Inches away from the cliff (3)

By Dele Adeoluwa 

 

We are surely in the throes of an uncanny order. Before our eyes, the ship of state is fast sailing through a labyrinthine tide towards an anarchical end. We are daily gravitating towards the cliff. We have never been this close.

Our dear nation continues to seethe in the cauldron of confusion and uncertainty as the insecurity challenge worsens. What is more, the bands of gun-toting goons masquerading as foreign killer-herders, bandits and insurgents, who have held the nation by the jugular, dig in by the day.

Their audacity can be unnerving. These malefactors carry on in a befuddling, cavalier manner, as if they own the country. The violence-inclined herders, most especially, comport themselves with scant regards for law and order, issuing threats and riding roughshod over the communities, as if they are lords unto themselves.

They have simply taken over the forests of most communities from where they make menacing incursions into the major highways North, South, West and East. No part of the country is spared now. As bandits and insurgents are turning most parts of the Northwest and Northeast respectively into vast killing fields, so have violent herders been on a kidnapping, raping and killing binge down South.

The failure of the authorities to check the atrocious activities of the malevolent elements, especially the killer-herders, has forced most political zones of the country to take their destiny in their hands by raising local security apparatus to tackle the marauders. After all, self-defence is the first law of nature. And we know that nature abhors a vacuum.

This is the big ‘lacuna’ and perfidious setting that have thrown up the likes of Sunday Adeyemo a.k.a. Sunday Igboho, the Yoruba activist, who has emerged his people’s folk hero.

Igboho, who has been leading the campaign to rid the Southwest of violent herders, took a hair-raising step penultimate week when he broached the idea of an outright secession of the ‘Yoruba nation’ from the federation, as his own way of putting paid to the whole insecurity maelstrom.

Although resorting to such an extreme option at this time is hardly thinkable going by our past experience,  we must understand the degree of bile and despondency which the current situation has elicited among the people, which must have prompted his recipe. The level of larceny, through kidnapping for huge ransoms, and monstrous activities being perpetrated by those vile elements in communities raise the hackles.

The official response most times is at the best tepid, giving the people the short shrift. The government is investing so much in the campaign to crush the insurgents that have turned the Northwest, especially Borno, into a sprawling nightmare, and, to a certain extent, tackling the bandits in the Northwest.

However, the killer-herders are more or less having a field day in the south. Their victims are left to their fate. At best, it is the police, already saddled with so much responsibility in the face of gross underfunding, and the local security apparatus put together by the governors that are left to square up with the heavily armed herder-kidnappers and bandits in the south.  In many cases, the local vigilance people seize the initiative, even from the police, to hunt down these vicious elements to free kidnap victims.

Igboho was thrown up by one of such expeditions. It would be recalled how doom and gloom had overtaken Igangan and environs in Oyo State sometime last year due to the atrocious activities of the bilious herders who were kidnapping the people at will for huge ransoms.

They were raping women, including housewives, in many cases in the presence of their husbands!

It was Igboho who emerged from nowhere and put paid to their monstrous reign in the area.  That was how his activism started. He simply moved in, filled a yearning gap and ‘stole’ the show, so to say. The rescued people, who were privileged to breathe the gusty air of freedom again, began to clap for their ‘saviour.’ You do not appreciate the treasure of freedom until you are caged.

However, Igboho’s extreme recipe leaves mucus in the mouth. I do not think the jigsaw puzzle that is the insecurity morass we are dealing with can best be tackled by such a rather perfunctory recourse. Secession is no tea party. In the words of the elders, it is not an easy task to extract the nut from palm kernel.

The path to self-determination is strewn with thorns and briers. Isolated secession is simply war. It is genocide personified. It is hunger in the extreme accentuated by economic blockades. It is not a venture which one unit of the federation can dare. It has to come by an understanding and agreement of all or at least majority of the federating units, culminating in an internationally supervised plebiscite. Otherwise, you will be isolated. The first attempt led to the civil war. The experience is better imagined.

Hence, let the proponents of self-determination exercise restraint in that area, continue their campaign within the ambit of the law and hope for the best.

However, the federal government should do the needful by addressing the genuine grievances that have become a veritable fertile ground for toying with extreme options. And chief among them is the government’s failure to tame the foreign violent herders and their local collaborators who have been terrorising communities.

Of course, there have been some encouraging moves in that direction. For example, President Muhammadu Buhari recently ordered security agencies to start shooting anyone found carrying illegal arms. The implementation is, however, the issue. Are the agencies concerned executing the order? It is left to be seen.

The president also talked tough on the security challenge last week in a broadcast, warning secession agitators to desist or face the music. He directed security agencies to double their efforts, hunt down criminals that are making life difficult for Nigerians and arrest the security drift.

In another development, the president, while eulogising the fallen heroes who had to pay the supreme sacrifice in keeping the nation as one, vowed that the nation will never again experience civil war.

Good talk! But let government move frontally to address the insecurity conundrum causing the ‘tremor’ in the land and threatening the nation’s foundation, once and for all. Let the security agencies obey their commander-in-chief and cage the rampaging criminals in the land.

The new service chiefs have started well. They have been recording a streak of successes against the insurgents. This is highly commendable. They should, however, extend the battle to the bandits and killer-herders all over the country who are bent on pushing the nation off the cliff edge.

They should show those ‘rag tag’ forces the stuff our infantry and air force is made of. Taming the brute in the violent herders and bandits is the surest way of putting paid to secessionist tendencies.

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