The limits of politicking

The condemnations have run their course. These standard official reactions to national tragedies, big and small, seem cast in stone. Sadly, they point more to our collective impotence and less to the outpouring of our common humanity. Four times innocent students in four different colleges in Yobe State have been cruelly killed by the Boko Haram insurgents between June last year and February 23, this year. Total: 137 dead.

And four times our political leaders duly discharged their obligation to their killing by condemning their killers. Because this is Nigeria where politicians generally love motion but hate movement.
Anyone who reads part of the statement by the Governor of Yobe State, Alhaji Ibrahim Gaidam, would feel sorry for Nigeria. He said: “It is unfortunate that our children in schools are dying from lack of adequate protection from the federal government…”

The killing of children anywhere in the world has never been treated as a mere statistical evidence of a nation caught up in a spiral of unending violence such as we face with Boko Haram. It is a national tragedy and appropriately so treated. A nation that spares a thought for its future takes up such senseless and wanton killings as a national challenge. The challenge invites not the motion of grief and sympathy but the movement of full and undistracted commitment on the part of the state to make the killers pay for their crime in order to reassure the people of their full protection by the state.

The well protected among us may feel secure but their sense of personal security does not hide the fact that the rest of us feel utterly unprotected. No matter how loudly the drums of sycophancy may assault our ears, the inability of the state to carry out its statutory obligation of protecting its own people can be read in only one way: we face the prospects of Nigeria striving rather hard to take its place in the comity of failed states.

Condemnations, no matter how strongly they are worded, make no impression on the killers nor does it, in this case, reflect the extent of our collective loss and our determination to ensure it does not happen again in Yobe or any other state or community in the country.

I have made this point before in this column and I make it again, if only to underline the fact that our leaders are busy dancing owambe while our country is slowly turning brown from a cocktail of monumental security challenges. What is more tragic is that the Boko Haram insurgency has become a subject of needless hire wire politics in which the desire to score cheap points tends to outweigh the more urgent task of saving innocent people from cruel death in the hands of the insurgents. As the politicians trade accusations, dance owambe and pour champagne in celebration of victory that spells defeat, an increasingly desperate and despondent nation groans.

Each day confronts the nation with more senseless killings and other acts of brigandage against the people, not only in the theatres of Boko Haram insurgency but also in other parts of the country. It is necessary to remind our political leaders that by toying with the Boko Haram insurgency and other security challenges in the country, they are toying with the future of our dear country. Time to pull back and put nation above self.