Anarchy on the prowl in the land

The bombs go off everywhere–at political campaign rallies, in trash cans, on school play grounds blowing up innocent unsuspecting children; they also go off in places once thought to be secured and impregnable– at command centres of police stations. The latest of such gruesome bombing occurred at the headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) […]

The bombs go off everywhere–at political campaign rallies, in trash cans, on school play grounds blowing up innocent unsuspecting children; they also go off in places once thought to be secured and impregnable– at command centres of police stations. The latest of such gruesome bombing occurred at the headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) in Abuja. So far no city is immune—bombs go off in Maiduguri, Bauchi, Jos, Kaduna, Minna, Kano etc, just about everywhere.

The insidious recurrence of bombs going off in unsuspecting places has become the preoccupation of all Nigerians, driving everyone to distraction as safety becomes the primary concern. In a sense therefore the nation is effectively at war with itself and its people are in the grip of a paralyzing terror of being blown to smithereens by an enemy they cannot yet identify nor fathom. As a result Nigerians are effectively under siege and would continue to be unless urgent solution is found to put a stop to the bombings.

Two years ago an Islamic sect grabbed the imagination of Nigerians when it laid siege on the Nigerian Police Command in Bauchi State killing some policemen in the process. The sect- popularly known as Boko Haram uniquely propagated a millenarian world view that urged people to turn their backs on modernity as we know it. The assault on the police station enraged the authorities who ordered a combined military and police reprisal on the sect resulting into the death of their leader—Muhammed Yusuf and a number of his followers. But if the onslaught was meant to destroy the sect, we now know to our chagrin that it failed woefully.

Boko Haram members have since regrouped and are now wielding deadlier weapons with which the sect is operating far afield from its bases in Maiduguri and Bauchi, and many of the mayhem we are now witnessing have been rightly or wrongly ascribed to it. A legitimate query we need to answer however is that had a less violent measure taken against the sect two years ago have saved us the bitter nightmare of unrelenting bombings we are witnessing now? Would it have been more beneficial to have subdued the members of the sect and then bring them to trial under the law to give society an opportunity to know why they seek to reject the Nigerian society, such as it is?  By brutally seeking to obliterate the sect we have unwittingly turned it into a virulent underground organization and like a badly bruised snake it is now striking back viciously and venomously.

Of course, it may be well be that the spate of bombings is not only the handiwork of Boko Haram as we are all made to believe. There is the possibility that there could be other shadowy organizations involved in the perpetration of the bombing incidents. After all, the frequency at which bomb blasts are recorded seem to suggest that the intricacies of bomb making have become so accessible that anyone disgruntled enough could cobble one together and lob it in to the crowd merely for the heck of it. We couldn’t have forgotten so soon that long before Boko Haram became a by word for mindless violence there had been the Niger Delta marauding militants blowing up oil installations and pipelines and one of their audaciously heinous undertaking so far was the October 1,2010 bombing in Abuja for which Henry Okah- king pin of the militants has been implicated. It follows therefore that in combating the menace of incessant bombings, government should cast its dragnets far and wide to include other well known violent organizations, not withstanding that their members are presently being pacified through the amnesty programme.

It is understandable that so far the response of security agencies to violence purportedly perpetrated by Boko Haram has emphasized force. The fact remains however that it is a tactic that has achieved limited success, a realization that has dawned on everyone, as gleaned from utterances issuing forth from government quarters urging both carrots and sticks policy in dealing with the seeming intractable problem. Such a two pronged approach in dealing with it would enable government to, at once root out perpetrators of the violence while at the same time enable it to  acquire information on how the Nigerian society was able to spawn such disaffection in groups as to make them so enraged to take up arms against the state.  No doubt, such information would be invaluable for policymaking toward dealing with extremist groups in future.

Extremist tendencies, it must be underscored, would always find fertile ground to perpetrate violence where social and economic opportunities have become scarcer and scarcer. Where there is a large group of people in perpetual state of abject want cohabiting with a few people living it up in opulence and conspicuous consumption as we have in Nigeria today, it should be expected that violence would be the likely result. It is therefore not too late to fashion out policies whose aim would be to entrench equity and fairness that would provide opportunity for all.