AS the Islamist group, Ansaru, claims responsibility for the kidnapping of seven foreigners in a deadly raid on a construction site in Bauchi State, there is palpable fear that terror groups are upping their bloody games. The workers were taken on Saturday night from the offices of Setraco,
a construction company in Jama’are after a prison was attacked and two police trucks burnt. Earlier, three North Korean doctors were killed at a hospital in Yobe State and nine polio vaccinators murdered in Kano in a rash of terror attacks.
The dangerous slide is coming eight months after President Goodluck Jonathan appointed Sambo Dasuki as the National Security Adviser. The Maiduguri, Damaturu, Bauchi, Kaduna and Jos conurbation has undoubtedly become an “axis of evil,” where churches, markets, police personnel, barracks and facilities of telecommunications firms are bombed with reckless abandon. Thousands of lives have been lost. Those who have grown weary of living in perpetual trepidation and losing their beloved ones have fled these areas.
This is the challenge Dasuki was engaged to reverse. Presidential spokesman, Reuben Abati, in response to an enquiry about the NSA’s brief, once said, “He is expected to reinvigorate the security architecture to make it more effective; and combat various security threats and renew public interest (confidence).” However, nothing has changed; and bloody mayhem has become a national staple.
It is regrettable that Jonathan capitulated to pressure from powerful interest groups who tragically believe that appeasement is the best approach in dealing with the security nightmare. In the light of this, Dasuki, immediately on assumption of office, made some peripatetic overtures to some state governors and traditional rulers, especially those in Borno, Yobe and Plateau states. As a provocative reception for Dasuki, just four days after he had assumed office, some terrorists, on June 24, invaded Damaturu Prisons and freed 199 inmates. An attack on a police post in Dala, Kano State, with explosives, resulted in the killing of 17 of the assailants. As if these were not sufficient warning that a pacifist script was out of context, the NSA shuttled to Jos on July 4, 2012 where he told newsmen, “I was in Yobe and Borno states last week, and I have got the telephone numbers and contacts of key Boko Haram members, and I will meet with them. I saw the dangerous effects of Boko Haram (activities) in these states and what I saw was pathetic.”
After his trouble-shooting missions to the North-East and North-Central geopolitical zones, serial bombings and other armed violence that came thereafter, no doubt, have since made nonsense of the dialogue option as a veritable strategy for dealing with this incubus. That was the import of the July 8 and 9, 2012 killing of over 100 persons by suspected terrorists in Barkin Ladi and Riyom Local Government areas of Plateau State. A senator, Gyang Dantong, and the Majority Leader of the state House of Assembly, Gyang Fulani, died in the attack. Other examples are the shooting spree inside the Deeper Life Bible Church in Okene, Kogi State, in August last year, which left no fewer than 20 worshippers dead; and the massacre of 22 students in Mubi by gunmen who, for one hour, forced the victims out of their hostels, one after the other. A security or an intelligence community that is “on top of the situation” would have got a hint of this carnage while it lasted. On November 25, 2012, a suicide car bombing at a church inside Jaji Army Barracks claimed 11 lives.
The felons, who have held the Nigerian state hostage for three years running, almost snuffed life out of the Emir of Kano, Ado Bayero, a few weeks ago, with five persons in his entourage losing their lives. Had the terrorists hit their prime target, a spiral of senseless bloodletting would have enveloped many parts of the country. The emir is not an ordinary citizen; the January attempt on his life was not the first. Incidents such as this frighten foreign embassies in Nigeria into believing that nobody is safe, prompting them to send negative travel advisories to their nationals, to the detriment of the country’s image and foreign investment inflows.
As is already well known, Boko Haram is the face of al Qaeda in Nigeria, a fact the Presidency has only just belatedly acknowledged. The tepid, pacifist and carapace indifference of Dasuki has only compounded the problem. The terror sect unilaterally declared a ceasefire last month, but the recrudescence of its offensives in Kano, Gombe and Kaduna states recently, during which seven police men were killed, once more exposed it as a perfidious and wily group, whose profession of peace should not be taken seriously. Obviously, the “change of strategy” in the fight against the Boko Haram insurgency as claimed by President Jonathan has turned out to be disastrous.
The option of negotiating with terrorists, which Dasuki prefers, is not working. Conceptually, it is a mistake to think that all insurgent organisations are alike. Does Boko Haram belong to the kind of insurgents that are susceptible to negotiations? Going by its confessions, the objective of Boko Haram is to establish an Islamic government in a part of the country. For such an “absolute terrorist” group, the objective cannot be achieved except “by bomb and rifle; the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun” as revealed by a United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police document.
This is the brand of terror Nigeria is contending with. This is the galling reality Dasuki must face.
Courtesy: Punch Editorial
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