Kano carnage: Will the real Boko Haram please stand up?

I was in the kitchen just after 4pm that Friday afternoon when my nephew Mukhtar peeped in through the door and said ‘Aunty, I’ve just heard that a bomb had exploded in Kano.’ ‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajiun,’ I said ‘Where in Kano?’ I also asked. ‘They said it’s around Kofar Naisa in the […]

I was in the kitchen just after 4pm that Friday afternoon when my nephew Mukhtar peeped in through the door and said ‘Aunty, I’ve just heard that a bomb had exploded in Kano.’

‘Inna lillahi wa inna ilaihi rajiun,’ I said ‘Where in Kano?’ I also asked.

‘They said it’s around Kofar Naisa in the city.’ He explained.

‘May God keep us safe’ I prayed and promptly continued to round up my cooking. Around 5pm I picked up my phone to call my family home, but before my call could go through Mukhtar was back with the update. He had just called Kano and been told that there were about 10 blasts in different places and that the police station at Farm Centre was one of the targets. With accelerated heartbeats I waited for my sister to pick my call. Farm Centre is where my family home is located. My mother and siblings live there along with other relatives. That particular police station, a few metres behind our home, has always been the landmark we give to our first time visitors to enable them to locate us. And now it’s a bomb blast site? That’s unbelievable.

Fati picked my call and said what I heard was true but that they were alright. Of course they were worried about two siblings who were out of the house, but they will continue to track them on their phones and warn them. I promised to join in tracking the absentee siblings immediately. In the end everyone in my home was accounted for, safe and sound, but that can’t be said of numerous other families whose fathers, mothers, sons, daughters and breadwinners were caught in the carnage.

Truly the Kano invasion was a shock, an outrage and completely criminal, but why was it allowed to happen successfully? Yes, we have no way of knowing that they’ll struck but like many writers observed before me, this was an operation that lasted hours and the perpetrators had a field day bombing and shooting anyone they wished to, why were there no soldiers from any barracks when it became obvious that the police had been overpowered?  An eyewitness told me about how policemen were removing their uniforms and begging for civilian clothes while they ran for dear life, why did no one think to meet the invasion with superior fire power? Twenty bomb blasts in a big city like Kano and all we got to hear was the arrest of 150 people days after the incident? Why was there no one to face the terrorists while they ‘worked’?

This is a city with army barracks, an airforce base, all symbols of military authority and nothing could be done while over 200 hundred people were being massacred in different locations by bombers and gunmen? Like with all the others, this act of terror leaves more questions than answers. The first of which is who were these invaders? Of course the legendary Boko Haram has since claimed responsibility for this inhumanity, but since we have all graduated from the belief that Muhammad Yusuf’s rag-tag army of dates-only-eating and Boko-hating followers are not the current Boko Haram, where do we begin to look? Just going on a rampage in order to grab Boko Haram operatives will not produce the perpetrators, but it will succeed in landing many innocent people in jail.

Twice my nephew in Maiduguri was arrested in a Boko Haram raid last year. His heavy dose of Shuwa Arab blood gives him a slimmer-than-a-Nigerian look, and his small beard doesn’t help matters either whenever the JTF guys went on rampage in that city. Luckily for him both times he had his University of Maiduguri ID card with him, but neither time did it help him until after he was brought before the authorising officer. That second time, Muhammad was at a filling station trying to fuel his car when the JTF men came. They took him away without listening to his pleas. He was already at an immigration office awaiting deportation to God-knows-where when the boss saw his ID card and recognising his father’s name asked why the boy was brought there.

The moral of this story is that innocent people can easily be arrested because of their looks or grooming sense. Already the family of Kano trader, Uzairu Abdullahi who was killed when the police stormed his house at night and claimed he was a Boko Haram member have said he was only targeted because he kept a beard. Was there any proof that he was the man they wanted when they came to his house and began to shoot? Whatever is the truth about his life, no one can confirm now because of his extra-judicial killing in the hand of the police. His pregnant wife and another child all died in the process. How unfortunate.

President Jonathan described the Madalla Christmas day bombing as worse than the Nigerian civil war, yet by all accounts what happened in Kano was an invasion and a violation of the nation’s sovereignty. When armed men storm a prominent city and embarked on bombing and shooting for hours with no resistance from security agencies what does that say about the nation’s security apparatus? It is amazing that just days after the incident another bomb blast occurred at the Sheka police station in broad day light, and all the police personnel could do was to scamper for safety at a nearby primary school while the attackers followed in hot pursuit. Despite their regular cases of accidental discharge, these policemen could not aim and shoot even one of their assailants so that his arrest could lead to some findings. The gunmen again had their day as they rode away on their motorcycles, assuring civilians that they had not come for them.

If we were serious about being in pursuing of these audacious murderers we will not start going after every foreign-looking man or people who speak our languages with a foreign accent. Neither proves a thing unless we’ve got the relevant evidence. Already our police force is boasting of having arrested 160 Chadians in connection with the Kano carnage, does being a Chadian prove anything? Please let us stop deceiving ourselves and know that we are dealing here with sophisticated killers, so we must rise up to their challenge with adequate firepower and sincere intelligence gathering.

Last week the police claimed glory by announcing how they caught Kabiru Sokoto, alleged Madalla bomb mastermind by tracing him through his mobile phone signal, isn’t it time we use such high-tech ways to track this new Boko Haram? Unless, like l argued on this page last week, there is a deliberate attempt to ignore the real actors and go after shadowy sponsors and so-called sympathisers-in-government, this is the time for the police and other security agencies to use their tech-savvy ways to get their terrorists. And now that the president has finally invited Boko Haram to a dialogue, will the real Boko Haram please stand up?