Have you ever felt like you are living in a time loop? Like something that is happening now should not be happening because it had happened already, like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? Except, each time it happens, it hurts more, weighs more, makes you bleed more?
This has been a tragic week for Nigeria. Except if you are living under a rock, you must have heard about a small town in Kaduna State called Tudun Biri, where people celebrating the Maulud festivities were attacked by a Nigerian Army drone and bombed to smithereens. At the last count, 85 people have been confirmed dead, killed by their own government, their own army that should be protecting them from the menace that has become known as bandits, who are effectively gangs of armed men running wild in our country’s vast ungoverned spaces, kidnapping people, raiding villages, taxing villagers and massacring at will.
The killing of the 85 villagers this weekend by the Army drone would not be the first time the military has accidentally bombed its own people. It happened as recently as January when an Air Force jet dropped a bomb on villagers in Doma of Nasarawa State, killing 37 civilians. It took six months for the Air Force to admit that it was definitely behind the attack finally.
Before then, there had been about half a dozen other incidences of accidental bombing of vulnerable civilians. The first major one in recent times was the January 2017 bombing of 52 villagers in Rann village of Borno State, when an Air Force jet attacked a displaced persons camp. At least 120 persons were injured in that incident. In April 2020, the Air Force attacked Sakotoku village in Damboa, Borno State, killing 17 civilians, mostly women and children. In April and July of 2022, NAF raids of Kurebe village in Niger State and Safana village in Katsina State led to the death of dozens of civilians.
There are common denominators in these incidents. The most common is the Air Force being the culprit. The second is a clear lack of accountability on the part of the NAF and the FG. The third is the government’s spurious claims of launching investigations into each attack, findings of which are never made public and from indications, we are not learning anything from since the same thing keeps happening over and over again. Fourth is the government’s hurry to sweep the incidents under the rug and the total disregard for the victims whose families are offered neither apology nor compensation to help them cope with their losses. How anyone would think that is okay to do is beyond me. It is even surprising that we have numerous rights groups in this country, and yet none of them, to the best of my knowledge at least, has taken up the crusade to get compensation for these victims.
The other painful thing is the lack of accountability. In all the incidents mentioned, there hasn’t been a person or system that has been identified as being the cause of such fatal errors—mistakes that should be mortally embarrassing for a professional army—so we never know if any heads have rolled, figuratively of course, on accounts of these mistakes, or if a system has been rebooted to prevent a reoccurrence. We all know that in the dusty battlefields, such as vast swathes of Nigeria are today due to a pestilence of terrorists, bandits and felons, it is often easy for things to be lost or disappeared or deliberately concealed as state secrets, but has the Air Force, beneath the veil of state secrecy, done the due diligence it needed to do? Has it been done right by the victims and the country as a whole?
We can’t keep blaming this on intelligence failures, which seems like a blanket excuse, to be honest. Neither can we continue blaming it on poor equipment. In the last few years, and for many years before that, in fact, the defence sector has always gobbled down the lion’s share of our annual budget. Yes, we all know that in the pre-Boko Haram years, these allocations were misused as the military did not feel the pressing need to equip itself, and the Air Force almost fell into complete ruin. But just recently, NAF acquired some $600 million dollars’ worth of Super Tucano fighter jets. With constant combat experience and ample mistakes of bombing civilians, one would think we would have learnt better how not to make such costly and grave mistakes.
Again, next year, the defence sector will be guzzling the largest share of our budget to procure better equipment to help tackle the country’s security challenges. But what assurance do we have that with these new gears coming in, innocent Nigerians would still not be at the end of another drone or fighter jet attack? None. We didn’t receive any assurance in 2017 when Rann happened, and we haven’t received any assurance since Safana, Doma or Damboa because the military has not held itself accountable for these tragedies.
But repeated assaults on the lives of innocent Nigerians is not the only recurring thing that is happening in the country, this time loop haven of ours. The inexplicable spending spree the Nigerian government has been embarking on is yet another one. Every week, there is a shocking news revelation of allocations made for frivolous expenses that make little to no sense, especially in the present economic whirlwind the country has found itself in. The budget presented to NASS by President Bola Tinubu last week has followed the pattern of the supplementary budget he had presented prior. The splurging on a presidential yacht, the SUVs for lawmakers, for the office of the first lady, the office of the president, the $38 million on presidential jets, and the billions for renovations of already renovated buildings all in the supplementary budget makes little sense.
Now, with a $34.85 billion budget on the table and looking at the breakdown, it makes you wonder about some of the bizarre allocations on the budget. With a debt profile of $51. 759 billion and inflation at 27 per cent, the highest in two decades, and with subsidies being cut to stop wastage, it is strange to then splurge scarce national resources like N16 billion for local and international travels and almost the same amount (N15 billion) to renovate the VP’s official residence and the other ridiculous spending on that budget makes little economic sense. Don’t even get me started on the COP 28 jamboree.
The irony is that we have seen all these before, both the extravagant spending and allocations in the budget and the accidental bombing of Nigerians, all across several governments. Pledges of accountability too. The military’s disregard for its hundreds of victims conjures the image of a savage moonwalking on the grave of his victims, the government’s extravagant spending invokes that of it dancing shoki on the mounting deprivation of Nigerians. Weren’t we supposed to be breaking out of this vicious time loop, out of this rinse-and-repeat circle of death and wastage? For the dead and their relatives, apologies and compensation are due. For the wastage, well, we can do better. Let us do better.
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