Trouble in paradise

I had not had time to comment on the ill-fated Dana Airlines Crash, when we had the Farouk Lawan bribery saga; a major ground-breaking scandal like no other, which totally eroded whatever little confidence I had in democracy.  Just as I was fuming and ventilating over Farouk’s betrayal of the poor people of Nigeria, worse happened.  On Sunday the 17th of June, 2012, bombs were detonated in 3 churches between Zaria and Kaduna.  From the initial explosions, over 30 people died, including women and children.  Immediately after the bombings, anger boiled over, when young Christians allegedly went into the streets and started killing anybody who looked Muslim.  A day or so passed, and the Muslims could not take it any longer, leading to all out madness in the land.  There is trouble in Paradise.  Whoever is pulling the levers to ensure that Nigeria dwells permanently in wahala, surely scored a bull’s eye with the Kaduna bombings and the subsequent reprisals.

As someone who had been following the trends of these troubles in the motherland, the Kaduna/Zaria incidence was a confirmation of my fears.  I noticed how the so-called Boko Haram bombed a nondescript Catholic Church in Madalla in January (heralding church bombings in Nigeria), with the effect that such put Nigeria right in the centre of international reckoning.  The fact that St Mary’s Catholic Church is unpainted and attended by poor people in the main, still made it relevant.  It was a Catholic Church all the same and so the Pope will make a statement, so also the European Union, and of course the USA.  It is only a total idiot that will not be able to draw the subtle patterns that have been carved out, from these bombings and other terrorist activities in our country.

After the Madalla Catholic Church bombing, it didn’t matter which other church was bombed by these people perpetrating this heinous crimes.  By that first act, it has been established in the minds of many unthinking Nigerians, that Christianity was the target.  The government as well as so-called intellectuals keep promoting an untenable theory in the minds of the people.  But their theories are a bag of contradictions.

They say Boko Haram is all powerful. And they hate Western Education.  They are super-strategists, but when they catch some of their members, they look so dirty and scrawny.  Boko Haram has the ability to beat all of Nigeria’s security agencies, on whom billions of dollars have been spent, but they are headless.  How can an organization be super strategists, when they have absolutely no structure (and no face) as President Jonathan rightly asserted in his last media chat?  How can an organization deploy strategies that beat the whole world, when it has no command structure?  How come there is a pattern to the bombings and killings, if no one is pulling the levers?  Of recent the so-called Bokon Haram had graduated to church bombings, deliberately pitting Nigeria’s two main religions together.  Before then their bombings were indiscriminate.  They seemed to give sometime between the Madalla Catholic Church bombing and the other churches.  Perhaps something they expected the government to do was not done, so they escalated their approach!

Boko Haram (a stupid name by which a much more sophisticated problem is trivialized by all of us), knows exactly what it is doing.  And there is a huge chess gambit on hand.  The ‘checkmate’ seems so close.  But most Nigerians have not a single clue what is happening, in a game in which they are pawns; killed at will, for no reason at all, for just being unlucky  to be walking past when a gambit is being deployed.  Boko Haram moved the church bombings to the regional churches, attacking ECWA and COCIN churches in their very heartland; the volatile Jos. They even tried one of the indigenous churches in Bauchi and elsewhere.  Yes, that one whose name starts with ‘Eklassiyar’.  It is apparent too, that the target of Boko Haram is carefully selected.  However they are mainly poor people.  I remember passing the Sultan Road Junction in Kaduna, where many Okada Riders mill about.  That place was bombed, with many of the Okada/Achaba boys dying.

The idea of bombing and killing mainly poor people, is to stoke the embers of hatred and get them to start killing each other.  Elites don’t carry daggers and machetes against themselves.  At best, they write rubbish on many blogs and always stand back while they incite the same poor people to go out and revenge.  Many so-called intellectuals in Nigeria today, have made this their past-time.  They have even started labeling some of us by unsavoury names, just because we still urge caution and understanding, rather than the blind rage they are pushing.  The problem with blind rage, is that it will make you kill even your own kith and kin.  After all a blind person does not see.  My eyes are still wide open, and I can see that mincemeat is being made of my beloved and only country, with no one bothering really, to bell the cat and say the truth!

Boko Haram has become the epitome of evil in Nigeria, with people ascribing phantom deeds to them.  They are supposed to hate western education but maintain a website.  They even post well-edited, professionally shot video clips of their deeds on youtube.com.  And they speak quite regularly to our pressmen, even calling for conference calls once in a while.  Wonders shall never end in Nigeria.  With all the strategy they have, and their desire to ‘convert every Northerner to Islam’ by bombing everyone to smithereens, Boko Haram had no plans whatsoever to protect the Muslim brothers, sisters, children, and old people, that were being dragged out of their cars and houses, defenceless, and butchered in the streets of Kaduna in the past week or so!  No, their strategy does not include that. Or perhaps that is EXACTLY what whoever is behind all this wants to achieve!

Northern Nigeria and especially the Muslim Ulamah are the greatest losers in a war for which they are blamed. They are at once the victims, as well as the villains.  The economies there are fast collapsing.  The last vestiges of industry are disappearing.  Right thinking Nigerians who live there are beginning to hate the inhabitants.  Politically, their fortune is almost eroded to nothing.  Very few trust core northerners again.  Well, the northern Muslims will have to save themselves.  In all this turmoil, the president appointed Colonel Sambo Dasuki as the new NSA.  I felt it was a good move.  Until the president granted a media chat and said he doesn’t ‘give a damn’ about declaring his assets.  More on that next week. There is trouble in paradise!