Mob in Mubi

Its announcement was made to coincide with the rally by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria. And a sad nation got ready to be reunited with its long lost daughters, whose innocence, honour and peace and quiet were shattered by an experience like no other. And this nation was not there for them.The announcement of the […]

Its announcement was made to coincide with the rally by the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria. And a sad nation got ready to be reunited with its long lost daughters, whose innocence, honour and peace and quiet were shattered by an experience like no other. And this nation was not there for them.
The announcement of the ceasefire was followed by the sort of breaches that often accompanied difficult peacekeeping rites; and could be excused and rationalised as the work of renegades. Yet, if these are renegades, they must be majority renegades; and their exploit has put to doubt the authenticity of the entire ceasefire process.
Like many others before it, the attack on Mubi was launched by a fighting force travelling in a convoy 14-truck long and with five armoured personnel carriers, according to press reports. The attack came less than two weeks after the announcement of the ceasefire.
In what we must believe was a valiant attempt by troops to recapture Bazza, they seemed to have inflamed the insurgents, who then overran the towns of Bazza, Minchika, Gulak and Madagali, before capturing the important commercial town of Mubi. As a result, thousands fled the town—women to the mountains, men to the villages and soldiers to only-God-knows-where.
From where did they originate? And from where did they come to Mubi? How many checkpoints did they cross? What happened to reconnaissance and rapid response? Who is supplying them with their trucks and weapons? Obviously, their supplies come from outside the country, because they are not manufactured here. Indeed, what is? Are the trucks and the armoured personnel carriers dropped to them from the sky? If that is the case, where then is our radar? If not, do they come in by sea or by air; and at which port or airport? How many checkpoints are there between the place of deployment and the nearest airport or seaport?  Or, do they receive them through overland routes? Isn’t it time the nation started taking greater interest in the role our neighbours are playing in this tragedy? Or is the nation satisfied that retreat is all it can do in the given circumstance?
While retreat by our soldiers can be resorted to as a strategic move; it can’t be adopted as a strategy. Because running is no option, the nation needs to be reassured that of the moment when and where our soldiers will make the last stand, beyond which they will not move but will remain determined and ready to take on any enemy. Where will that last frontier be? Where will be their Gettysburg? Or will the nation, like the long-distance runners some north-easterners have become, keep running until Boko Haram takes over the whole country?
And even if this country is not worth dying for, for what it has done or failed to do to its own people, are the people not proud enough to wish to protect their honour; and are its fighting forces no longer patriotic enough to want to pass the bravery test? Of course, at its untested best, patriotism is not the willingness to die for one’s country; it is the readiness to make the other person die for his. But it is only when it is tested that it takes a life—or death—of its own. If it is not, it remains the proverbial last refuge of the scoundrel.
For the past two or three years, a part of Nigerian territory had been under occupation by forces that recognised neither the existence nor the sovereignty of the country; and presumably, this territory was won in war waged by armed opponents consisting of citizens and perhaps foreigners.
For a number of reasons, the Nigerian army has been quite unable to take territory back and wrest control from the insurgents. First, government soldiers appear—or disappear—to have inferior firepower. Two, they also seem to have a level of motivation to pursue the insurgents that is inferior to the insurgents’ motivation to meet them, take territory and kill those who resist. Three, there appears to be a level of corruption that is unusually high even by Nigerian standards in the funding, expending and accounting for the war. Fourth, there is what is said to be the presence of fifth columnists, whose presence in government was announced by the president himself, and the terror-providers whose do-or-die exploits and struggle for supremacy in the ruling party, General Andrew Azazi, the late, former Nationals Security Adviser, accused of fomenting or inflaming the insurgency. And sixth, and perhaps more importantly, the Nigerian government has prosecuted the war with such disinterestedness as suggest that it is no longer interested in the nation’s territorial integrity, its recovery or its preservation—at least as far as its north-eastern tip is concerned.
For these and perhaps other unstated reasons, Nigeria has become a nation on the run: its people, running helter-skelter, have become long-distance runners; its army, running into the bush, have been reduced to hunter-gatherers; while its daughters have been subjected to abuse. The harm this has done to our image is that we are a good-for-nothing nation at which every nation can thumb its nose.
We are only good at keeping the peace for others and not for our nation. At home, they are unlike the soldiers who earn the praise of the international community for their valour and loyalty. At home, it is as if they have forgotten all their lessons in military science.
The nine principles of war that are supposed to guide all military operations are: one, to concentrate power at the decisive place and time; two, to direct every military operation towards a clearly defined, decisive, and attainable objective; three, to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative; four, to strike the enemy at a time, at a place, or in a manner for which he is unprepared; five, to allocate minimum essential combat power to secondary efforts; six, to place the enemy in a position of disadvantage through the flexible application of combat power; seven, for every objective, to ensure unity of effort under one responsible commander; eight, never to permit the enemy to acquire an unexpected advantage; and, none, to prepare clear, uncomplicated plans and clear, concise orders to ensure thorough understanding. And it appears that our troops have placed greater confidence in the unstated tenth principle, which says, if you cannot do all this complicated planning, then take to your heels.
Now, the question to ask is whether this attitude will have been the attitude the government will adopt if Boko Haram is not a ragtag insurgency but an external, determined, trained enemy intent on invading the country and taking all of us prisoner. Will the armed forces have countenanced the occupation of Nigeria by, say, Cameroon or Chad or by an even stronger extra continental power on a new colonial conquest? If it will not, how will it have repulsed them, considering that any invasion of the country by an outside power will have to deploy more men and materiel than Boko Haram can muster?
But, who is really behind all this unending, unaddressed and painful tragedy? In getting to the correct answer to this question, we will discover that truth is in fact stranger than fiction in every material particular. There is certainly much more than meets the eye in all this, but sceptics have always tended to dismiss some of the explanations as mere conspiracy theory, and they hope that this bad name ought to hang it.
While healthy scepticism is healthy; unhealthy scepticism is sick—and too much of it can in fact be deadly, especially when it leads to the conclusion that conspiracy theories are of no value; while they could indeed be the most valid explanations of what is going on in the world today, especially the really strange—and often even impossible to imagine—occurrences happening in this part of the world today.
As fictionally said by Benjamin Disraeli, and as factually accurate in the real world, “So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes.” And—verily, verily—so is war instigated and prosecuted.
Paraphrasing JRR Tolkien’s I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend; I can say that I do not love the gun for its slickness, or the bullet for its speed, or the civilian JTF for its glory. I only love the homeland that they defend. And when it is under threat, what am I to do?