‘…Before a world in shock

However much we wish to deny it, we in Nigeria today are a people in grief, in a country which ought to be officially mourning, within a world that is just shocked by it all. No doubt the latest shock the world has received was no less than the one we ourselves got when we […]

However much we wish to deny it, we in Nigeria today are a people in grief, in a country which ought to be officially mourning, within a world that is just shocked by it all. No doubt the latest shock the world has received was no less than the one we ourselves got when we read that the girls abducted at a secondary school in Chibok are now unwilling brides in the hands of their captors.
The news headlines on April 29th was disheartening enough when it said “Abducted girls moved abroad” but to hear that on top of that they had been married off to strange men at a N2000 bride price was the biggest shock of all. How do we expect parents to come to terms with this monumental tragedy? How can they accept the fact that their innocent young daughters have not only been ferried abroad but have also been married off to some vicious and murderous strangers?
And all this in our 21st century world? Even more difficult to believe is the report that villagers who saw the girls being transported in trucks and canoes had tried to alert the military but were hindered by some official red-tape from getting the military to act on time. According to Dr Pogu Bitrus, the leader of the Chibok elders forum, who spoke to Daily Trust early this week ‘The military was alerted on Tuesday, two weeks ago, when some villagers saw many of the girls being transported in trucks, some with even their school uniforms. The villagers tried calling the senator representing their zone but they couldn’t get him. so they went to Bama barracks where they reported the matter. At the barracks they were told to put it in writing, that that is the military tradition. At that time, if the military had intervened they would have stopped them (the captors) from reaching their destination.’   
 And how is it possible for these people to cross the border into neighbouring countries, with truckloads of young school women without rousing the suspicions of even the border patrol? What is our subscription to Interpol worth if we can’t use that connection to intercept these abductors in neighboring countries? Are we really this friendless among sister African nations that we can’t even count on them to help us catch our enemies?
On Wednesday when various women groups came out en masse in Abuja, Kano and Ibadan to protest against the abduction of these school girls and government’s slow-motion approach to it, most of them were in tears at the gravity of the situation at hand. A Chibok mother whose four daughters were among those kidnapped was inconsolable. Her grief was natural, it will take superhuman effort to cope with such misery.
Like I argued on this page last week, in countries where such human tragedies are viewed for what they are, the whole seat of government and the defense establishment would have been moved to the epicenter of the tragedy (in this case Borno State) to underscore the importance of the rescue mission. As it is, not a single service chief is anywhere near the forest hideouts of the abductors. No foreign government is officially involved in the search for these girls even after reports that they have been taken across the nation’s borders, in fact no appreciable headway has been made, 19 days after the incident.
But this is only the first point of shock for the world’s on-looking population. Another point is how even in a grave and tragic situation like this war against insurgency, corruption has been allowed to take the day. Almost every day we record casualties from the harvests of the bloodthirsty murderers who are killing and maiming our compatriots at will, yet the soldiers entrusted with fighting them and ending the carnage are so ill-equipped, it’s almost always a walk-over whenever they encountered the enemy.
How can this be when Nigeria’s defence budget is now one-third of the country’s entire annual budget? A possible answer to this is that numerous magnificent mansions are now sprouting all over our federal capital. In hushed tones, it is disclosed that they the direct fruit of Nigeria’s fight against terror because most of the money budgeted for the war is diverted to private pockets and from there to private landscapes.
This probably explains why the fight against insurgency is not being won. Only on Thursday another blast in Nyanya left a dozen people dead and many others injured. And coming less than three weeks since the bigger, deadlier blast that killed scores and wounded hundreds, we must admit that something is wrong with the way the current war is being waged.
One year after a state of emergency had been imposed in the three frontline states of the insurgency, the killings and abductions couldn’t be stopped. The latest is the school abductions in Bauchi, which came two weeks after the Chibok outrage. Even the violence is spreading fast into areas outside the traditional insurgents’ enclave and claiming more lives in the process. We have the Wukari violence raging right now and before it there was the Benue crisis, the Kaduna bloodshed and the Jigawa ambush.
Anyway you look at it the security situation in Nigeria is only worsening and there isn’t a single justification for the overinflated security budget that shows no commensurate result. In the final analysis we remain a country in mourning because of the daily death toll we record from needless bloodshed but we also remain in shame because before the eyes of the world we have been unable or unwilling to do what it takes to end the situation.
Once again our prayers are for the Chibok students and all other girls in captivity to regain their freedom and be re-united with their families soon. It is my sincere hope that forced marriage or not, these girls have not sustained any permanent damage to their minds or their physique that will render them unable to realize their full potentials later in life. We are indeed a people in grief but freedom for these abducted teenagers might alleviate our pain somehow. Let us pray that this comes sooner than later.