By Tony Eluemunor
Why would a cancer-stricken man beg a doctor to treat only a sore on his toe, if he is not suicidal? I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when government spokesmen gloated that it had taken our security agencies two whole years of strenuous and coordinated effort to ensnare and grab Nnamdi Kanu.
I was horrorstruck. Did it take that much effort to “get” Kanu, a man whose whereabouts was always advertised as he lived on Facebook and Youtube? It was likely the loud and foul-mouthed braggart did not even know he was being trailed. I want to believe he was totally confident that his British Passport was enough talisman for him.
Just when many Nigerians were still trying to make a meaning out of that arrest, the security agencies sent another shock wave across the country. See it this way; Nigerians were still debating the security merits in targeting Kanu for two years when the Boko Haram chief, Shekau, and bandits terrorised Nigerian, kidnapping even school children yet they did not appear so targeted, when security agents called on Sunday Igboho, one bloody night. Yes, bandits decorated by guns swinging from their shoulders had been received by, and posed for pictures with, government officials. A religious cleric had made a small career out of speaking the minds of the bandits and helped to negotiate for the release of hostages. Yet, none was pursued and brought to book in a commando style.
Actually, a serious concern arose when recently a spate of horrendous blood-letting and torching of Police stations, Prison yards and other government buildings began to happen in the South-Eastern states. If it was not stopped, policemen and policewomen would have abandoned their work and the result would have been pure bedlam, as a part of the country would have become a lawless zone. Yet, it is difficult to convince Nigerians that the same seriousness that was displayed in confronting the security challenge in the South East was also employed in combating the greater scourges called bandits and Boko Haram. And what about the other scourge; killer herders?
Yet, in paying a deadly visit to Sunday Igboho, the DSS tried to kill an ant with a sledge hammer. Would it have been cowardice on the part of the operatives who called on his house to have retreated when a gunfight ensued? Could it not have been prudent of them to attempt to arrest him without endangering multiple lives? I say this because in the end, Igboho was not arrested … yet, some people, Nigerians all, died.
My real point is this; Kanu and Igboho came about because of the road Nigeria refused to take; restructuring. The complaints had been coming thickly that a dangerous trend of killings were being perpetrated by killer herders, but nobody appeared to take it seriously. Instead the powers that be spent valuable years talking about Cattle Routes or Cattle grazing Reserves. We disdained State and Community Police outfits to address the new problems. Some states moved to stop the scourge by banning open grazing so that wayward herders would stop encroaching on farms. But it appeared the police has refused to enforce the bans – notwithstanding whether some state assemblies duly passed bills that made the bans into state laws. That was how Chief Sunday (Igboho) Adeyemo emerged; he offered to defend himself and his community.
May it not be over looked that we came to this impasse simply because Nigeria has refused to restructure. It appears that the more Nigerians have been asking for restructuring the more President Buhari has waxed stronger in his belief that restructuring is not needed. Please, don’t get me wrong; if we had been restructuring since 1999 when civil rule returned, it would have gone a long way by now. But former President Olusegun Obasanjo, the late Umaru Yar’Adua and Dr. Goodluck Jonathan all failed to restructure. Even when some three South-South satte governors championed it, we demonised them (I will visit that next Sunday). Yet the need was not only there, it had been brought to fore as far back as 1953 in London. Please see the excerpt from the UK Parliament Hansard.
It is a pity that the call for Nigeria’s restructuring (in all ramifications) has given rise to a Mazi Nnamdi Kanu and his arrest. I fear we may not learn the right lessons from this sordid episode. Chinua Achebe decried the fact that Nigerians have often refused to learn the needed lessons in the preface to his first collection of essays, Morning yet on Creation Day. He said that when many Nigerians were asked about the lessons the Nigerian Civil War taught them, their answers were often “puerile”: war does not pay. Achebe wrote the Preface in 1975, five years after that war.
Achebe said that many preferred not to even broach the topic – in a self-defeatist self-censorship. And the real Achebe spirit came to the fore when he said: “I will prefer to be accused of nastiness than join in the national pastime of consigning events of just a few years ago into prehistory”. It was also in that Preface that Achebe said that experience is not whatever event that might happened to man. He said that much could happen to a stone without making the stone any wiser and so experience comes from the lessons learnt from an event. And Barbara Tuchman added in her much-praised book, The March of Folly; The Mistakes of Governments from Troy to Vietnam, that if wisdom is the application of intelligence on experience to make astute, proficient and wholesome judgment, then many leaders have frustrated wisdom.
Did the Federal Government frustrate wisdom when it first arrested Kanu? Many swear it did because an inconsequential man who was actually dwelling on the fringes of serious talks was thrust onto centre-stage. Before him one Chudi Uwazurike spear-headed an Igbo agitation. Most importantly, Uwazuruike was wedded to non-violence. That was before the military Operation this and Operation that, including Operation Egwueke (Python Dance), and it was even said that the military visited Kalu’s residence in a show of force. That was totally unnecessary for by then Kanu’s army was nothing but the words spewing from his loquacious mouth.
