Mon, 20/06/2011 - 12:47am | SAM NDA-ISAIAH
 
 
The sixteenth day of June, two thousand and eleven, witnessed the arrival of the first Nigerian suicide bomber on the Nigerian soil; he was certainly not the first Nigerian suicide bomber. Farouk Abdulmutallab was the first Nigerian suicide bomber to have hit the world’s consciousness. It was only that God did not allow him to kill innocent people in his evil attempt to detonate his ware on Detroit, in faraway United States, and, thankfully, he is being safely kept away somewhere.
If the innocent co-passengers of Farouk Abdulmutallab were lucky, those in the parking lot at the police headquarters in Abuja last Thursday were not. Several innocent lives were wasted and more than 70 vehicles burnt. Not even the police know the exact number of casualties at the moment.
Those Nigerians who were lying to themselves in the wake of Abdulmutallab’s suicide bombing attempt in faraway United States must have received a rude wake-up call last Thursday. The phenomenon of the suicide bomber beats all logic. Why should you kill yourself in order to kill someone else or to make a point? Suicide is not supposed to be a Nigerian thing and Nigeria still has one of the lowest suicide rates in the world. But with Abdulmutallab and last Thursday’s action at the police headquarters, there is obviously a new reality. And Nigerians should be frightened.
Nigerians should be frightened because their security and intelligence agencies and government at all levels lack the competence, will and even the sophistication to tackle the new actuality. Some funny state governments have been procuring armoured tanks for the police to help them tackle this new extreme challenge. Nothing proves the absolute emptiness of the authorities in Nigeria on the matter better than this. What are the police going to use the armoured vehicles for?
Do they even know the enemy? Even the most elementary student of statecraft should know that this is simply and squarely an intelligence challenge and the Boko Haram apparatchiks are clearly far ahead of the Nigerian government and its organs in terms of intelligence sophistication.
The attack of Thursday was clearly Boko Haram’s response to the IG’s declaration that their days were numbered. The IG obviously issued that statement to please his bosses, because he obviously knew nothing about Boko Haram’s reach. But with the extreme violence directed at him in the failed attempt to kill him, he now knows. The Boko Haram people have threatened to continue to pursue him until he apologises. The effect of that is that the IG would use all his time trying to protect himself from Boko Haram’s smart bullets and suicide bombers and would have little or no time for the rest of us.
To compound our problem, our president declared last week that the Boko Haram people wanted to kill all of us including him. Now that the president has been so greatly ingenious to discover just on time that the Boko Haram people want to kill all of us, what should we do? For him, he has the entire apparatus of the Nigerian state to protect him and his family, but who protects the rest of us since he and his people have abysmally failed in this most elementary duty to the people? I hope the Nigerian president still remembers that protection of life and property remains the most basic business of a president.
President Goodluck Jonathan has been in power for barely a year and it is during his reign that bombs started flying in Abuja. The first one was carried out by the operatives of MEND, a Niger Delta terrorist group, on October 1, last year. And, as I write this piece, no one has been jailed or executed for the dastardly act that killed so many innocent Nigerians. Only in South Africa do we occasionally hear of attempts to get Henry Okah, the arms dealer and self-styled leader of MEND, jailed for his act. If the perpetrators of that act are still walking free among us, and their “generals” moving around Abuja with troops of policemen (belonging to the Nigerian state) protecting them, why are we then so alarmed that the bombing situation has got out of hand? Why are we so surprised at the impunity in the land? These days, militants who have carried arms against the nation and killed several soldiers and policemen get newspaper spaces to carry adverts with their militant “ranks” – all of them “generals” – to defend the president or threaten anyone who talks to the president anyhow. Then, why are we surprised that many more militant groups of different hues and causes are springing up all over the land using the same methods as MEND? And because we have not had the courage to call the Niger Delta militants what they are, and have even pampered them, any group with any form of grievance whatsoever now speaks in the language of arms and bombs.
The issue of Boko Haram is far worse than that of the Niger Delta militants. At least we know that the Niger Delta militants are motivated by money and the federal government has continued to hand out billions of naira to them, but no one knows exactly what the Boko Haram people want. And now that they have introduced suicide bombing into the equation, and have named their targets – the IG being the latest addition to their hopefully short list - what happens if they decide to hit any of their targets who might have just boarded an aircraft? Even though the security at Nigerian airports has been beefed up since Abdulmutallab, considering how desperately and embarrassingly airport workers beg for tips, it will not be quite difficult for a really determined terrorist group to beat the security and get into an aircraft. In fact, with very generous tips, people can be driven directly into the tarmac to board an aircraft, avoiding all security checkpoints.
It’s very difficult to advise a government that does not appear to appreciate the enormity of the crises we are in. But since the Boko Haram people have been so gracious and generous enough to have offered the IG the option of apologising, maybe that would be the most sensible thing to do at this point. The truth is that it does not appear that those at the helm of the country at the moment have the capacity to protect the people. The issue at the moment is not whether we will be in the league of the world’s top 20 economies by 2020. What has dominated debates and private discourses across the country in the last few days is which brand of dystopia the coming anarchy will throw Nigeria into: Congo or Somalia? It’s really a very scary situation.
My candid advice to the IG, however, is that, until he eventually develops an intelligent answer to the Boko Haram maze, he should never annoy them again. And this is a very good piece of advice!