For moments like this (1)
Fastforward to today. Bombs exploding everywhere. Yes, it seems limited to the northern parts of Nigeria, but who knows what next, or who next? Just as it defied our imaginations that these could ever happen here, so also are we unable to imagine what next would happen in our milieu. When the Boko Haram phenomenon […]
Fastforward to today. Bombs exploding everywhere. Yes, it seems limited to the northern parts of Nigeria, but who knows what next, or who next? Just as it defied our imaginations that these could ever happen here, so also are we unable to imagine what next would happen in our milieu. When the Boko Haram phenomenon started, some of us advised strongly that Nigerians should refrain from being too emotional about what was happening. We urged that we all open our minds, and not view the issue from the prism of religion or tribe. But we were told to shut up. It has to be the ‘evil’ Muslims, and the ‘parasite’ northerners, they said. That thinking fitted smugly with our one-track approach, so long as it made us and our kind look good, and the other guys at the other end of the divide, the very devil itself.
One could forgive the illiterate, but what of so-called intellectuals who reasoned in that manner, and even went ahead to sell their opinions to others less intellectually endowed? What of so-called opinion leaders who forgot that what went around, came around? Now the carnage seems unstoppable. But I write here today, to give hope, to imbued courage, to also proffer, that we may yet escape an almost certain perdition!
Respected columnists, intellectuals and so-called ‘leaders of opinion’ kept saying that Boko Haram was simply about some people wanting to convert the whole of Nigeria to Shariah law, and they want to ban Western education. Many of them pooh-poohed the write-up from a certain female Professor Emeritus Jean Herskowits, a contributor to the US-based Foreign Policy magazine. Herskowits had stated that the apparatus called Boko Haram had since been hijacked, and that at least four other bodies were mounting operations under that name. They said she must be smoking some expired hashish! Many so-called intellectuals said the woman had some unholy relationship with Northern Nigeria. A former US Ambassador wrote a book “Nigeria on the Brink”, but the government refused him a visa and asked him to go to hell! But look at us now, seemed we arrived in hell earlier than Mr John Campbell!
Now our best ‘intellectuals’ are gradually admitting that there seems to be ‘factions to this Boko Haram phenomenon. But they will only go as far as saying ‘it is political’. They have their eyes trained on Muhammadu Buhari, but their minds and bodies, permanently resident in the gutter. What stops us from broadedning our minds further, to include all the possibilities. If politicians can be responsible for what is happening to our country, so also could foreign interests. We have been trying to draw attention to all the while, being effectively neutralized by mainstream Nigerian media. Now they seem to be affected, and are perhaps smarting in the guilt of their own intellectual if not logistical, complicity. Do things have to affect us as individuals before we allow that best part of our brains to open up? Or is it all about interest – personal interest, pecuniary interest, tribal interest, religious interest etc?
Anyway as people were reading the said article, up in one of the best Universities in Nigeria, BUK, several bombs were detonated in church services. Amongst them eminent Professors, mainly southerners and of course all Christians. What a rage??!! The BUK incidence is enough to cause a civil war, and one is tempted to think that is what whoever is behind the burning down of Nigeria wants exactly! But some of our die-hard right-wingers would want to justify that event for their beloved Boko Haram, by saying ‘Yes, they are against education, that is why they bombed the university’. But I beg to differ. As we have finally accepted that there are ‘sects’ in Boko Haram, so also should we accept that all sorts of crazy people HAVE BEEN mounting murderous operations on that platform. Since we are ready to blame Boko Haram for every ‘knock-out’ or faulty car-exhaust that goes off ‘pow!’, so also have the shadowy guys behind our misery been mounting their operations with unprecedented bravado. The more we cower into our religious and tribal crevices, the more they brazenly come for us in the rat hole that we are digging for ourselves. It is time to be courageous!
We have even conceded territorial space to Boko Haram. I argued here a few weeks ago that I doubt if there is Boko Haram in Kogi State, contrary to the claims of our security agencies. I mentioned passing Okene few years ago and running into a mini civil war – with guns and all – and there was no Boko Haram then. But our media, uses the misfortune of people to sell copies, and of course they are not rising above their basic instincts. Some are using this Boko Haram thing to get back at a certain region or religion, forgetting that we will all suffer collateral damage. After the Kogi State incidence, a newspaper carried reports that Boko Haram members were arrested in Ebonyi State. They were found with guns and whatnot. Now it is no longer safe to be a ‘maiguard’ in some regions. ‘Maisuya’ and ‘maishayis’ are simply dumping their paraphenailia of trade and heading back home. Hmmm. See what we have caused for ourselves?!
Boko Haram is partly a creation of our ugly imagination. Once we give some space, they fill it! If Boko Haram is in Ebonyi State, then they are all over Nigeria. Then Nigeria is gone! Kaput! Except we redefine what is happening to us, and admit the truth for once – that the original and the real Boko Haram is merely a small sect which have since been annihilated, and that the sophisticated guys doing all this damage to Nigeria do not have anything to do with religion or tribe. Heck, I doubt if they are Nigerians. When the video of the Thisday bombing was posted on youtube by whoever it was, I noticed that all the other videos in its category had to do with ‘MIND CONTROL’, ‘COVERT OPERATIONS’, ‘CIA OPERATIONS’. I pointed this out on my facebook page, and will come up with my observations on that matter as we go along.