As the nation bleeds

Nigeria is under siege. The tragedy is that we don’t even know who the enemies are or why they have turned various parts of our country, particularly the north-east and the north-central zones, into killing fields. Borno. Yobe. Adamawa. Plateau. Benue. Kaduna. Peaceful states turned into conflict states.
Thousands of people in these states are dead and many more are being killed daily. Thousands more have been displaced and have become pathetic refugees in their own country. Only this Wednesday, in a brazen act of impunity, killers blocked the Makurdi-Lafia federal highway, stopped vehicles and systematically picked out those they had earmarked for slaughter. And the state had no response to them.Oh yes, the police are investigating.
Our country is bogged down in the marsh of a sorry pass.Let no one under-estimate the magnitude of this tragedy for the present and the future of Nigeria. It is tragic enough that we do not know the enemies or how they choose their own enemies, what they are fighting for or against and why. The greater tragedy is that in the protected island of officialdom, few, if any care, about what is happening, to whom, where and why. And so each wave of killing and destruction elicits nothing more than condemnations.
To be fair, President Goodluck Jonathan cared enough to set up two panels to tell him about Boko Haram and how to deal with the insurgency. It is incomprehensible that the same president who cared enough to want answers to the insurgency does not care enough to look into the reports submitted to him, let alone do anything about them. As he dithers and dallies, the killings go on. Put it down to the insouciance of a leader whose country is on the cusp of transformation.
It is common sense that no nation fights an enemy it does not know. But for more than four years this country has been fighting an enemy it does not know, except that it goes by the name of Boko Haram. In Plateau State, and now Benue and southern Zaria in Kaduna State, the new gang of killers goes by the name of Fulani herdsmen. Only this week the National Economic Council, without knowing who these people are and why they slaughtering men, women and children in scores of villages in Benue State and other states in the north-central zone, concluded that the problem was the lack of grazing grounds for the Fulani herdsmen; therefore, the federal government would create some. End of killings and destruction. How awfully simple-minded. Put it down as a solution looking for a problem.
No nation would face what ours is facing without some evidence of a determination on the part of its leaders to cage the killers and end the killings. Why do we treat these killings as the teething problems of a country trying to become a nation? Has the life of the Nigerian become so cheap that we cannot afford to waste our sympathy when it is wasted so cruelly, so mindlessly and for reasons no one could put their fingers on?
Perhaps, the answer to these and other critical questions might be found in the profound argument about the official attitude towards the crisis advanced by Vice-Admiral Murtala Nyako, the governor of Adamawa State. It is a complex war with frightening implications for a nation that marked the centenary of its amalgamation and is still engaged in divisive efforts at finding strings strong enough to hold it together. In his remarks at a symposium in Washington last week on Current Economic, Social and Security Challenges in Northern Nigeria, Admiral Nyako, made this important point, among others:
“The initial assumption was that Boko Haram was religiously motivated. Nobody now associates the group with any religion; their targets have largely been within the Muslim communities. What, therefore, are the motivating factors of the so-called Boko Haram? We must answer this question properly to enable us determine what type of war we are fighting.”
The country, he goes on “…does not seem to know what it is facing and the type of war it should be fighting; is it a war against terrorists, insurgents or, as people are coming to believe, a nurtured war against the people in Northern Nigeria? In short, is the massive killing of people and destruction of property and the environment state-sponsored?” (See Daily Trust of March 25, 2014).

A good question and a frightful one at that.The admiral had written at least two well-informed professional papers to the president on Boko Haram that received scant, if any attention of the big man most probably because it is safer to cling to the earlier assumptions than task ourselves with looking beyond what has become the one-name-fits-all in the insurgency, Boko Haram.

The same attitude now informs official reaction to the killings in Benue, Kaduna and Plateau states. Fulani herdsmen, not Boko Haram, are to blame. But are these really Fulani herdsmen? When did these simple herdsmen married to the welfare of their cattle, transform themselves into well-trained and organized warriors, armed with sophisticated AK 47 and other weapons and war against communities with which they have no known disputes?

I see no attempts at unraveling this mystery, if mystery it is. But as with Boko Haram, Fulani herdsmen is a useful label simply hung on every instance of unprovoked killings in the northern parts of the country outside the core theatres of Boko Haram operations of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa. To continue to blame these killings on Fulani herdsmen is to persist in the folly of believing that there is little to worry about in our nation being systematically painted with the precious blood of its own people.

Nigeria had been at cross roads before. It is at cross roads again. The noise at the national conference would hardly drown that fact. The mass graves may mean little to some of us because the affected villages are isolated villages in other states and they are far removed from them. This is a well-oiled attitude that increasingly tells much more about Nigeria and the Nigerians than any pious pontifications by those now favoured in the distribution of political power and the benefits thereof. But tomorrow, Nigeria’s tomorrow, must mean something to Nigerians and their leaders. Or so I think.