The General Buhari Presidential Campaign and Kashim Shettima Gubernatorial Campaign landed in Maiduguri on Monday this week. It was an incredible sight to behold. Approximately one million people received the campaign in Borno. It was remarkable that there was no bombing and the incidents that were witnessed were directly related to the effort to control the unprecedented crowd. If the APC’s slogan of CHANGE has been genuinely taken to heart in one part of Nigeria, it would have to be in Borno State.
The insurgency of the past couple of years has affected the lives and livelihood of the people of that state and into the future, even after Nigeria might have defeated the insurgency, Borno will still have to deal with the consequences of a distorted demography.
This is because a lot very young people, especially young men between teenage and the early thirties, have been decimated in the insurgency and counter-insurgency war.
The fact that for a long time, the Federal Government at the centre did not adequately understand the insurgency and framed it within a partisan perspective, as an act of its enemies, just deepened the alienation of the Borno people from the federal administration.
I think one of the most interesting outcomes of the developments of the past couple of years, is the way that Governor Kashim Shettima and his administration made very heroic efforts to strengthen relevance with the Borno people.
The government was always there in moments of loss and deaths and it was always focused about delivering on social and infrastructural services. These seemed sometimes to be impossible given the way that the insurgents deliberately went out to destroy government institutions and social services that could serve the interest of peoples in communities.
Even in the dangerous situation associated with killings in Borno, I have continued to travel there back and forth, so I can honestly report the efforts at giving succor to people and never forgetting the development agenda by the government.
What the Borno people look forward to more than anything else, is the peace that will follow the defeat or substantial degradation of the insurgency, for them to go back to re-creating their thousand year old history.
It is the affirmation of faith and hope for development, which underlined the near-million man outing last Monday for the General Buhari and Kashim Shettima campaigns in Maiduguri. I think the resilience of the human spirit even in the worst adversity was played out in Borno state last Monday. It was simply incredible to behold the multitudes that were longing for an improvement in their lives!
