In an interview with Daily Trust newspaper
last week, spokesman of Borno Elders Forum, Dr Bulama Gubio lamented that the
people of the north east feel as if they are not Nigerians. That plaintively revealing
statement captures a lot more than what appears to be a successful takeover of
the towns and villages they live in by an insurgency that has now
declared many of them them captive subjects of a separate caliphate. The complaints over being neglected,
ignored or abandoned have been heard countless times from Borno Elders, and
from a thousand other sources since the murder of Muhammad Yusuf triggered the
growth of a vicious group motivated by bitterness, fuelled by the zeal to fight
the Nigerian state’s entire ideological and structural underpinnings, and emboldened
by successes in that direction.
Dr
Gubio is one of the very few members of the
elite who have chosen to remain behind, or who are unable to leave. The
region
has bled away most of its affluent and influential citizens. Those like
him who
stayed behind have seen an already backward economy destroyed; a
community traumatized
beyond words; social structures crumble and land and populations brought
under
occupation of terror. Borno state governor’s recent broadcast to the
people, in which he attempted to shore up crashed spirits and morale
while commending
efforts to make this living nightmare of the people all go away woyld
have sounded surreal to most of the people who had electricity, tv set,
radio, the time
or the peace of mind to listen to him. Dignity of elders and leaders is
be
difficult to preserve in the face of traumatized populations streaming
into towns
as refugees, adding to the fear and desperation of those already
resigned to
being taken over any day now. The enemy crawls nearer with certainty and
confidence by the day, while those who can afford contact with the rest
of Nigeria
hear of another country where life is normal; economies grow, children
go to
school, and young people look towards a bright future.
A few weeks ago, people in the north east
would have heard that over N58b was pledged
as Terror Victims Fund. If they expected that they would receive immediate relief
from those pledged amounts,all of them being victims, their expectations would have taken
a further dip, and their feelings of alienation from a nation they used to feel
proud to be a part of would have been heightened.
This is a part of Nigeria where refugees flee
along with the military when towns or villages are lost. The refugees stop
briefly to count their losses in young men conscripted on pain of death or
slaughtered to serve as incentives to the conscripts, or as suspected volunteers
in Civilian JTF, or in young
girls and women selected for abduction. They squeez into schools and
government offices, at
the mercy of all the elements and the stretched resources of state
governments
and relief agencies. Nigeria now has well over in one million internally
–
displaced persons (IDPs). These are people who, a few weeks ago, were
farmers, workers, housewives or school children in towns and villages
only a few kilometres
away. No one is sure how long they will stay in camps, but they are
grateful
that they are not in those towns and villages where terrorists have
total control over who lives or dies the next minute. A few months ago,
most of these
refugees shared the outrage of the nation and the world over the
abduction of
the Chibok girls. Now many of them have lost many more daughters and
wives,
while hope dims by the day that the Chibok girls will be found and
freed.
In another part of the same nation, life goes on normally. The main preoccupation is for current leaders to get re-elected. Once
in a while, leaders and citizens get all worked up over events such as the importation of a disease such as
Ebola, but federal government doles out N1.9b
to fight it, and state governments take extraordinary measures to
forestall an epidemic.Nigeria's rich and priveleged are saved from being
temporarily prevented from flying around the world,spending their
wealth. Sometimes
quarrels break out between politicians over who to blame over the plight
of
citizens in the north-east,or when the president hobnobs with
politicians from the region accused of being pillars of support for the
terrorists, but they are soon forgotten, until the next one
breaks out. Soldiers and policemen find comfort in creating the facade
of normalcy
around places where the powerful and the wealthy live. The most
impressive outings of the Nigerian state are seen when elections are
being organized. On
these occasions, thousands of soldiers and security personnel are sent
to keep voters in queues, and to remind the citizenry that Nigerian
democracy flows from the
barrel of the gun.
Voices
of people like Dr Gubio and Borno
Elders are becoming fainter. In the same week they wrote their open
letter to President Jonathan,Northern Elders Forum and the more
circumspect Arewa Consultative Forum also released strongly worded
statements lampooning the President for turning his back on the people
of the North.These groups must be wondering what else to say, and who
to say it to, going by their widely-publicised tearful lamentations.
Perhaps they
count on the fact that the Vice President, Minister of Defence, NSA,
Inspector-General of Police and a few other influential political office
holders are
northerners, and they may feel their pain. Or they remember that the
Senate
President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives are both
northerners,and they could leverage on the superiority in numbers of
northern legislators to engineer a more robust response from the federal
government. They could be hoping that the intimate relationship which
our president enjoys
with some northerners will make him more amenable to showing a firmer
resolve
and stronger political will to fight the insurgency eating up their
lives, or
showing more compassion towards victims.Even more improbable,they could
be desperate enough to think northern governors will spare five minutes
to read their pleas for attention and action.
The two parts of the Nigerian nation will drift further
apart as our leaders fail to accord the defeat of this insurgency the highest priority.
The enemy will win the next elections because the government will predicate its
campaign strategy on the need for four more years to defeat it, and the
opposition will insist that only its government will defeat it. While they
argue and campaign, the government will not fight it because that will deprive it of a major
campaign asset, and the opposition’s criticism of government's response to terror
will be a double-edged sword, at best. The people of the north east, or even
much of the North will be further exposed to a war against them; a war which is
neither declared or acknowledged as one. By the time some Nigerians go to the
polls, if indeed there are elections early next year, many of their fellow citizens would have
been under effective occupation by terrorists for months. There will be many Nigerians
who will wonder if they will ever be Nigerians again.
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