Nigeria: How Security Agencies Sabotage The Fight Against Crime

 By Rotimi Fasan

It has become customary for Nigerian security agents and agencies to pass off what should ordinarily be classified information as routine news release. Each time some of these security units and their operatives engage in this unwholesome breach one is reminded of how far many of them have fallen in their knowledge of what is appropriate information to be shared with the public and what is best kept secret.

Many of them don’t appear to have been trained. And if trained, they do not come off as having learned the right lesson. They look grossly raw and inexperienced but sometimes we are talking about some of the most senior persons in the military and paramilitary agencies.

Nigeria: Metele As Price Of National Swindle

By Paul Onomuakpokpo

Aside from the occasional death of soldiers in their battle against Boko Haram, the nation is now confronted in Metele with a seeming culmination of the military’s losses to the insurgents in the north-east. The government has often fumed at the obduracy of its traducers who instead of trumpeting the wonders of its military in Sambisa Forest have rather warned that more still needed to be done to defeat the insurgents in the light of the occasional suicide attacks on civilians and losses of two or four soldiers to the insurgents.

But the recent killing of about 100 soldiers in Metele, Borno State, so shattered the charade of triumph over the insurgents that President Muhammadu Buhari had to dispatch his defence minister to Chad for more collaboration in defeating them. Clearly, the dead soldiers deserve all the garlands for their bravery and patriotism for which they have paid the supreme price.

Nigeria: Between Hope And Hopelessness

By Dan Amor

In 2015, during the Presidential campaigns, the ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) then in opposition, promised Nigerians heaven on earth. They said they would turn Nigeria to a new paradise in Africa. Boko Haram would be defeated in six weeks. The pump price of petrol would be brought to forty Naira per litre. Naira, the Nigerian currency would be made to be at par with the American dollar. Primary and secondary schools students would be provided free food daily. Unemployed Nigerians would be given a welfare stipend of five thousand Naira (N5,000) each every month.

 

                                                                                  *pix: cnn

The list included over 150 promises, too numerous to be accommodated here. More than sixteen months of the APC in the saddle, Nigerians are told to be prepared to make sacrifices, that the change must begin with them. Boko Haram has been defeated only on paper.  Sambisa forest has been liberated by federal forces. But the insurgents have metamorphosed into killer herdsmen who are being pampered and protected by security forces to kill armless Nigerians. The Nigerian currency has nosedived several octaves below its metropol. It now exchanges for almost 500 to the dollar from N165 to the dollar in May 2015. Petrol which sold for N86 as at May 2015 now sells for N145 per litre. Millions of school children are still at home more than a month after schools have resumed across the country. Everywhere, there is hunger and gnashing of teeth as inflation has risen above rooftops. But, in his October 1 independence anniversary broadcast to the nation, President Muhammadu Buhari asked Nigerians to hope for tomorrow, that tomorrow would be better. Are Nigerians hopeful of the day after? Will tomorrow ever come? The collective answer to this poser is a resounding NO. Tomorrow hardly comes.

If Nigerians are no longer hopeful of tomorrow, they deserve pardon. For, never in the history of mankind have a people been so brutalised and tortured by the very group of people who are supposed to protect and nurture them. They ought to be pardoned knowing full well that their manifest state of hopelessness has extended beyond disillusionment to a desperate and consuming nihilism. Which is why the only news one hears about Nigeria is soured news: violence, arson, rape, killing, maiming, kidnapping, robbery, corruption, official lying, etcetera. It is sad to note that Nigeria is gradually and steadily degenerating into the abyss. Even in a supposedly democratic dispensation, a sense of freedom, a feeling of an unconditional escape, a readiness for a genuine change, is still the daydream of the entire citizenry. Everything is in readiness for the unexpected, and the unexpected is not in sight. You cannot possibly conceive what a rabble we look. We straggle along with far less cohesion than a flock of cattle or sheep. We are, in fact, even forced to believe that tomorrow will no longer come. Quite a handful of us are simply robots without souls; as we are hopeless because we are conditioned to a state of collective hopelessness.

Amina, Sambisa And The Parable Of A Wobbly Nigeria

By Okey Ndibe

A peculiarly Nigerian type of frenzy happened last week. The event was triggered by a report that a young woman named Amina Ali Nkeki, one of the more than 200 Chibok schoolgirls abducted in the night of April 14, 2014, had been rescued. The initial reports disclosed that a vigilante group rescued Amina last Tuesday, as she wandered along the edges of Sambisa Forest in the company of a man, who claimed to be her husband, but was suspected to be a Boko Haram insurgent, and a four-month baby in her arms.

*Amina Ali Nkeki, rescued Chibok girl
meets President Buhari 

From there, it was brouhaha all the way. Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State feted the 19-year-old mother. Then, a day later, President Muhammadu Buhari welcomed Amina and her baby to Aso Rock, his official residence. The misfortunate woman was cast in a dizzying drama that featured photo-ops, speeches and global media coverage. The president cradled Amina’s baby in his arms, as he and others beamed for the cameras. Speaking on behalf of the Nigerian state, the president promised that Amina would receive the best physical, psychological and emotional healthcare Nigeria can provide.

You’d think, watching all the excitement, that all 219 schoolgirls, not just one, had been spirited from their abductors. But that was the one narrative, thumbed with the imprimatur of the Nigerian state. There was an album of counter-narratives, running the gamut from those who insisted that the whole thing was an abject hoax, a stage-managed political theatre, to those who believe that the abduction saga never happened in the first place.

Last Thursday, two days after Amina’s rescue, the Nigerian military announced a second rescue, of a youngster named Serah Luka. It was as if a slow momentum was building up, Nigeria on the cusp of finding and liberating the 200 odd victims, who are not accounted for.

But the second success story turned out a dud. Chibok parents as well as activists, who pressed former President Goodluck Jonathan – and are pressing Mr. Buhari – to bring back the schoolgirls questioned the military’s claim that Serah was one of the schoolgirls. Neither her name nor image was on the roster of the missing schoolgirls.

Whether it was an honest mistake or a calculated fib, the misidentification of Serah, as one of the Chibok schoolgirls further fueled conspiracy theories. The first and second rescues were seen as politically orchestrated maneuvers, a plot by the Buhari administration and its champions to deflect attention from biting economic crises and deepening social misery.

Some doubters wondered why Amina, who was supposed to be sitting certificate exams at the time of her abduction, was incapable of expressing herself in English. Her apparent incapacity fed speculations that she was chosen and cast in a contrived melodrama.

Buhari Has No Answers To Nigeria's Problems – Gov Fayose

Ekiti State governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose has called on Nigerians to pray specially for President Mohammadu Buhari; saying; “The President needs God to give him the necessary wisdom to be able to find solution to the country’s economic and security problems.”

*Buhari 

The governor also challenged the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, to relocate to Sambisa in Borno State or Yobe and move around there without heavy military security if indeed he was sure that Boko Haram had been defeated.

Speaking through his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Governor Fayose said; “only God’s intervention can save Nigeria from the present economic and security problems as it is glaring that the man running the affairs of the country at the federal level does not have any answer to the problems.”

He said; “Even the Holy Bible said in James 1:5 that if anyone lacks wisdom, he should ask God and as it is, Nigerians must assist the President in asking for wisdom and understanding to tackle the country’s economic and security problems before Nigeria is further plunged into more woes with the federal government’s decision to borrow N2.2 Trillion, which translates to N6.066 billion per day to finance the 2016 Budget.” He described the Federal Government’s announced reduction of petrol pump price from N87 to N85 per litre as a continuation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) government’s governance by deceit, saying; “Even secondary school students of economics know that you cannot deregulate and regulate at the same time.”

Boko Haram Is Wounded And Dangerous

By Max Siollun

Less than a year ago, the militant group Boko Haram controlled an area of northeastern Nigeria the size of Belgium. It was “a mortuary for the uncooperative and prison for the conquered,” as one unlucky resident described it to me at the time, and it threatened to engulf ever more of the country. The brutal Islamist insurgency had sapped the morale and discipline of the Nigerian army and seemed poised to carve out a caliphate that rivaled the one it had pledged loyalty to in Iraq and Syria.

Fast-forward just 10 months and the idea of an Islamic caliphate in northern Nigeria seems a distant memory. Delusions of statehood caused Boko Haram’s leaders to overreach, inviting a powerful regional military response and bolstering the candidacy of former Nigerian military leader Muhammadu Buhari, who set about crushing the Islamist insurgency after winning the presidency in March. A regional military coalition led by Nigeria has recaptured much of the territory Boko Haram once controlled and driven its fighters into remote regions in Nigeria’s northeastern corner.

But if Boko Haram has seen its territorial ambitions dashed in recent months, it is hardly on the verge of defeat. In a way, Boko Haram has come full circle, reverting back to the kind of asymmetrical warfare that was once its grisly hallmark. As a result, the group poses as much of a danger to civilians now as it did when it fought to control cities and towns. In the last six months alone, Boko Haram has killed nearly 1,500 people.

What explains the rollercoaster ride of the last 10 months? Part of the answer is hubris. Last month, a senior Nigerian military officer told me that the publicity Boko Haram garnered from its 2014 kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok emboldened the group’s leaders to be more ambitious, resulting in costly mistakes. Instead of sticking to the hit-and-run tactics that it had used to successfully torment the Nigerian military for years, Boko Haram began to seize and hold territory, boldly declaring an Islamic “caliphate” in the areas it had conquered. This stretched the group’s resources too thin and forced it into a conventional war with the Nigerian military that it could not win. Boko Haram also shed its domestic focus, launching cross-border raids into neighboring Cameroon, Chad, and Niger, all of which eventually joined a five-nation military coalition against it (along with Benin and Nigeria).