By Ugo Onuoha
The prospects for the future wellbeing of this country, Nigeria, are not looking good, the pretenses of our rulers to the contrary notwithstanding. And this is not about its distant future. It’s about the near future. Nigeria is rapidly deteriorating from not working to falling apart. The assertion of the country not working is a notorious fact, but the claim of its falling apart could be treated as crying wolf.
It may not be out of place if we reassure ourselves that we have been at the precipice on more than one occasion in the past. The country was barely seven years old from independence when it was plunged into a fratricidal civil war during which millions of lives were lost in the space of three years, 1967-1970.
Some commentators, rightly or wrongly, regard that civil war and the events that preceded and precipitated it, as the beginning of genocide on the Igbo, a significant nation inside this country. Others, especially from the side of the victorious Yoruba nation of the south west region, Hausa, Fulani and other minority nations of the northern region, regard the war as a necessary conflict to Go On With One Nigeria [Gowon]. Yakubu Gowon, now in his 90s was the military head of state who led the triumphant federal side.
The dominant history of any war which also passes as the authentic one is usually written by the victors and their collaborators. So it has been with the Nigeria – Biafra war. The victors claim that between 200,000 – 300,000 people died on the Biafran side, but the victims put the figure at between 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 deaths.
The victors say that one of the events that snowballed into the bloody war, the January 1966 military coup, was plotted and selectively executed by the ultimate losers wherein their [victors’] military and political leaders were gruesomely murdered. The victors’ collaborators, the British Broadcasting Corporation [BBC], was in overdrive to propagate and perpetuate the falsehoods. Fifty – five years since that war, the BBC has not relented. It has become more sophisticated and more daring and more demonic. Its record at distortion and baiting genocide is in public sight.
Some British tax payers who fund the corporation and prominent politicians have seen through the evils of the BBC and are now demanding that it be scrapped. The BBC may yet get its deserved comeuppance if the US president, Donald Trump, delivers on his vow to sue that corporation for billions of dollars. The BBC had reportedly interviewed Trump and then fiddled with his responses to convey a different message and portray the American leader in poor light. It’s the corporation’s stock-in-trade.
It has been begging Trump for forgiveness ever since. It has sacked at least two of its top executives including the CEO. Thus far, Trump, who revels in court litigations appears implacable. If Trump sues for defamation and wins billions of dollars, that could help to quickly bury the BBC and erase the evil the corporation represents. In spite of whatever some people might think, the world will surely be better for it. If Nigeria is unravelling for the worse, the fingerprints of the BBC have been on it from the beginning.
There’s no doubt that Nigeria is seriously beginning to shut down after many years of protracted abuse by insiders and outsiders. The unravelling has been noticeable since 1960. And even before. The signals were obvious at the various negotiations and constitutional conferences that led to self government at different times for different regions of this country. They were there when some of the country’s founding fathers from the north made violent vows to dip the Koran in the ocean and to ensure that the emergent country became the estate of their forebear, Uthman Dan Fodio.
The Fulani hegemons also boasted that they would never allow the infidels of the southern regions rule over them and the minorities in their midst in the north to be in control of their own destiny. The signs were there when elections were rigged, violence unleashed, and politicians induced to cross carpet in the south west to stop a victorious non-son of the soil from forming and heading the regional government in Ibadan. The schism led to the dislocated non indigene to move to Enugu, his ethnic base, which ensured that the premiership of the defunct eastern region was wrestled from a minority politician to accommodate the returnee ‘big man’. Bad blood started spreading.
The January 1966 military coup and the July 1966 counter coup, and the acrimonious killings that ensued were clear signs that the Nigerian construct or project was a sham. “Araba”, the violent chant of the separatist agitators of the north, was unheeded. Historically, elements from the north were the first to demand the dissolution of Nigeria. Indeed, they did not want independence when it happened. It’s instructive that the British were reportedly the people that persuaded the north to remain in the federation which was structured to favour them. In the period that “araba” lasted, an opportunity to deal with a fractured and flailing federation was lost.
Before independence in 1960, the man who saw tomorrow, Obafemi Awolowo of the Yoruba stock, had vigorously canvassed for a very loose federation, but Nnamdi Azikiwe, the pan-Nigerian, Pan-Africanist, and an incurable optimist argued to the contrary. Given what has been happening in this country for so many years, it will be hypocritical to argue that the jury is still out on whose vision would have served this now benighted country better. The bestiality of the civil war and the scotched earth tactic in punishing the losers, and in the sharing of the booties by the winners were also markers that all was not well.
We papered over the cracked walls and pretended to be moving on. When after the war slogan of ‘reconciliation, reconstruction, and rehabilitation’ failed to materialise, we shrugged our shoulders and moved on in the belief that the defeated people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps. It would be their misfortune if they couldn’t. And didn’t. We probably were convinced that we have perfected the act of ignoring iniquities and inequities and the structural defects of the federation. In reality we were stacking the odds against building a nation out of a country.
Now it should be obvious that the chickens are coming home to roost. Tragedies have become the byword for our country. In the 1980s, a celebrity journalist and columnist, the late Dele Giwa of the National Concord newspaper, and later the Newswatch magazine which he co-founder, wrote an opinion article in which he said that Nigerians had become ‘unshockable’. And to think now that those were the years of innocence. Today Nigerians are inured to shock with the lived experience of multiple tragedies of monumental proportions everyday. This is a peek into the picture of our country in the last week.
And not every tragedy was reported and captured. A serving general in the armed forces and three of his men were captured and executed by terrorists in Borno state on Friday, November 14; 64 people, including women and children, were abducted by terrorists in Tsafe local government area of Zamfara state on Saturday, November 15; the next day, Sunday, November 16, 25 female students and their principal were abducted from their school in Maga, Kebbi state, by terrorists. The vice principal was shot and killed. Soon after terrorists invaded a Christ Apostolic Church [CAC] in Eruku, Kwara state, killing two worshippers and abducting 38 others. The terrorists are reportedly demanding N100 million for each of the abductees.
Elsewhere one policeman was killed by terrorists in Geidam, Yobe state; eight members of a civilian security taskforce were killed by terrorists and three others abducted in Gwoza, Borno state; terrorists abducted 15 persons, including four nursing mothers and babies in Sabon Birni in Sokoto state. Two persons were killed by the terrorists in that operation. Back in Kwara state, terrorists killed four rice farmers in an attack in Edu; and, on Friday, November 21, terrorists invaded St. Mary’s School [a private Catholic college], in Papiri, Niger state, and abducted more than 300 pupils, students, and staff.
This past week could be the worst in terms of insecurity in our country thus far. But the likelihood is that it could get worse. American president has been threatening to use the military to attack Islamist terrorists in Nigeria who he accused of committing genocide on Christians. He repeated the threat last weekend , and he has gotten approval from the Congress to do whatever pleased him in that regard. Now imagine this scenario: Islamist terrorists increase the spate of kidnapping Christians and non-fundamentalist Muslims who they would use as human shields against American drone strikes if the situation deteriorates further.
In effect, the expectation of a spike in abductions as is beginning to manifest presently by sectarian terrorists should not be treated as far-fetched and red herring. Nigeria is unravelling and the prospects are foreboding. The situation will not be helped by the position of Nigeria’s president, Alhaji Bola Ahmed Tinubu, that he is depressed by the country’s worsening security situation. He was not installed in the presidency to throw up his arms in seeming surrender and to leave citizens to the devices of terrorists and sundry violent non-state agents of evil.
*Onuoha is a commentator on public issues
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