Remove Nyanya military checkpoint now! (1)

I told her that my greatest worry after that sad incident is that many more Nigerians, especially residents of Abuja and especially those living in the Nyanya-Mararaba-Masaka and Keffi axis, are going to face more excruciating pains in the coming days and that some of those persons might even consider those who died in the […]

I told her that my greatest worry after that sad incident is that many more Nigerians, especially residents of Abuja and especially those living in the Nyanya-Mararaba-Masaka and Keffi axis, are going to face more excruciating pains in the coming days and that some of those persons might even consider those who died in the blast luckier. She asked me ‘’how?’’.
I told her that from my experience of the ways of our security agents, they will soon impose a very harsh punishment on innocent people by mounting a military checkpoint manned by stern looking soldiers close to or in the neighbourhood of  the site of the blast, a checkpoint that will not at the end of the day succeed in achieving any single useful thing. My prophecy came to pass exactly four days later. On Friday, April 17, residents of Abuja living in the axis aforementioned who wished to commute to the Abuja city centre woke up and encountered a terrible hold –up that they have not experienced in a long while. The military have mounted a checkpoint that at some point narrowed traffic to only one lane.
I have become very familiar with the ways of our security thinkers and operatives because they seem to have a stock response to security crisis. Once a breach takes place, as happened on Monday April 14, you can be sure that a checkpoint or series of it will spring up and sometimes remain permanent and over time become a toll collection point where the ‘boys’ will begin to harass and extort money from harassed, intimidated and depressed citizens.
Given my limited intelligence I have often asked what useful purposes checkpoints that are erected at the site or in the vicinity of a security crime scene such as the one under discussion, really serve? And the answer I get is usually, ‘’what do you expect the security forces to do?’’. And my answer in return has always been, “let them do something that is intelligent and reasonable and not the kind of thing they usually do to “please the situation’’ as we used to say in my secondary school days. In our experience, checkpoints are mounted to show the people that the authorities are doing something in response to the fear and panic that envelope the people when a dastardly strike such as the one of April 14 takes place.
My own humble opinion is that a government should not be in haste to do just anything to please the situation. When it does so, it does not give some of us the confidence that we are being led well or being led by an agency of people who are thinking.
To me, it will be understandable if after a strike such as the Nyanya one, the authorities take immediate action calculated at dissuading the committal of a similar one in that location because bombs may have been planted in more than one location within the vicinity chosen as target or that since terrorists operate in cells, some members of the cell assigned to cause mayhem in a particular place may still be lurking around even after the first operation has been carried out to monitor things. But to think of mounting a road block in Nyanya days after a blast took place does not look intelligent to me. Boko Haram terrorists do not particularly hate the people of Nyanya for them to want to make the people living there or along its axis their permanent targets. They merely chose that site in Nyanya because of its strategic significance in terms of the point they sought to make. They could as well have chosen such densely populated parks in Utako, Kubwa, Gwagwalada or Bwari or anywhere else in Abuja or anywhere else in the country for that matter.
When Boko Haram terrorists had made Madalla their tactical operational zone, people coming into Abuja from the Abuja-Zuba-Kaduna route were subjected to the unkind of untold hardship that the people of Nyanya are subjected to now in the name of security check. Very few Nigerians have the kind of small courage that we are showing here by questioning the rationale for some of the unhelpful but extremely punitive checks that are being done in some of the entrances to Abuja and some of our major cities. We are blackmailed and intimidated not to question lest you are seen as not appreciating the efforts of our security men who want to guarantee our safety and security. Let no one accuse me of being ungrateful or being insensitive.
By all means our men in uniform deserve to perform their duties to us. All I am saying is that they should show us competence, good thinking and a concern for the convenience of the people. See the anguish many suffer in the terrible hold-ups that ensure when a portion of the road is blocked in the name of eagle-eyed searches that yield hardly anything because by their very nature they cannot yield anything. If anything they only succeed in scaring criminals to take other routes or device cleverer strategies.
I keep wondering how anyone in the security high-ups allows checkpoints to become ‘permanent’ once they have been erected. I am probably not good enough to be in the intelligence arm of our security agencies but I cannot help thinking that not even the most foolish of terrorists will remain in the Nyanya axis or come into Abuja through that route once an incident such as took place on April 14 happened in that place when all mouths and all eyes will be on that place. As the inspiration for this piece came into my mind, I remembered the question that children of my generation were usually given in Primary Three in my days to test our mental aptitude: ‘’If there are 300 birds perching on a tree and a hunter shoots and kills one, how many birds will remain on that tree?’’. Some of my mates who were arithematically brilliant but lacking in wisdom or common sense used to answer ‘’299’’! I think the birds are more intelligent than those who permit checkpoints to be mounted in response to a terrorist attack on a particular location. There are so many routes into Abuja and there are so many crowded parks in some many megacities in Nigeria that the BH terrorists can make another statement having made such a as loud one in Abuja. Nothing says that Abuja will remain their permanent hunting ground.
I would like to think that checkpoints are effective only to the extent of their being surprise elements. From what some of us read about countries where good thinking informs governmental actions, checkpoints are erected mainly after hard core intelligence suggests that criminals are passing or likely to pass through a particular route. They never become permanent features like Customs and Immigration Office in international boundary areas. The permanency of most of our checkpoints makes it easier for really determined and serious- minded criminals to plan. Criminal gangs or cells can factor in permanent checkpoints in their operational plans and movements, defeating the very purpose checkpoints were mounted in the first place.
I watch actions in many civilized countries with thinking and responsible governments when natural or man-made disasters happen. You see that real reasonable efforts are made by the civil defense, police, fire service, the secret police and just about everybody that needs to be involved to ensure that normalcy is restored as soon as possible while they grieve over their loss and mourn over their dead. But here, in an attempt to show that something is being done, more hardship and unnecessary inconvenience is further inflicted on the hapless people on a scale that may even be more permanent than the original tragedy. How sad. The Nyanya military checkpoint is one good example of the thing I am quarreling about here. It serves no useful purpose and should be dismantled without any further delay.
 It is equally sad that the Mass Transit Park has since being cordoned off. Innocent citizens’ vehicles which are sources of their livelihood have been quarantined there all these days in the name of not tampering with investigation. Given the way we do our things, by this time next year that park will still be fenced around like the shrine of a feared witch doctor. Meanwhile, nobody will be thinking about the plight of some citizens whose means or place of livelihood have been so callously kept out of bounds.
Let the checkpoint in Nyanya be removed now and citizens given the freedom to go about their normal duties. The thing to do to catch BH insurgents is to infiltrate them, especially their highest echelons, in order to know in advance where they will strike and take care to prevent just such from happening. This is not easy matter. But this is the only reasonable way to go. For my suspicion is that those BH insurgents are no fools. The soldiers and the police and the secret police may be subjecting innocent citizens to needless torture in Abuja when in fact their next target may not even be anywhere near here or even neighbouring states. This is elementary intelligence thinking and it is truly baffling to me that our men do not seem to grasp that simple logical possibility.
We have allowed the kind of thing I am lamenting here to become routine procedure because we hardly do the cost-benefit analysis of things. See the terrible billions of manhours that are being lost in the gridlock that has been unnecessarily created in Nyanya. Consider the terrible siege mentality that has been created in our people who have to bear with that gridlock. How many Nigerians experience a higher and dangerous blood pressure because they have to live in hell in the course of pursuing their legitimate means of livelihood?
See the damage that is done to our image when TV cameras beam footages of the Nyanya go-slow to foreigners. Nigeria is scheduled to host the World Economic Forum next month. If there is one thing we need desperately to project to foreigners, it is a sense of normalcy and not one of fear and panic. If the Nigerian authorities themselves take step to show that there is fear and trembling in Nigeria because of Boko Haram terrorist attack, why will anyone accuse a foreigner who says he thinks Nigeria is a safe enough place to hold the World Economic Forum?  We continually shoot ourselves in the arm and turn around to point accusing fingers at foreigners whom we accuse of not wanting us to succeed.
It is not only the Nyanya military checkpoint that should be removed forthwith but all those ugly erections meant to protect security formations that have narrowed many roads and streets of Abuja. They are ugly and inconveniencing sights that I want to repeat, do not serve any real purpose other than to portray Nigeria as Iraq or Afghanistan. With the many technological gadgets available today, you do not need manual or eye contact to detect bombs and bombers. Nor do you need permanent, intimidating and inconveniencing checkpoints to apprehend criminals. The reigning security idea in the world today is that the less obtrusive security is, the more effective it really is. In Nigeria, security is too visible, too loud and yet so pathetically ineffective as Boko Haram and other criminals have demonstrated time and time and time again.
 One does not want to say out some things that would sound like giving dangerous ideas to suicidal elements but I have often overheard even supposedly unenlightened folks talk about the danger of allowing a situation where vehicles of all descriptions queue up stretching for miles on end bumper to bumper where escape from even simple emergency will prove extremely difficult if not impossible. It is amazing that those who are paid to worry about the safety and security of both persons and cars do not seem to see anything wrong with government deliberately creating super hold ups in our major cities like Abuja.
If I were an activist my concern will be about unnecessarily and truly counter-productive checkpoints that have been our lazy, pedestrian response to the security challenge facing us. Can somebody please set up an NGO in that direction and co-opt me as a member so that we campaign against useless and evil checkpoints until they are drastically reduced or made less permanent, erecting them only as temporary measures to help apprehend suspected criminals that are trying to flee from apprehension.