Security Emergency: Our children are going

The virtual ‘warfare’raging on in our country today—and we call it insurgency or terrorism or both—belies characterization, ideology or motivation. If you say it is political, what and whose politics? If you call it religion, whose religion? What religion? It has wrecked numerous churches and ravaged mosques. It has killed pastors and Imams. It slaughtered […]

The virtual ‘warfare’raging on in our country today—and we call it insurgency or terrorism or both—belies characterization, ideology or motivation. If you say it is political, what and whose politics? If you call it religion, whose religion? What religion? It has wrecked numerous churches and ravaged mosques. It has killed pastors and Imams. It slaughtered top military braces who have fought wars of the highest profiles—home and abroad. It has cut down students and their Professors. It has attempted to kill top-notching Emirs. If we think it is anti- book, Western education books, why kill clerics of the Islamic and Arabic scholarly cadre? It has been be deployed to slaughter and rape and plunder. What is the ethical perspective of the war? What is the moral dimension of the violence? What is responsible for the mindless slaughter of students and innocent children in cold blood and in the middle of their sleep in the quiet of their hostel light-outs? Who used the various used condoms in attack venues? Is this a manifestation of purism by suicide bombers whose destiny and affirmation cause is assurance of Aljana after death?
Let us take the macabre dance of tragic death and blood bath that ‘paint our street red’ and crimson with fratricidal carnage, as a sign that our nation needs an emergency security declaration by the government—the kind that has been ruled in some parts of the North Eastern State , with very minimal effect, judging by the massive waste of valuable lives of our compatriots on a daily basis—as an expression of the dismal state of our national existence. Let us assume that our country is on the threshold of ‘warfare’ of the irregular and unorthodox kind that is characterized by terrorism, militancy, insurgency and all other forms unconventional warfare. What is the implication for our nation that the battle has been taken to the domain of the new generation, the generation that our elder and patriarch, our frontline novelist, Chukwuemeka Ike referred to as our coming generation in his novel titled ‘Our Children Are Coming?’  Now, what is  happening to our nation is that with the pool of blood sprawling across our nation, our children are no longing coming: Our Children Are Going!.
The mindless and bizarre slaughter in chilling and cold blood of 43 students of the Federal Government College in the Gujba Local Government Area of Yobe last week Monday epitomizes the depth to which our descent into the abysmal ebb has plummeted. Consider the fact that government colleges are unity institutions modelling our national design to bring the best of our youths from every ethnic nationality, geo-polity, irrespective of race, tribe, religion or birth together, to live, study, socialize, relate together and bring out their best as symbols of our national possibilities and national aspirations. Some of us who went to such schools in the old North—the provincial secondary schools which later became government colleges and government secondary schools—used to relish, with alluring nostalgia, the bond of unity, the selfless, innocent, free and undifferentiated relationship and dis-alienated growth pattern that unity schools symbolized. We lived together, wake up in unison, observed siesta in the afternoon together, take games sessions together, preps as one, meals-period as one and, indeed, lights-outs together. In my case at the Dekina Secondary School of Kogi State, nobody knew nor cared where anybody originally came from—Igala, Okun-Yoruba, Igbirra, Bassa-Nga, Bassa-Nkomo, Koto-Nkarfi, etc. We were simply Dekinates. Never mind what politics has done to destroy that united and unified existence these days!
Even among the young generation—about five decades since our time, the unity schools still bear essential ingredients of the homologous cementing essence of our generation. Now, see what pain will descend on the unionizing vision that informed the spirit of those old unity schools and the present one; what with what happened in Buni Yadi, and had happened in other north-eastern colleges of recent. Thought or report of students being murdered in their sleep in the middle of their dreams was simply unimaginable. Today, this is the reality. Students in the Police College, government secondary schools and universities, are now killed daily in their hostels as these institutions lay unprotected, even when check-points are mounted in front of their school gates. On the eve of our Centenary celebrations, over thirty students were killed, again, in Yobe state by Boko Haram ‘warriors.’ (as alleged) Horrifying images of nine students burnt beyond recognition in Damaturu confront us early morning, churning our stomachs and rendering breakfast taste like dung and ash in our mouths. Young students who survive grisly attacks are haunted daily by the deaths of their colleagues whom they watch cut down, helplessly, before their very eyes! Newspapers, including Daily and Weekly Trust, publish pictures of victims of the Yobe massacre.  Schools are deserted whose buildings are touched and whose environment suffocates with the acrid smell of burnt youth bodies. Experience this gripping and chilling report filed by Hamisu Kabir Matazu from Damaturu in Weekly Trust of Saturday March 1, 2014; ‘there are the bloodstains that were all over the gate of the now razed students’ dormitory that tells much of the terror unleashed on the hapless teens five days ago. But the scorched- earth look of the secondary school tells less than the gruesome attacks that left 29 young students dead…It looks like a war-front, but it is far more devastating in our hearts.
All of the tragic narrative by Matazu fit, palpably, into a horror film—of youthful hopes dashed, memories destroyed and aspirations crumbled. It narrates the agonizing story of students who stayed behind to read for exams in delightful moods, sharing stories and eating ‘the last supper in their dining hall before sudden death came to a school enveloped by fire and gunshots! As I write, dead bodies litter Borno (Sun News caption) beginning from last weekend) from bomb explosions in Maiduguri. Death tolls have been put at higher than a hundred. But what is most worrisome is the targeting of youths in schools as if the aim is to terminate the future of the nation.  Our children are going and even though the government promises to leave no stone unturned to terminate this warfare in the North-East, where a state of emergency is supposed to be on, this trend of the insurgency aimed at the future generation, in a nation whose present generation has been declared wasted, sound utterly nihilistic. It is too cruel anywhere!!
The epigram that preceded this stint raises the scale of the uncertainty in the counter-insurgency measures put in place by government. What is the real position of the military intervening in the rave of insurrection and terrorism in the country, with particular reference to the north-eastern part  of the nation? When you cut down the youth of a nation, you play lethal endgame. This warfare must be terminated now, and by every means!!