By Chido Onumah
The suggestion, as reported by Sunday Punch (16/11/14),
by retired senior military officers, including a former Head of State, Gen.
Yakubu Gowon – the man who prosecuted the Nigeria-Biafra War – asking President
Goodluck Jonathan to declare “total war” on Boko Haram, the group that has
terrorized Nigerians for about five years and has lately annexed parts of the
country, couldn’t have come at a more auspicious time. While their tactics – cutting off food and fuel
supplies to the insurgents – may be problematic, their intention is commendable. The interpretation is that Nigeria is fighting
a civil war and needs to approach it as such.
Before the latest intervention, one of Nigeria’s
most respected military officers, Col Abubakar Umar (retd), had, in a
strongly-worded open letter to Nigerians, proffered solutions to the current impasse.
Umar was quite categorical. “I feel compelled to appeal to all Nigerians to
recognize that Nigeria is indeed at war. It is a war that seems set to engulf
the entire country. We need to understand that the war in the Northeast is a
war against Nigeria. The insurgents intend to use a conquered Northeast as a
launch pad on which to invade and conquer the rest of the country and possibly
the whole of the West African sub-region,” he wrote.
Umar
proposed a number of key strategies, among other things: “recall all armed
forces personnel in the reserve,” “reabsorb all able-bodied and willing
discharged veterans of international peacekeeping operations,” “order back to
barracks all security personnel who are currently deployed on nonessential
duties for retraining and redeployment to the war front in the NE,” suspension
of all national celebrations and Nigeria’s participation in international sporting
events until the war is won.
These are
very bold propositions and I endorse them. Of course, number is not the sole or
even the primary determinant of a nation’s military strength and combat
readiness. Any serious effort to make today’s Nigerian Armed Forces a fighting
force should address – as Col Umar also observed – the current sagging morale
of our troops.
It should
look into the present situation in which the troops fighting supposedly ragtag
terrorists are clearly outmatched by the latter in terms of the calibre of
weapons they carry, at a time defence still gulps a sizeable percentage of the
national budget. It should also look into the housing of our fighting troops in
befitting barracks, their kitting with appropriate uniforms and the payment of
their welfare packages as and when due. All these are essential morale boosting
measures for a fighting troop.
I shall go a
step further and call for a moratorium on the general elections scheduled for
February 2015. I pushed the same position in a September 2013 piece while the federal
government was mulling over the idea of a National Conference to address,
supposedly, the future of Nigeria. The idea then was that the greatest
challenge facing the country was the need for it to come to terms with its
history.
I argued
that Nigeria – defined by a quivering colonial power in 1914 – was not working
for Nigerians, at least for the majority, and that it was time to redefine
Nigeria in the image of the inheritors of the contraption that was handed down
a century ago. The reality is that part of the Boko Haram narrative is the
fundamental defect of the Nigerian nation. Nigeria can either confront this
problem headlong or continue to postpone the imminent catastrophe.
Of course, there is a political angle to the Boko
Haram crisis. As
far back as January 2012, President Jonathan had, during an
inter-denominational service to mark the Armed Forces Remembrance Day, declared
that Boko Haram had infiltrated, not just the executive, but the legislative
and judicial arms of government, as well as the police and armed forces. He
went on to describe the Boko Haram phenomenon as “worse than the civil war”.
That
was almost three years ago. While that
pronouncement may have been made to score partisan political advantage, clearly
no sincere effort to deal with Boko Haram can take place in the current
atmosphere of political bickering and mindless electioneering rhetoric. Faced
with renewed threat by Boko Haram, the need to rethink the future of Nigeria vis-Ã -vis the
2015 general elections becomes even more imperative.
Nigerians have to look beyond next year’s elections in order to deal with
the current danger. Evidently, either way, the 2015 elections – if they do hold
– will be contentious and the consequences are better imagined. Add to that, a
country ravaged by war and an economy reeling under the slump in oil prices and
you have a recipe for a monumental regional crisis.
There is really no alternative to dealing with the current crisis in
Nigeria other than approaching it as you approach crises that have the
potentials of debasing humanity. The National Assembly should review the
current war effort of the government, pass a resolution postponing the 2015
elections and give the president all the powers to mobilize Nigerians to win
this war convincingly in the next one year or face impeachment.
Two weeks ago, as Boko Haram captured one town after
another in Nigeria’s Northeast, leaving a trail of death and destruction,
including the massacre of innocent students, I watched again the movie, Hotel
Rwanda, about the Rwandan genocide, just to remind myself what can happen when
those who ought to act decide to be indifferent when a band of murderous fiends
that has publicly declared its intentions, decides to run amok.
Though not one to pander to the amorphous “international
community”, it is important to state that those who can support Nigeria to win
the current war should not wait for the humanitarian situation to worsen before
they act.
According to the Office of the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), “Thousands of Nigerians are escaping the
deadly threat posed by the terrorist group Boko Haram and fleeing into
neighbouring Cameroon. The vast majority of them are women and children….many
families were forced to flee on foot, taking few belongings with them and
walking tens of kilometres before finding safety in Cameroon.”
The UN agency reports that, “The ongoing refugee
crisis has seen more than 100,000 people spill over into Niger’s Diffa region
since the beginning of 2014, while Cameroon is currently hosting some 44,000
Nigerian refugees. Another 2,700 have fled to Chad. Meanwhile, an estimated
650,000 people remain internally displaced in north-eastern Nigeria due to the
insurgency.”
Clearly, there is an international dimension to the war raging in Nigeria
and I think “the international community”, specifically the US, has a role to
play, because as Col. Umar stated in his intervention, “Boko Haram is well
funded by AL-QAEDA in the Magrib, (AQIM) as well as the booty they acquire in
the numerous territories they conquer. More than anyone else, the West knows
that, like ISIL, Boko Haram constitutes monumental threat to global peace and
security.”
I do not
know President Obama’s Nigerian policy. Whatever it is, the so-called concern
for human rights in terms of limiting its support for the Nigerian military simply
doesn’t cut it. Expectedly, the Obama administration is keen on the “success”
of Nigeria’s 2015 elections and its representatives will “monitor” the
elections. But the question is: can we really talk about elections and democracy when the survival
of Africa’s most populous nation is at stake?
Of course,
in the end, this is Nigeria’s war and the Nigerian government must do everything it can to
win it and safeguard the lives of Nigerians. Undoubtedly,
years of mismanagement and corruption have not only served to exacerbate crises
like the current one, but have also diminished our capacity as a nation to adequately
deal with them.
It’s for
this reason that Nigerians everywhere must rise to the challenge of the present
danger!
Email:
conumah@hotmail.com; Twitter: @conumah
No comments:
Post a Comment