Killings: Blame Buhari Not Service Chiefs!

By Richard Maduku

Despite a presidential appointee’s numerous enviable privileges, there are persons who don’t wish to become one today under President Muhammadu Buhari. A few even pity his aides. This is not because contractors will not build houses or buy cars for them because of the anti-corruption stance of the man. It is also not because they detest being referred to as usurpers, hyenas or jackals by the first lady whose outspokenness could sometimes be more critical of the government than that of a spokesperson of the rival political party. Neither are those who feel this way nursing presidential ambition come 2019 general elections. Rather it is because of the shortcomings of the government for which, whether out of fear or reverence for the President, the aides are always being blamed. 

For instance, the exasperating ineptitude if not sleaze that plagues the Ministry of Petroleum Resources which the President has appropriated for himself despite his enormous responsibilities are never attributed to him. It is the Junior Minister and the Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company that always take the flak for everything including the frequent scarcity of petrol all over the country especially at Christmas/New year periods.

As We Await Buhari's Response To The 50 Nigerians Killed In Benue

By Perry Brimah, Dr.
The account of the massacre given by the governor of Benue state was harrowing. The raiders came in typical style and killed at will, men, women and children. They set fire to homes and farms, burning flesh, wood and brick alike. This time it was Governor Ortom's very own village. These terrorists do not discriminate one farming village from the other. The same way they raid and set farming villages ablaze in Borno is the same way they light them up and fill the paths with blood in Benue, Enugu and Ekiti.

*President Buhari 

Their enemy is clear: the farmers and their farms. A weeping governor Ortom narrated how they burned hectares of rice farms. It does not take a rocket scientist to get what's happening here or what was happening in Borno; with the insurgent and not political Boko Haram, that is.

Chief of Internal Security, Buratai Agrees They Are Boko Haram

Dare I say, to our relief the Nigerian 'chief of global security,' Lieutenant General T. Y. Buratai has finally admitted that these men ravaging the middle belt and south of Nigeria are the same 'ol Boko Haram. It took a lot of convincing for the man Buhari has put in charge of Nigeria's internal security to admit this feature of the spread of terror that we have long wailed about.

The target is the farmers. Dislodged from the Sambisa forest, these enemies of farmers have spread wide in the hinterland and gone deeper than before. They do not attack towns. They do not attack senators and governors. Their enemy is the farmer. Their need can only be the land.

Nigeria’s Killing Fields

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

If our claim to being an irreducible part of civilised humanity is to be validated, we must meet an acceptable degree of adherence to the norms that guarantee that level of life that is superior to that of a people at their inchoate stage of development. For what entitles us to be a part of civilised humanity when the robust allowance we ought to make for the sanctity of human life is non-existent?  

*President Buhari 

If we all take it as a given that  respect for human life is a fundamental principle   of  a civilised society, then we must come to the grim realisation that as a people we still have so much work to do to remain part of the civilised world. For clearly, the ascendancy of the disdain for the sanctity of human life in our society daily spawns crises with their attendant loss of lives. If these deaths were only caused by Boko Haram, there would have been the tragic consolation that the perpetrators are only irredeemable and blood-sucking lunatics on the fringes of humanity.

The first step towards retrieving the society from its self-affliction of the warped norms that nurture violence is that our political leaders must not recoil from the responsibility of admitting that they were the ones who  first torpedoed the rules of mutual engagement that foster trust between the leaders and the citizens. In them is reposed the trust of using the nation’s resources to improve the lot of all the people. But on almost every occasion, this trust is often injudiciously requited.  They cater to their selfish interest – buying mansions  they do not need, buying private jets to escape the pothole-ridden roads  they fail to repair  and acquiring wives  and mistresses in conformity with their sybaritic lives . 

This state of mutual distrust is expressed in an aggravated form through ethnic suspicion. The tragic consequence is that thousands are killed on account of unfathomable or  the  flimsiest provocation. It is this mutual suspicion that provides the ground for the perpetuation of the inter-ethnic feud as the case of the Agatu community where hundreds were allegedly killed by herdsmen. In the case of the people of Agatu and the herdsmen, we may make an allowance for the possibility that a lack of constant interactions  has over the years exacerbated   this mutual distrust. But how could there be mutual distrust among people who intermingle almost daily in the course of business or living in the same neighbourhood? This is the puzzle that the tragic clash between traders of different ethnic origins threw up in Lagos recently.