The most cynical and sadistic turn of that terrorism is the descent into the dark abyss by the targeting of school children, especially girls, for death, for sexual assault and for whatever other dastardly unimaginable motiveless motives. A car bomb explosion in Nyanya claimed the lives of seventy-two innocent Nigerians pursuing daily bread in the market place. Hundreds others were /are in various states of mortal injury. Brief like candlelight but leaving behind enduring pain and ravaging sense of loss, even as death has been allowed to assume a nihilistic commonness and ordinariness on our national horizon. Because of the rapidity of its occurrence, there is a pervasive benumbing of the spirit and our humanity is gravely crippled and assailed by death.
This phenomenon of cavalier wanton killing and criminal decimation of our compatriots of varying ages, sexes and classes is fast assuming a work-a-day macabre reality in our country overtaken/overrun by carriers and dealers in death. This dehumanizing impact of death by terror is perhaps the most tragic aspect of our failure to come both to grips and to resolution of terrorism on our national landscape. Ordinary citizens, as the Nyanya killings depict and denote, can no long toil for life safely. The sense of insecurity for the common working and toiling wo/man raises the scale of hopelessness among the deprived masses on our land.
What is far more tragic and horrifying is the new dimension of terror which haunts down innocent children, pupils and students by the dealers in wanton death. Students can no longer stay in their schools to study in peace and without fear of sudden death ravaging their classrooms, dining rooms and beds at any time of the day—fresh cold morning, hot and steaming afternoon and in the darkest nooks of nights. The whole nation appears to be at war but there is bedlam in the north east of this huge, trauma-bound country. There is no exaggeration, to my mind, in the picture painted by Daily Sun in its Editorial of April 22, 2014, in these apt words of plausible resonance of national alarm; ‘Overall, the picture of Nigeria that is fast emerging is that of a country that is dangerously and irretrievably adrift, with its ship of state rapidly approaching a precipice’—alarming but un-ignorably tenable. This is the graphic contrary reportage to the temporariness proposed by the President, in an attempt to douse the sense of gloom that pervaded the national horizon as aftermath to the Nyanya Bus terminus carnage of Abuja, our nation’s capital, where safety of lives and property ought to be taken for granted.
Were we to persist with a stubborn hope that all can be well, still—or, indeed, that all is well as undaunted optimists like myself can be, then the harrowing abduction (kidnapping?) of 100, 124, 234 girls from Government Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State—nullifies optimism. I do not, even at this stage of inundating, looming national despair, believe that what is lacking is apt perception by the leadership of the nation of the enormity of the security problem at hand. The description of the terrorist rampage of Boko Haram as ‘temporary’ may be a deliberate leadership strategy to lighten the emotional burden of a grieving and rightly aggrieved nation by its leadership. What will make this expression of ordinariness palpable is the failure at this critical time of the national leadership to find immediate and urgent solution to the ‘warfare’ that Boko Haram unleashes on the nation—for indeed, war is upon us is a war of uncommon colour, texture and character which has overtaken us and salvation, not verbal assuaging of emotion, pain and grief, is of critical and urgent import and essence. The irregular, guerrilla character of the Boko Haram onslaught makes propositions of conventional strategy of carrot and stick tenuous and renders the task on the hands of government more delicate. Yet, the critical business of government remains that of securing lives and property and fault-finding and blame-trading by politicians of the ruling and opposition regimes will take us farther away from urgent and dire need for solutions to the tragedy on our laps. These are hard times and all patriotic citizens of whatever engagements—politics, religion, trading, profession—must become stake-holders in our tenuous, tender national destiny. There must be a nation to contest for in 2015. We all need to hang on to the reality and real existence of that nation before politicians, both centric and oppositional, can wager for power and control.
As we write, parents cannot find their children in the forest of Chibok Borno and in Yana Bauchi. They not only cannot find them; they know not what is happening and what will become of them. Girl children sent to school to learn and to study are in the clutches of psychotic killers. Attack on Government Girls Secondary at Yana in Shira Local Government of Bauchi State last Sunday (duplicating the Chibok dark film earlier) has left Governor Yuguda at his wit’s end as to what to do to protect and secure the lives of student girls. In the end, he has asked that the 200 girls be evacuated from the school, in a desperate attempt to forestall the recurrence of the experience of the 129 students of GSS Chibok of 14th April. There is no reason to pretend that evacuation was to renovate the burnt down buildings of the school. Ostensibly so, but the practical reality is to prevent the fate of Chibok eggs hatching for the girls at Yana.
Even in real war situation, children and women are spared and protected. Now, girls, latest reports say about 270 of them, double the earlier figures put out even before the military said they have been recovered and then recanted, are still missing. This is nearly three weeks since they were last seen after abduction allegedly by Boko Haram—for what? To prevent Western education? Satisfy primitive lust and perverse greed/eros or simply cause pandemonium in homes? What manner of cannibalism is this, pray? Have any of these psychopaths given birth to children, male or female? Do they know how it feels to go through the pain of birth-pangs, raising children and giving love of their lives to them, not to talk of sending them to school far away or near their homes and suddenly not to find them, know their whereabouts?—dead or alive, abused, harassed, humiliated or even killed, possibly? What is the non-meaning of this senseless violent orgy? The parents have lost sleep; the perpetrators have murdered sleep and the State has lost the right to sleep, until these children are found and restored to their parents, to the delight and sigh of joy of the mother nation; Nigeria! The youths have turned vigilantes, working with the parents, the soldier JTF and no one should talk politics any more until these girl children are retrieved from the clutches of death. What is happening is the death-knell sounded on the future generation—the future of our nation. Cry, our beloved country!
