Between the

Between the "Boko Haram" and the Niger-Delta Militants

Umar Bello

As I write now, a combined force of security personnel are still combing the old city of Bornu and neighboring states killing and maiming innocent citizens in a crude form of cowardly bravado and flaunting their helpless preys with impunity for all to see as if they were some Hercules felling invincible Goliaths and showing their feats. Such 'bravado' is always best demonstrated when they are set on helpless citizens who are armless sitting ducks that can easily be picked by their rifles in a slapdash case of 'find-and-shoot' --(not when face-to-face with dare-devil armed robbers holding the nation by the jugular)-- which saves them from any rigorous courage or methodical mental acumen in solving knotty security cases. If the latter sensibility has been applied right from the emergence of the Boko Haram, this ugly decimation of lives, properties and the displacement of a lot of people would have been saved and that 'potentially dangerous' threat could have been really 'nipped in the bud' right from its inception. But this is a nation of fire-brigade rashness where everything is based on the spur-of-the-moment without any proactive or preemptive brain work. However, it is not even the rashness or cowardice of the government security agents in treating issues that is on trial in this missive, but the government's peculiar sense of justice and fairness in the containment of two security threat at the poles ends of the nation.

The sort of fire-power and insensitivity deployed to quell the revolt of Boko Haram with the leader, Muhammad Yusuf, riddled with hundreds of bullets while trussed up pleading in the police headquarters just in the wake of the red carpet amnesty given to his counterpart, Henry Okah, on a platter of gold, reveals the mindset of a government clearly clueless to the course of justice and national security. In the killing of Yusuf, they have not only taken a life extra-judicially since he was caught alive and surrendered, but they have also interred many potential leads and dimensions in investigating the Boko Haram's phenomenal emergence, source of funds, tentacles and even the psychological mindsets and philosophies of the group for further and future strategic/security planning. And by killing and maiming the members and non-members alike in thousands callously and carelessly, they have not only aroused public and even sectional sympathies for them, but they have set the other members (still at large) on a course of more destructive 'martyrdom'. When you sow the wind, especially in a case like this, you will only reap the whirlwind. A Police Commissioner is reported to be in a dilemma about releasing some of the families of the killed members of the Boko Haram because there is a lot of thunder and militancy in the words of the women, but does he expect poetry and confetti thrown at his feet from them having killed their breadwinners and destroyed their properties?!

And yet, as said earlier, in another extreme dimension of this security miscalculation is the bread-and-butter treatment of the so-called Niger Delta Militants. A state should never be seen negotiating with criminals especially those who have taken arms to disrupt the economic life-wire of the nation by killing, kidnapping and attacking government establishments with sophisticated weaponry. But our government has not only negotiated with them, but it has decided to make their militancy a salaried vocation with perks attached thus legitimating their brigandage. Little wonder that hardly had Okah been pardoned than the Atlas Cove Jetty was bombed sending the signal probably that the government should bid them financially higher! More unemployed youths in the Niger Delta are getting to understand that rather than being in the gridlocked Nigerian labor market seeking for elusive jobs, they had better be in the 'militancy job' which only needs you to wear a hood and carry an AK 47 shooting government targets and you would be cosseted and financially subsidized by the government which is bamboozled and cowered by the discourse of resource control.

While the Yar'adua administration throws the nation from one extreme throes of security blunder to another pitching it in between potential crossfires from the now aggrieved and bereaved Boko Haram members and the trigger-happy, fire-for-money militants, there are important points for us all to draw. First, as Nigerians, it clearly indicates that the government is out of touch with the realities of governance in Nigeria. The virus of reckless (in)decision, as clearly demonstrated in the two extreme versions of security gaffes highlighted above, must have infected all government policies and decisions (seven or seven thousand agenda and all!) culminating into the present record high and unprecedented difficulties faced by our stoic citizenry. Secondly, to the talakawa in Arewa, this case (as that of Jos) has proven again that presidents from the North, contrary to the politics of namu namune spinned and sold to us by our selfish power elite during presidential elections, (probably with the exception of Buhari) simply serve themselves, their families and friends and often, as in this case, kowtow to the wishes of the southern part of Nigeria naively taken in by the discourse of lopsided development orchestrated by its vociferous media at the expense of the North.