Who says we need each other?

Last week, my Facebook friend, Gimba Kakanda gave me something to chew. Shortly after the gruesome and callous (as if it could be anything else) attack in Kaduna, Gimba’s wall went blank. He asked to shut himself off the tragedy and live for a while. I bet that was the way those who have not sold their shame for blind loyalty to the status quo felt. I did.
Every attack deserves condemnation, if you are not blinded by hatred and ethno-religious prejudice. Other friends on social media were busy doing something different. First, they denied that Buhari was the target of one of the attacks; that his convoy just passed through the scene. That left me with the option that the bullet-riddled jeep well publicised by social and mainstream media was photoshopped to fit the narration. There were politiricians who quickly put one and one together Idi Amin style to arrive at eleven. The attack was Arsehole Rock’s reaction to Buhari’s warning on the precarious state of politics and the nation a week earlier.
Conspiracy theory number three stretches the imagination further. One profile said – the snake does not bite itself. Most of us fail to accept that libel can be committed on social media. There were those who accused the General as the master sponsor of Boko Haram. Most of us have irretrievably lost it. The politricians would politricise anything and we, their supporters have sold our brains and sense of reasoning.
There are those who believe that northerners would do anything in their determination to wrestle power back from the south. These people believe that northerners want to expel them from their Garden of Eden and make them vagabonds of hell. To them, the Transformation Agenda was the best thing since sliced bread, never mind that they still wake up to the same lethargy and numbness of a nation dynamically inactive. But for these illusory historians, Boko Haram was the north’s answer to losing the presidency in which case, the north is itself nebulously defined, and Katsina state is no longer part of ‘the north’. These days, even geography is a casualty of politics. When it suits the politics of divide and rule, those with the knife cut off the ‘Middle Belt’ from ‘the core north’, but at other times, anyone under the Lugardian arrangement is a ‘Malo’.
Before Gimba gave me this intro, I was working on another innocuous story in a newspaper in which some southeastern manufacturers (not Innoson Motors – silly) were allegedly loudly complaining that Boko Haram has negatively affected their businesses. According to that report, which apparently was not cleared by the headquarters of MASSOB; Biafra, (if we can borrow the name without facing sedition) has suffered because its goods are no longer being sold in bulk as northern traders have stopped making southern trips. I cannot believe that this may have anything to do with the new arrangement, which requires them to register and carry the mark of the beast if they must trade with the south, or shall we say Biafra? On the other hand, northerners may be so backward they have no clue how to even register.
Another reason to doubt the report is that northerners contribute nothing to the commonwealth but suck out all the juices from it. Who would miss such parasites in an era where every southern village wants Ban Ki Moon’s endorsement to be a separate republic? As Fela would have put it, all that is ‘part of the case.’
So, my real-time friend, Na’Allah Mohammed Zagga (sorry, he too is a northerner, deal with it); had something more interesting to share. It is the video of an air defence system pioneered by the Israelis to safeguard their aircrafts against air missile attack. Apparently Israeli commercial planes are fitted with this device that has the capacity to deflect missiles from planes. Next time, I’ll be asking my agent to book me on an Israeli aircraft in the light of events of the past couple of days.
After suffering two tragedies, the news is that Malaysia airlines want the Multi-System Infrared Counter Measure or MUSIC on its remaining commercial jets. This is music to my ears knowing the love-hate relationship between Israel and Islam. Sixty-three per cent of Malaysia is Muslim. Now this must be betrayal for other Facebook friends who believe that nothing good can come out of Jerusalem. Zagga’s question was – why should it take tragedy for people to think about safeguarding lives? My answer is, necessity is the mother of prevention. Truth is, people are learning that differences apart, we all need each other to survive in this weather-beaten earth. Did I say ‘we’? The next question is – who are ‘we?’