Baga: Getting short shrift

Indeed, if Nigerian Senators are asked what their chief preoccupation is, and they are to answer truthfully, the answer will be ‘pursuit after contracts and landing juicy committee appointments;’ which explains why crucial national issues like the April military assault on Baga town get short shrift from our lawmakers.

But wasn’t it a real shame that a whole-well, a half of a-Senate Joint Committee went to the scene to investigate a burning issue and came back empty-handed, unwilling or unable to resolve the dispute about the number of casualties or extent of destruction, or answer the all-important question why? Were 183 innocent people of Baga gunned down in cold blood by Federal troops as their leaders insist? Or is the number 36 as Defence Headquarters insists or 37 as Senator George Sekibo says or 228 as Senator Maina Ma’aji Lawal counted? How many houses were razed to the ground or damaged in the inferno that followed? Was it 2,000 houses, as the Borno State governor and leaders in Baga say, or 2,400 as Human Rights Watch says, or 3,059 as the District Head of Baga found at the last count? Senator Lawal should have insisted on taking members of the joint committee to the three graveyards e visited to count the 228 fresh graves he saw. Now, we had gone to Baga but we were none the wiser.

It was indeed unfortunate though by no means surprising that only one of the 13 members of the committee who are from the southern parts of the country visited Baga. The nation was not interested in where they came from; it was only interested in the fact that its senators had failed in their duty to it. While they must have their reason, whatever that reason was, it would probably be even more unfortunate, because, except for the one absent on account of illness, it was either plain cowardice, in which the members were not man enough to be witnesses for the nation on the scene of terror; or plain selfishness, in which they weren’t patriotic enough to sacrifice time and convenience for what some might erroneously regard a Northern problem. If the solution to a problem that had almost pushed the country to breaking point depended on their being on the scene, some senators were, by their absence, saying they would rather the nation burnt. And with this unfortunate attitude, they ended up handling a serious national assignment with so much regrettable levity.

This much should have been clear to all discerning and honest observers of the Nigerian national scene-that democracy has not brought any kind of relief to a people so corrupt. If it brings them anything at all, it will only be grief. So far, it has not brought the former and is on its way to ensuring the latter. The people of this country are being doubly short-changed. It has already become too much but it is almost certainly not going to be sustainable. These people cannot just continue to rig our elections to elective offices they don’t deserve or merit, then go on to misappropriate our the national patrimony, and then fail to do their legislative work with any measure of competence, or approach their oversight functions with demonstrable effectiveness.

All this tells a lot to the nation: that Nigerian politicians are not in this business for helping the country or its people; and apparently they have neither mission nor goal except what the nation sees them pursuing-money. By their conduct in their various arms of governance, they are everyday directly telling everybody that they are in this only to help themselves and only each other at the expense of the nation. And in the end, the shame is not on them; it is on the nation for accepting and acquiescing in this outrage.

With this type of attitude, it will be difficult for Senators to want to go out into the field of terror; and if they are forced to have to do that, it will be even more difficult for them to discharge the responsibility of determining what happened. But perhaps in this case the point of the investigation is not to determine whether but how the tragedy actually occurred; for, whoever knows the character of our security personnel or has had the painful misfortune of seeing them at work, or more appropriately at war with the people at checkpoints, will not be surprised that the sad event at Baga happened. What would have been surprising-serendipitously so-was if it had not. Investigation is but to prove the case beyond reasonable doubt or determine the nature and extent of the details of the tragedy. And in this, officialdom will only make a bloody fool of itself denying the very obvious that at any event will been in character.

The abysmally low quality of the investigation, the utter lack of seriousness with which Senators have approached the weighty assignment and the pressure said to have been brought to bear on the investigation in a way that may have comprised the independence of the Senate in reaching its decision or failure to do so all point to the fact that the investigation may have been conducted in order to exonerate the Nigerian Army of a grave responsibility. But it is not the indictment by a Senate committee that should really worry the Nigerian Army; what should worry it is indictment in the estimation of Nigerian people-and this has already been given. And what should worry everybody is the arrival of the day when, in defence of their freedom, in the manner the so-called Civilian JTF rose, the nation loses its fear and rises to challenge the impunity of its own army.

 The seriousness of the crime and the exigencies of the situation required a thorough, speedy and impartial investigation and the meting of exemplary punishment. This might explain why the Senate gave its committee only 14 days within which to submit its report; but more than two months later, the report had not been submitted-having been listed twice on Senate’s Order Paper and twice withdrawn. It has been said that great pressure was exerted by military authorities on the Senate leadership, greatly helped and facilitated no doubt by the fact that David Mark, a retired brigadier-general, is president of the Senate today.

The long time taken to submit the report and the withdrawals of the report from the floor of the Senate constitute the usual classical technique employed to gain time and induce a collective national amnesia of sorts in which after passion cools, anger subsides, people forget, a smouldering issue is put back on the back burner-and then subsequently killed.

The most curious thing to come out of the Senate Baga saga is perhaps what, by the emphasis placed on it by the Senate president, appeared to have been the upper chamber’s main recommendation. Mark called on the government to embark on a massive recruitment of soldiers to contain the insurgency. At this stage, the issue was not what was needed for the containment of the insurgency; what needed to be known was why soldiers attacked Baga and whether they in fact killed 183 or more people and destroyed property in the town. It was not a question of numbers, because if more soldiers were recruited, they would probably kill more people. What is needed is the retraining of soldiers to force them to learn to respect the rights and freedoms of the people.

And it was curious that the Senate president would seek to rule out compensation for those killed or those whose property had been destroyed by the military violence in Baga, a suggestion that becomes even more grotesque when it is recalled that the same government has paid compensation even for the victims of non-governmental killers. And Mark was not yet done as the praetorian representative of the military in the nation’s parliament. He went on to disallow amendments or the inclusion of prayers to the report’s recommendations; because, according to him, the senators proposing the amendments and the prayers had not been to Baga. But by the same logic, he should have rejected the entire report, because no more than half of the members of the committee itself had been there.

The Senate should not be proud of a committee that has done a job that is marvellously wishy-washy; and it should, for the sake of its own image and in view of the gravity of the issue, quickly reverse itself and reject a report that has clearly not been done well; and allow the nation to find an alternative way of knowing exactly what happened at Baga.