitment to end the insurgency on many occasions;
on paper and on sheer pronouncement, the fact on the ground is that no
exceptional thing towards realizing that objective is being done
The truth of
the matter is this; the Boko Haram issue has aroused local sentiments and mobilized
a lot of symphizers within the nigerian nation-state especially in the northern
part of the country among the masses but most importantly among the northern
power brokers, most of whom are camouflaged even within government parameters and
parastatals and most times working to sabotage the little effort that the
government of the day is making to
address the challenge but because the Boko Haram knows that the government is
not convinced about what real measures to employ in its fight against the sect,
Boko Haram appears to be gradually winning the war.
In the
period culminating to the Nigerian civil war, after Late colonel Emeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu announced the secession of Biafra, the federal government was swift to
mobilize its troops to suppress the rebellion and bring the secession plan to
an end. Millions of nigerians died in
that war termed by the federal government headed at the time by the
then head of state, General Yakubu Gowon now retired as a “war to keep Nigeria
one”. My reason for alluding to this reference was that the federal government
of Nigeria acted with unprecedented bluntness at the time even against the unanimous
decision of a section of the country to carve themselves out from Nigeria. That
decision was seen as an aggresion on the federal character of our nation,
Nigeria.
Today, a
group has declared a similar war against Nigeria and even unlike in the Biafran
issue they have even dared our nation in different instances; butchering our
citizens, bombing our nation and killing our people, insulting our elected
president in their various media broadcast and even threatening to kill him,
they have abducted our daughters and are still keeping them in their custody,
they have sworn to make Nigeria, a nation built on the tenets of secularity an
islamic nation and I do not see the kind of bluntness with which the federal
government of Yakubu Gowon stood up against Biafra or even anything near it. I
saw the bluntness taken into the niger-delta at certain points in the
unfortunate militancy era in Nigeria, I am yet to see a similar thing with a
more dreadful and notorious group such as the Boko Haram, who lack any
political and sane ideological undertone.
More
soldiers are deployed to intimidate voters at local and state elections than to
Sambisa forest to face the enemy, more and better armed military forces are called
in to stop peaceful demostrators in Nigeria than to fight the Boko Haram, till
date, nobody knows who is supplying arms to the Boko Haram, or their financial
sponsors, we do not know their political wing and their spokespersons except
the insane man who calls himself Abubakar Shekau who comes on youtube from time
to time to boast of their cruelty and to further threaten all of us. Who were
those who spoke with former Nigerian Head of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo
on behalf of the sect? Those are the people we should be trying to know.
All these
questions and many unanswered ones only goes to buttress the fact that there is
no honesty as regards the fight against Boko Haram, we cannot continue to treat
the issue as a sensitive issue to be trodden upon with some level of tribal cautions and if the government knows it is not ready to fight the group or really ready to
engage them in a face-off for whatever reasons best known to the government,
the government should stop sending our youths to the hangman, you cannot tell
me that a nation with an effective military strength of over 130,000 active
personnel cannot handle a handful of insurgent group except ofcourse that
they are much more than we are told they are.
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