By Ochereome Nnanna
FINALLY, he got moving. Following the mass murders of innocent Nigerians and security forces in Borno, Yobe, Adamawa and Nasarawa States within the past one month, President Goodluck Jonathan cut short a state visit to Southern Africa and returned to a series of meetings with top military advisers.
He declared a state of emergency in three flashpoint states of the North East: Borno, Yobe and Adamawa.
Some argued he should have also included Kano, Nasarawa, Bauchi and Plateau. Perhaps, the president does not want to spread the forces thin. Perhaps, he wants to tackle the border states first. He has superior information and advice from our security chiefs who should know better than the rest of us. Let us go along with the presidential decision.
Since the Boko Haram menace resumed in 2011 shortly after the general elections, we, on this page, have piled pressure on the president to go tough on the terrorists. We urged him to ignore the media noisemakers, political blackmailers, parasitic sectional “elders” and regional boasters and hit the terrorists hard.
We asked him to bring them to their knees before considering the option of “dialogue”. That is the only bitter medicine fit for terrorists. All over the world, that is the medicine they are being fed. That was the pill the late President Umaru Musa Yar’ Adua forced down their fundamentalist throats.
But our president chose to play Mr. Please-all. He wasted precious time, pandering to blackmailers and sending former President Olusegun Obasanjo (when the going was still good between them) to go and offer financial gratification to the family of the slain leader of Boko Haram, Mohammed Yusuf. He allowed himself to be blackmailed into considering the extra-judicial killing of Yusuf of higher national interest than arresting the resurgence of his re-armed successors.
The president came out to inform us, in a resigned tone of voice, that Boko Haram supporters and financiers were all over the place, even in his cabinet and the Presidency! Prodded further to take action, our Commander-in-Chief threw his hands into the air and informed us that he was “no Pharaoh” or “army General”. I wondered what Pharaoh had to do with it when the country’s territorial integrity was being threatened by paid foreign terror agents. Before you knew it, our leader suddenly buckled to regional pressure and decided to set up a committee towards granting unsolicited and undesirable amnesty to defiant terrorists!
While we wasted valuable time, the terror groups proliferated. They gradually abandoned the option of suicide bombing and settled for gunfights, targeting police and army barracks, as well as prisons and other security facilities. The lives of our people in uniform, especially the Police, became cheap. Every aggrieved group in Bayelsa, Kogi, Nasarawa, Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States took pleasure in killing our policemen and taking potshots at our army troops.
This delayed reaction exacted a
heavy toll on the image of the president. It appeared as if he was afraid of wielding the powers of his office. The opposition, especially the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) and the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) talked about him without reverence or regard to his person or office.
A leader who appears indecisive when faced with tough decisions is a danger to himself and the entity he leads. So also does a leader who wants to please everybody. Failure to take decisive action and on time when faced with a tough challenge such as terrorism is like incubating a vicious virus or cancer, or any other life-threatening affliction which Niccolo Machiavelli calls “a wasting disease”. In his timeless letter to the Magnificent Lorenzo de Medici, in his book: The Prince, (translated by George Bull, Penguin Books) Machiavelli warned about the dangers of delaying action in the face of a rising peril:
“When trouble is sensed well in advance, it can easily be remedied; if you wait for it to show itself any medicine will be too late because the disease will have become incurable … political disorders can be quickly healed if they are seen well in advance (and only a prudent ruler has such foresight); when, for lack of diagnosis, they are allowed to grow in such a way that everybody can recognise them, remedies are too late”.
Of the nineteen states of the North, only Benue, Kwara and Kebbi have so far been spared of Boko Haram violence. Kabiru Sokoto bombed St Theresa’s church in Madalla, Niger State and bolted to Nasarawa State. When he was caught and detained in Abuja, he escaped and was finally caught in far away Taraba State. That is how mobile wanted criminals can get. The armed forces are conducting operations in three north eastern states. The terrorists, not known for fighting pitched battles, could be anywhere before the military contingents arrived.
It is going to be that much more difficult to achieve a total grip on these enemies of the nation at this point than that outset in 2011 when the president chose to use kid gloves and declared emergency in a few local councils without real emergency measures to go with it.
I am hoping that we have not left it too late. Happily, majority of Nigerians are pleased, even relieved, that the president has decided to act. The military must be allowed to perform their professional duties with minimal distraction. They must be decisive without caring whose political ox is gored, in the handling of culprits and their sponsors.
It is when people see that all terrorists and their backers, no matter how big or small, are being dealt with as befits the crimes they have been committing against innocent Nigerians, that confidence will gradually return in the ability of Nigeria to protect its citizens.
AS Nepal Tank Farm opens in Oghara
I WISH to congratulate an ebullient Elder of my Presbyterian Church, Elder E. E. Ekeoma and his wife Mrs. Ngozi Ekeoma, on the commissioning of the Tank Farm and Jetty of their Nepal Oil and Gas facility in Oghara, last Saturday (18TH May 2013) by Governor Emmanuel Uduaghan of Delta State.As they grow in the Lord so they are growing in their business. I wish them greater heights and more success!
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