President Goodluck Jonathan,truly found his vocation: with a doctorate in Zoology, there could be no better place for him to put his skills to work than in the Zoo called Nigeria. Nigeria is a zoo, with all kinds animals: the benign and the ferocious; their instincts are the same. At the top of this zoological food chain, are the big animals – the elephants of the jungle – where ever their footsteps fall – the grass was forbidden to grow.
But let me tell a little Igbo story, and Chinua Achebe had told it in some part in Anthills of the Savannah: the peaceful and indistinct tortoise was walking down a pathway one day when the lordly lion met him on his way, and roared: “aha! God done catch you today!” He said to the Tortoise; “I have been looking for you!”
The Tortoise of course knew the lion’s reputation for bullying, but he retained his dignity. “Beg your pardon,” he said to the lion, “but why have you been looking for me?”
“To beat you!” said the lion.
‘Is that so?” said the Tortoise.
“Na so e be” said the lion.
“In that case give me a minute” said the Tortoise, “grant me my last wish…”
“Ah. Take ten minutes” said the Lion, amused, and feeling very generous. Well, the Tortoise began to trample on the ground, scatter the soil; and beat the grass; to make the place generally rough and well acted upon. The Lion was taken aback by this, and he couldn’t contain himself.
“Tortoise, what’re you doing?”
“Writing down my own story…”
“What? You crazy little thing. You no get sense!”
“Balogun lion, look at me, what do you see?”
“A crazy little thing whom I’m going to beat up soon.”
“Good. But you do not see it yet. I am a small thing, and you ask why I scatter this place.”
“Yes…”
“Well, you’re powerful and I cannot match your physical strength. So, you’re going to beat me, I have no doubt. However, when people come here, and see this place, they will say, “the great tortoise put up a fierce fight against the mighty lion. They will know I did not go down very easily.”
It is the uncommon wisdom of the oppressed to rise to the occasion of history and deploy, by all means necessary, their own means of resistance. Nigerians too should not go down too easily. It is obvious that this ship called nation is sinking, and very fast, and a firefight is going on.
It is obvious that Nigeria’s political leadership has been withholding the absolute secrets of Nigeria’s final days from the Nigerian public. They seem to have prepared for themselves means of escape, nest eggs in various secret banks in foreign lands; emergency evacuation of their families and close friends; simply, at the high places are the Nigerian equivalent of the “Noah’s Ark projects” that will save only a few privileged species of the Nigerian animal, while the fire and conflagration that is close by burns the land.
In preparation for the final days of Nigeria, while Nigerians hide and pray, the Nigerian elite has systematically stripped every public institution of its meaning: Nigeria’s University and research facilities have gone to the dogs; Nigeria’s electric and energy delivery system has been sold part for part and in bits to the highest bidders; its oil fields have been mortgaged to foreign interests in the knowledge that there will not be a future generation; its strategic telecommunication infrastructure was the first to be farmed out, as no other country in the world does.
No nation other than Nigeria has ever handed its national telecommunication system – the basis of its national security – to private foreign interests, nor its core strategic national industrial infrastructure – steel and aluminum plants – bought and sold, and those that could not be sold, allowed to slide into decay.
It is clear, that the purpose of the Nigerian government in the last fifteen years, at least, has been to oversee the liquidation of the shared space of nation; to make Nigeria irretrievable, to supervise its demise, and seal its final treaties. The federal government itself acts like an enemy of the Nigerian people.
Those who have held power at the center and the states in Nigeria in the last fifteen years are not our brothers or sisters, our neighbors, our kinsmen, our classmates, they do not care for us as Nigerian citizens; they are not out to build the future of this nation; they are the millstones on the neck of the Nigerian people, acting out the orders of powerful global forces to reduce and erase what is currently Nigeria from the face of the globe. Boko Haram is the final nail in the coffin of Nigeria. What is Boko Haram? Nobody knows.
They are “ghosts” said the Nigerian president. “Give them amnesty” says the Sultan and the so-called leaders of the North. “Bring them out and we’ll begin negotiation” says the Jonathan government. In this case, the president is right. No one can offer amnesty to ghosts. If Sultan Abubakar and General Buhari knows them, let them bring out Boko Haram, and then any talk of amnesty might rightly begin.
But at the moment, and as General Azubuike Ihejirika, Chief of the Nigerian Army said last Monday, Boko Haram’s method is “baffling.” Well, this might just be because, there are too many Boko Harams. It is now a franchise with many mimic groups, including “Black Ops” groups within government, milking dry the national security vote which is now higher than the budget for education and research, industry and labour, put together.
Everybody is now Boko Haram. And Nigeria is like tinder, right at the edge, about to combust. And I say, Nigerians should not go down too easily. They should adopt “the Tortoise doctrine” of resistance, and they have two options: either commit mass suicide, one agreed “national suicide night” at the family tables, or organize and fight, and take back the sovereign mandate.
Nigerians should protest and reclaim their rights, create inter-community defense pacts to defend themselves in the coming anarchy because the federal government, it increasingly seems, no longer has the capacity to defend Nigeria or guarantee the rights and internal security of Nigerian peoples.
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