Saturday, May 31, 2014

Boko Haram Has Exposed Nigeria

By Charles Ofoji
If a nation is at red alert, yet a terror group like Boko Haram
strikes at will and ups the number of its victims, then such
a country is obviously a cassava republic that cannot
guarantee security of lives and property.
While Aso Rock makes noise about the determination of the
government to bring back the abducted Chibok girls and
also to finally thumb Boko Haram, the group continues to
strike audaciously as it pleases – in Borno (four times, with
the recent killing of forty soldiers and policemen), Kano and
Plateau (twice).
It seems they want prove that this government has no clue
of what it is talking about. Boko Haram wants to tell
Nigerians that we live at their mercy. And that our so-called
leaders are only making speeches – as usual.
Nigeria is now a laughing stock, especially among Africans,
who had seen our country as a giant in the continent and
had looked up to us for leadership. A Ghanaian, living in
Berlin, had recently joked that they (Ghanians) never knew
they were fearing Nigeria for nothing. „So we could have
defeated Nigeria in war?“he had jested, due to the inability
of the Nigeria State to deal with a little insurgency.
Though a war against terror is a different ballgame, the view
of the Ghanian might not necessarily be correct,
nevertheless it is representative of how others see us at the
moment.
The helplessness of our poorly trained and poorly equipped
military (no thanks to corruption) to deal with a hitherto
unknown terror group is a national embarrassment with
international acclaim. I felt sorry for President Goodluck
Jonathan when he was corrected by the United States of
America that Boko Haram has nothing to do with Al-qaeda.
In their bid to mystify Boko Haram and excuse their inability
to crush the group, Jonathan was misled by his intelligence
chiefs into believing that Boko Haram is an offshoot of Al-
qaeda. And he believed!
Nkem Chidebelu is a student of University of Jos. Her late
mother, Monica Chidebelu, an orange seller at the Jos
Terminal Market, threw all she got from peeling oranges
into making sure her daughter does not end up like her. She
sent her to the university to acquire education. While she
studied, amid her numerous challenges as the daughter of
an orange seller, her mother was her life-wire.
Unfortunately, that wire was cut when Nkem's mother was
sent to her early grave as terrorists bombed the Jos
Terminal market last week.
Speaking to one of the national dailies, Nkem regretted that
she was born a Nigerian. She could not understand why the
Nigerian government, with the amount of resources at its
disposal, can not protect the citizens.
I understand Nkem's disenchantment and frustration.
Finance Minister, Ngozi Okonjo Iweala recently revealed
that defence takes almost a trillion of the budget. During a
press conference in Abuja last Friday, Okonjo-Iweala
disclosed that the Federal Government has released a total
amount of N130.7bn to the Ministry of Defence for military
operations between January and April this year. She also
told journalists that in 2013, N281.51bn was allocated to
the three security agencies (Army, Air Force and Navy) in
Nigeria. This is almost $2billion US dollars.
Juxtaposed against the impunity with which Boko Haram is
killing the citizens, one can only ask: where did this money
go? If $2billion dollars were diligently spent in the fight
against terror, surely Boko Haram would have been history.
As I said on this platform recently, the country is in the
mess it is because of depraved corruption. The defence
budget has been seen over the years as a big cake to be
shared by the top military brass and their collaborators in
government.
The result is that we now live in a country that cannot
actually be called a country since it is incapable of
protecting its citizens. This is also why over 200 Chibok
school girls, who thought they could pursue quietly their
dreams by seeking education, were taken into bondage by
Boko Haram (we should not forget the 59 school boys who
were also butchered by the same group in February).
The lives of the Chibok girls got shattered, because like
Nkem, they had the misfortune of being born citizens of one
country called Nigeria. Whether Jonathan finds them as he
promised, with international help, certainly their lives will
never be the same again. If they ever return alive, they will
forever live with the trauma of their ordeal in the captivity of
Boko Haram.
Normally, people aspire to govern because they have a
vision or a direction of where they want to take the country
or people. But in Nigeria, people aspire to govern because
they want to line up their pockets with public funds. This is
a national tragedy. Our leaders, apart from being vision-
less and clueless, are simply wicked people. They neither
love the people nor their country. They never spare time to
sit down and figure out what is good for the people and the
country.
For them, leadership is a frolic and meeting at midnights to
decide how to share the budget. A typical Nigerian leader
would do everything to get money to maintain a permanent
suite at Hilton Abuja for his girlfriend than to do the least
that would benefit the shoeless boy in Otuoke. So is anyone
still trying to figure out why we got where we are today?
Nigeria was not run how a normal country should be. The
leaders were fooling the people (they foolishly failed to
realize that they were in the same boat with the people).
That foolishness left Nigeria a skeleton of a nation.
Mindless corruption and bad governance reduced the nation
to a bubble. Now, Boko Haram has burst that bubble.
*checkpointcharley@yahoo.de

No comments:

Post a Comment

Post your Comments here