Silence isn’t golden when your house is in flames and
you’re alone at home. You need to shout for help from the army of neighbours
within reach. You need to raise your lone voice above the crackles of the
inferno gaining new grounds.
This is what Nigerians have been fed with these
past few days after the disclosures on the ‘feud’ between two key men in the
Muhammadu Buhari Presidency: the grotesque, the grisly and the gross. The
nation can’t afford to function under the weight of the creeping official
silence that we are witnessing in the face of a leaked memo on our security
profile. Weighty issues have emerged in the document that need to be addressed
this critical time when the aggression of insecurity has risen to a crescendo
in the land. The memo has not come from an outsider shielded from the
activities of government.
Nor is it from any of those classified as
‘wailers’, those perpetually said to be opposed to Buhari’s government, those
compatriots who see nothing good in the sitting government. The damning missive
has come from the National Security Adviser, NSA, Babagana Monguno. He is angry
that Buhari’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari has strayed into territory not allowed
him under the Constitution. He accuses Kyari of “undue and dangerous
interference on matters bordering on national security”.
So upset is Monguno that, according to the Premium
Times online newspaper which sighted the letter, he “fired a warning
memo to all service chiefs to desist from taking further directives from Mr.
Kyari”. Monguno, a retired major-general, is reported to have said: “Chief of
Staff to the president is not a presiding head of security, neither is he sworn
to an oath of defending the country…As such, professional practices such as
presiding over meetings with service chiefs and heads of security organisations
as well as ambassadors and high commissioners to the exclusion of the NSA
and/or supervising ministers are a violation of the Constitution and directly
undermine the authority of Mr. President.
Such
acts and…meddlesomeness…have not only ruptured our security and defence
efforts, but have also slowed down any meaningful gain that Mr. President has
sought to achieve.” The memo is dated December 9, 2019 and sent to the
president and to the foreign affairs minister and his counterparts in defence,
interior and Police affairs.
The president’s chief of staff was copied. He
titled it: ‘Disruption of the National
Security Framework by Unwarranted Meddlesomeness.’ Only a few Nigerians
would be surprised that nearly three months after Monguno wrote the letter,
there is little to suggest his concerns have been taken care of. We all know
our beloved president’s introvert culture. He possesses a famous niggardly
attitude when it comes to reacting to kitchen cabinet uproar. The man at the
centre of it all, Abba Kyari, is as reclusive. Both are agoraphobics who do not
seem to notice what’s going on outside where they are, those groaning under the
feet of the fighting elephants.
There would be less shock that since Premium
Times unveiled the seething power tussle among the president’s men, there’s
been no word from the president himself or any of the horde of spokespersons.
All is calm. The government believes in the old adage: speech is silver,
silence is golden. There is, however, more rumble in this unholy silence which
trashes a glittering appearance. Not all that glitters is gold. The grass is
suffering under the giant weight of feuding mammoths. We’re used to fiddling
Neros calling for more revelry when Rome is burning.
We’ve been brought to a point where, like
Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq, the night’s flagship news broadcast would not be
complete or over if there is no report of carnage in Nigeria. Years ago, a news
editor in one of Nigeria’s leading TV stations developed a fetish about one of
these violence-prone areas. Long before he cast his headlines, he kept a
permanent spot for a major story on multiple deaths from violence and suicide
bombing in those areas. His morbid anticipation never failed; it was always
fulfilled. And he would end up with a sardonic smile. Aren’t we at that pass?
Aren’t we sometimes reluctant to turn on the radio and TV?
Are we
always comfortable with buying grief when we buy the newspapers, knowing we
shall be herded sheepishly into a world filled with the news and pictures of a
‘technically defeated’ Boko Haram inflicting more pain and anguish as they
operate freely? Knowing violence has become a daily affair here, isn’t it easy
for a news editor sitting somewhere in Johannesburg or Doha or London or
Atlanta to predict in the morning a headline of mass killings in Nigeria and have
his adumbration manifest one hundred percent hours later in the evening?
As I was composing this piece, news came that
Boko Haram terrorists have so far killed 547 teachers in the North-East of
Nigeria alone. The president of the teachers’ union, Nasir Idris, said
insecurity in the region had thus led to more challenges: increase in
out-of-school kids who are potential recruits for the insurgent Boko Haram and
politicians who rely less on the vote to get to power. They are also ready
candidates for cult and armed robbery gangs. We know why insecurity is still
the order of the day despite the countless billions of naira we have deployed
into battling it.
Those our president has mandated to tackle
insecurity are too busy attending to petty squabbles. Infighting is their
preoccupation, more important than the constitutional duty of terminating the
scourge threatening to terminate the nation. They ought to be removed without
delay, for fresh hands and fresh ideas to come in. But, according to the
government, even though the service chiefs have overstayed their tenure, they
won’t be removed soon as Nigerians and the National Assembly members demand
from the president.
Boss Mustapha, Secretary to the Federal Government, says
replacing them now would be harmful to national security. “You don’t just wake
up and say sack people, it doesn’t happen like that,” Mustapha says. How does
that comfort Nigerians? It doesn’t. It only says we haven’t arrived in the land
promised us by our leaders when they traversed land and sea seeking our votes.
The central government’s argument crushes our hopes as we mark the second
anniversary of the captivity of Leah Sharibu, the young citizen Boko Haram
gunmen have refused to free since they seized her in February 2018. Both the
leaders and the led are now helpless as murderous men and women straddle the
land like the Colossus of Rhodes.
*Ojewale,
a social commentator, wrote from Lagos
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