Boko Haram in the mind of conspirators

in a country whose President needed to be cajoled by the rest of the world before giving a thought to the abduction of over 200 teenaged students stolen under his watch; in a polity where politics is used to explain every embarrassing act of crass incompetence by those in positions of authority, it is even […]

in a country whose President needed to be cajoled by the rest of the world before giving a thought to the abduction of over 200 teenaged students stolen under his watch; in a polity where politics is used to explain every embarrassing act of crass incompetence by those in positions of authority, it is even possible that the man on whose desk the buck ultimately stops may have forgotten the meaning and bare essence of nemesis.     
Yet nemesis is that authoritative recoil of nature which can be very embarrassing for even the most wary transgressors. We can hardly touch, or even see it coming. But it is out there somehow, and somewhere. Like death, we are hardly able to choose its time of coming, or the manner it wrecks its supreme vengeance. And the wrath of nemesis could be fatal though too frequently it is merely symbolic. And that is because nemesis is often a patent reminder that God exists in spite of the follies of ordinary mortals like the rest of us.  
If your share the same names with Mr. President, Labaran Maku, or even the shameless PDP Spokesman Olisa Metuh, nemesis, of the symbolic form, surely came visiting last week with the attempted abduction of three first class Emirs in Borno state. It should embarrass the trio even further that one of the traditional rulers – HRH Shehu Idris Timta- was killed in the process.
The tragedy is sure to have embarrassed the trio, along with the PDP hierarchy –if they know the meaning of shame, that is – because not only did they make a mockery of the abduction of the Chibok girls at the onset, they also wanted the entire world, along with the perennially gullible Nigerian Public, to believe that the entire insurgency in the Northeast was orchestrated by Northern elites to bring down his government. Now that a prominent member of the so-called northern leaders has been killed by the same Boko Haram after failed attempts on the Emirs of Kano and Fika, what further lies are there to peddle?   
And as has become typical with such deliberate falsehood, they provided no concrete proof for the alleged conspiracy beyond the pedestrian fable that some notable members of the opposition had promised to make the nation ungovernable for Mr. President if they failed to thump him in the 2011 elections.  It never mattered that barring the intemperate bombings of Kano, Suleja, Jos, Kaduna and the FCT, the unprecedented orgy of blood spilling was almost entirely restricted to the Northeaster part of the country.
It mattered even less that Mr. President, as the Commander in Chief of the Nigerian Armed Forces, is easily the most powerful in the entire world holding the same title. And that is because while President Obama may be the Commander in Chief of the most powerful and sophisticated army in the world, he is still responsible to Congress and the American people in many respects.
There are fine lines Obama dare not cross in the exercise of his executive powers of Commander in Chief. And that is because the American democratic institutions are stronger than ours. The leaders of the same institutions also pledge their ultimate loyalties to the American constitution and people and not the temporary occupant of the White House. It is not so by accident.
The entire goal was to prevent the emergence of the very tyrannies the authors of the same constitution fled from when they arrived from Europe in their droves.  In Nigeria, the reverse is the case.  The Nigerian President is among the most powerful in the world because our docile and irresponsible National Assembly have made him so. He, along with his cabinet ministers get easily away with serial breaches of the constitution.
He can do as he pleases with Nigerians because he fears no impeachment from the very scoundrels who routinely queue at his doorsteps. Theirs is not even the case of poverty of leadership it is also, patently, about the rumbling of their stomachs. Given the slightest chance, they can sell their parents for a fee. They may attempt to deceive us with their elaborate gowns, but the reality is that they are also desperately poor, morally, materially and even spiritually. But I digress.
The main issue here is that given all the executive powers at his disposal, Mr. President has failed or refused to deal decisively with those very northern leaders we are routinely told are behind the insurrection. If he has their names as various security reports must have availed him, why not make them public to prove a point? Better still; why not bring them before the law? Why all the irritating noises about conspiracy theories when nothing has so far been proved beyond the laughable hypotheses that the mere fact that he is from the South justifies such appalling allegations?
In the midst of this nonsense certain facts are undisputable. President Olusegun Obasanjo was also from South. He was president for eight unhindered years. The Boko Haram insurgency, like Obasanjo also generously confirmed last week, did not commence under the Jonathan presidency. Neither did the rumbles against economic and political ‘marginalization’. As a matter of fact, not too long ago, the shrill cry against ‘marginalization’ was more deafening from the Southeast. There is, of course, no point in guessing why that is so.
But the least Nigerians expect from their leaders especially in difficult times like these is some modicum of honesty and inspiration. The long suffering people from the Northeast and other parts of the country caught up in the mindless violence deserve much more than circumspection from their leader. Each time the president and his party speak carelessly on the motives of the insurgents by linking it with petty politics an enormous injury is committed against all the victims of Boko Haram dead or alive.
It also constricts the capacity of the authorities and security forces from bringing the general insecurity in the country to an end because of the inherent prejudice in their attitude. In fact, the more I contemplate the criminal inaction on the part of those whose responsibility it was to prevent the deadly atrocities of Boko Haram before it spiralled out of control, the more I also suspect that they may have, themselves, viewed the insurgency with the mindsets of the conspirators they suspect the northern leaders they serially lampoon to be.
Like Josef Stalin, who suspected the barest huddle among members of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist party to be evidence of a grand conspiracy against him, by continuing with the present narrative on the genesis of the Boko Haram insurgency, Mr. President, and the PDP, may at the same time given the whole world a peep into their own peculiar mindsets as well.
For instance, it takes conspirators of the meanest hue to even contemplate that the parents of the teenaged school girls could contrive the abduction of their own children to score cheap political points.
Only unrepentant conspirators or those not averse to using the same tactics can also believe that an entire region could deliberately reduce much of its own economy and social life to shambles just because their leader at this material time of their national evolution hailed from a different region.
Only people capable of inflicting even more pain and anguish than Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda put together on unsuspecting principalities for political capital can possibly deter so much in containing the mayhem on the basis of flimsy and unproven excuses.
And that, to me, is the greatest tragedy of it all.