So many articles have been written on the issue of insecurity in our society to the extent that many of us are beginning to think the matter is not worth engaging our attention any further. Our leaders don’t read or find time to listen to numerous analyses by well informed minds that grace our newspapers and broadcast media everyday. Some of us have been very close to the leadership class and so can affirm that majority of them don’t have time for news except when it has to do with their person or their activities in a near direct way. Otherwise nothing of news bothers them.
This partly explains why the society moves in a circle of same mess. Some of us have told friends and contemporaries that our leaders can run our society very successfully after reading the newspapers and listening to the talk shows in electronic media. From the discourse in newspapers and the electronic media, they can glean helpful ideas and solutions. Nevertheless, the issue of security, especially the failure of security, is a very serious matter anywhere and therefore should be a matter of deep interest all the time. For us apart from increasing threats to life and property across our society, the appointment of new service chiefs few days ago makes for detailed introspection.
No matter what anyone would say the change of service chiefs is a fall out of public advocacy; virtually every segment demanded for that to happen, that it didn›t when it was most auspicious to do, subtracted a great deal from the level of acclaim that would have accompanied the action. This is another problem with public policy in our society: leaders not wanting to appear to be pushed by citizens into certain actions. It is another trait of our old fashioned leaders, who obviously lack knowledge of how to cultivate influence and believe that pandering to public opinion connotes weakness. This is fallacy of the first order.
Many are happy at the development but not many are convinced of its efficacy in stemming the tide against insurgency and other allied threats facing our society. The reason is simple: our security personnel have not shown us they posses the ability to think outside routine measures taught to them in training. Put another way, the nature of challenge confronting our society requires more than personnel change at the helm of affairs. The change is not out of place but the bigger truth is that it will need more than new impetus which the change in guard will urher in to gain substantial progress in the efforts to restore security to acceptable level.
Service chiefs have always spoken of fighting deviants to a standstill but short on speaking on the actual reasons we have insecurity at such a high level. Until a doctor diagnoses a disease clearly, proper cure would be difficult. First question to ask would have been who is behind such level of massing of terrorists in the North East? Those felons are huge in number and from what we see and hear, well trained in formal fighting tactics. Question is, who are they? Who trained them and why their focus on Nigeria? If they are Nigerians, then hunger alone would not be enough reason to go into the bush and take a resolve to fight a national army like Nigeria has?
Finding answers to above questions would tell us if we are up against international conspiracy to disintegrate Nigeria or weaken her by stalling her development by way of wasting lean resources fighting a never ending war. This is what international conspiracy has been doing; it didn›t start today and won›t end soon if at all it will ever. Wars of attrition enrich imperialist nations just like disease and dependence would do. Many countries are fighting over subtle control of Nigeria – America, Britain, France, Chin, Morroco, Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Turkey›s role and Islamic agenda is growing under her current President Endogan.
If it is international conspiracy our approach to its solution would be different, everything is not tied to military conquest. By now too many arrests made should have established if it is the citizens against the state, then we will ask their objective? Some of us are yet to know why citizens would be so angry to begin an orgy of wild destruction of property and lives, or is it like they told us these vandals don›t like western education yet we see them use products of western education like cars, wears, cameras etc.
If we find out it is local boys, then who armed them? Why are the local elite keeping mute if what the vandals do is against what should be? Northern elite have abdicated their responsibility in this regard either on account of fear or deliberate passive collusion, the latter appear more likely given the prevalence of strong institutions in the area and their overbearing influence gained over a very long time. They must be made to rise and be counted at this time of great national stress, we all irrespective of station in life should be diminished by the wanton destruction of even one human life.
There is this other truth our leaders have tried to stifle; it is that the tide in terms of activities of vandals bears religious «smell». Then there is the herder-terrorists and economically dislocated persons whose circumstance forced to become negative deviants. So called herders are not the real cattle rearers we used to know, the ones we have are well trained terrorists. Many of us suspect that these were gathered in the Sahel countries by over ambitious Nigerians, trained abroad in collaboration with foreign governments and brought into the country to pursue an agenda they think could be pushed through by means of application of both official and barbaric force.
Foreigners rampaging through out all parts of our society and unilaterally taking up residence in alien forests is not an act of minor mistake as some will want us to believe. It is a well thought out conspiracy to harass, overwhelm and possibly take over. Some people slept and woke up thinking how to reconfigure national demographics, all in the bid to extend influence. There is nothing like herders/farmers conflict; it is pure advance of primitive oligarchy built on crude tactics. Hard fact is that the enablers would talk about having a dialogue, while the advancing vandals gain a foothold, using the cover that the our constitution allows everyone to move and live anywhere. Those who parrot this will not allow non-indigenes step within a mile of a purdah settlement, a classical case of where rights begin and end.
No right thinking person would enter another›s property without consent and convert it to his abode on mere right to live anywhere. Truth is, there is no seriousness to rein in the armed marauding killer herders. Otherwise, the government would have talked tough, arrested the culprits and make examples of them. In Ghana, herders who tried same unholy act were arrested, tried and executed. Here we speak grammar. Finally industrialization and mechanized large modern farms is a panacea. Credit facilities and productive education. Restructuring is a bigger solution. Plenty of indiscipline has engulfed the army. Army without discipline is a like a group of …!