Home and abroad, the world faces a chaos pandemic

It will not be an understatement to say that at the international, local and societal levels, there seems to be a chaos pandemic on the rise. While the world holds its breath over increasing US unilateralism amid threats to invade Greenland, to the Kaduna communities trying to make sense of the abduction of 178 members […]

It will not be an understatement to say that at the international, local and societal levels, there seems to be a chaos pandemic on the rise. While the world holds its breath over increasing US unilateralism amid threats to invade Greenland, to the Kaduna communities trying to make sense of the abduction of 178 members kidnapped by bandits from churches as they worshipped, to the very gruesome murders of a woman and her six children in Kano by a gang led by a family member.

In all of these scenarios, questions that would, and should in normal circumstances offer clarity, seem to stir the murky waters even further, adding to the confusion. It is hard to make sense of all this, but I will try to approach these issues in stages.

First, Kano. When Umar Auwal knocked on the door of his aunt, Fatima Abubakar, at Dorayi Chiranchi area in Kano, she welcomed him and his friends, not realising she was letting in her and her children’s murderers. It was around 11 am. He was her relative. What was there to be worried about?

What followed has thrown the country into confusion. The brutality with which Umar Auwal and his partners murdered the woman and her six children, stabbing, bashing their heads in with a sewing machine, throwing the banged-up body of a baby into a well, has sparked theories of a family feud. But there was none. The husband of the deceased and both parents of the alleged perpetrator have denied any such feud.

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So why did he do it? We still don’t know. Umar and his partners have been arrested with blood-stained clothes and the victim’s mobile phone. He has not clarified his motive yet but he has confessed to another double homicide in the Tudun Wada area where two co-wives were attacked in their homes and murdered in cold blood, in broad daylight.

While the country is still trying to make sense of these crimes, and many kind-hearted individuals have rallied to support the husband and father, Bashir Haruna, who is still trying to make sense of the murders, something happened a few kilometres away in Kurmin Wali in neighbouring Kaduna State.

When reports first emerged of yet another mass abduction, this time of worshippers at a Sunday service last weekend, the Nigerian Police’s first reaction was to deny the incident. What led them to that decision remains a puzzle and their explanation that the denial was made while reports of the abductions were still being investigated makes little sense. After hours, the force made a U-turn and admitted that the abductions did occur. Still, it took the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), not the police, to release the names of 178 persons abducted from two churches that Sunday.

You would think that after years of dealing with cases of mass abductions and killings and the negative narrative around Nigeria, the police and the authorities in general would have developed not only better ways to protect people and communities but better crisis communication strategies. Yet 12 years ago when the Chibok abductions happened, the government’s first reaction had been to deny that it did. Over a decade later, we are still repeating the same mistakes. What have we learnt in the decade since that and in all the years Nigeria has been contending with these insecurities? Not much it seems. It is hard to see how this chaotic approach would inspire any confidence in the families of the victims, some of whom have had multiple family members abducted at once, in the police to handle this situation.

You could almost see the desperation of the police to deny this. After all, the narrative of Christian genocide in Nigeria has dominated discourse in the last few weeks and having worshippers abducted from church will only inflame that narrative. The reality is that while the police were busy with the optics, the bandits were travelling farther away with their victims and ensconcing themselves in their hideouts. This level of chaos is almost unprecedented and while the reaction is typical of the police, who admittedly sometimes get it right, like they did with the prompt arrest of suspects in the Kano murders, it might not be isolated from international events.

Only on Christmas Day, US President Donald Trump ordered strikes on Nigeria. His motives, of course, were that the terrorists the strikes targeted, even if we have not seen evidence of their decimation, he believed were killing Christians in “unprecedented numbers.” If the reports are to be believed, these numbers came from a screwdriver seller in Onitsha, who admitted that he too got his numbers from Google and somehow sold the idea to the Trump administration through his NGO.

While Trump’s strikes on Nigeria were just weeks ago, and hardly has there been any result to show for it, it feels like a long time ago. Because a lot has happened since then. Trump ordered US military actions in Venezuela, abducted the Venezuelan president, the tyrant, Nicolas Maduro, who strangely seems already forgotten in a US jail awaiting trial for “narco-terrorism.” If that crime sounds made up, it’s probably because it is. It is one of those dubious narratives the US government had come up with to justify its baffling actions in the world.

That something as egregious and criminal as the abduction of a country’s president, by another country that has made it clear it wants that country’s resources has already slipped off public attention is a testament to the chaos pandemic.

Trump has quickly moved on to Greenland, which until the World Economic Forum in Davos this Tuesday, he had openly voiced his intention to take by any means necessary. No one, but Trump, apparently can rationalise his determination to seize territory from a fellow NATO member.

Yet his narrative keeps shifting. First was the claim that Greenland is essential for US security. Why this has become an urgent priority, if it were true, is that the US is preparing to launch another war, somewhere beyond Greenland. The last I checked, neither Russia nor China have indicated hostile intents to the US, beyond what has been the norm since the Cold War ended.

Then the narrative emerged from leaked conversations between Trump and the Norwegian Prime Minister, Jonas Gahr Støre, in which the American president linked his belligerent posturing on Greenland to not receiving the Nobel Prize last year.

Trump had said: “Considering your country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America.”

Blaming Norway for a decision made by the Norwegian Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government, and therefore threatening to seize an autonomous territory from neighbouring Denmark, who fought alongside the US in its War on Terror and lost many men as a result, seems like chaos thinking—if it can be called that at all.

Whatever kind of thinking is going on in the White House seems like it is grasping at whimsical ideas designed to promote imperialist thinking. On the eve of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the US president had shared an AI-generated image of himself hosting demure-looking European leaders and presenting to them a map of the world in which Greenland, Canada, the US, and Venezuela have been painted in American colours.

That the president of a country, one that is supposed to be a leader of the free world, is harbouring such imperialist sentiments is concerning, especially for the sovereign countries annexed in that AI image the president shared.

There has been an abandonment of caution in addressing what the US is doing, mostly because of the threats of tariffs, or direct US aggressions. The sad truth is that we have seen this kind of rhetoric before. This same kind of entitlement to seize and annex territories had been prevalent almost 90 years ago just before a squat, moustachioed German, claiming to want to secure his country, had rolled his powerful army into Austria, then Czechoslovakia, and then Poland, kicking off World War II. At the end of that chaos pandemic, 70-85 million people were buried and the world, with the US at the forefront, chanted “Never again!”

I sincerely hope ‘never’ doesn’t mean 90 years. If the US is building fortresses, then let the word of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney be a forewarning. “But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.”