I HAVE been thinking through President Muhammadu Buhari’s threat to “deal with (pipeline vandals) like Boko Haram”. That was the president’s “latest release” from foreign land, when he completed his one-week epic tour of China last week. You see, the typical Nigerian government (not just the regime of General Buhari alone) is very funny. It is only in Nigeria that government issues special “warnings” to lawbreakers to desist or they would be dealt with, as if the criminals did not know the government is charged with that responsibility before embracing their ignoble enterprise. How many times have we “warned” Boko Haram to drop their killing spree and “embrace dialogue”?
How many times have the Nigerian Police “warned” armed robbers, kidnappers, cultists and others to stop “or else…”? Our “warnings” usually fall on deaf ears because they are not necessary in the first place. The job of government is to govern, and to do this effectively, a government has to prove its ability to keep criminals and anarchists within the firm leash of the law. A serious government with the capacity to do this does not have time to talk. It just simply acts. After all, the laws of the land have given them the power, the funds and the equipment to do the job, so why waste time engaging in empty-barrel antics and issuing effete warnings? I understand why Buhari deployed the Boko Haram imagery at the vandals and their backers. He wanted to send the message that he would “crush” them as he is doing to the bloodthirsty Jihadists.
I don’t mind any legitimate action that government decides to take in order to stop those troubling the state in any way and for any reason. After all, these pipeline vandals, for me, are no heroes of anyone. They certainly aren’t mine. I can never make an excuse for anyone who engages in wilful lawbreaking, even if they are President Buhari’s kinsmen (the Fulani “herdsmen” or militia) who have not even been “warned”, let alone brought to book. Look at it: we have passed through hell in the past three months, toiling through the day in search of fuel to power our plants as government and the power companies are unable to provide us with electricity. We pay through the nose, drawing from our lean individual reserves to procure black market petrol in order to survive the intense heat and move our automobiles. Those chaps blowing up the pipelines are partly responsible for our woes, and I cannot find any excuse for their activities.
And I am thoroughly disappointed that the Federal Government has spent almost four months watching them dig in since they restarted armed activities in the Warri area of the Niger Delta in January 2016, shortly after Niger Delta militant leader, Government Ekpemupolo (Tompolo) went underground. Immediately after the first set of pipelines were blown up three months ago, the Army, the Navy and all sorts of law enforcement agents were reportedly deployed to look for the culprits. Yet the situation gets worse as confirmed by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, who claimed recently that Nigeria loses about 250,000 barrels of crude oil a day. So, my message to the Buhari administration is: go ahead, look for these people, get them to face the law and give us the chance to rebuild our battered economy.
But I take serious exception to putting the militancy in the Niger Delta on the same pedestal with Boko Haram. Yes, both are crimes against the state and the people of Nigeria. But, while the militants of the Niger Delta can rightly be described as “rebels with a cause”, Boko Haram is a mindless demon that takes great pleasure in spilling human blood. I read the other day a shocking story of the 2014 Buni Yadi murders of young secondary school boys, which took place about two weeks to the mass abduction of the Chibok school girls by Boko Haram. An eye witness told a newspaper of how the Jihadists gathered the students and preached from the Koran to them. Immediately after that, they separated the juniors from the seniors and slaughtered the seniors! Doesn’t that make your blood freeze? On the other hand, the Niger Delta militants have been known to kidnap both expatriates and locals. Sometimes collateral casualties occur in the wake of their facility bombings, but they are not known to purposely target people, apart from law enforcement agents (soldiers, police) who are after them.
The Niger Delta militants also engage in oil stealing, but they will tell you that they are entitled to the oil because it is mined in their native land; their own share of a resource exploited by people from strange lands and their collaborators operating the Nigerian state. You may not agree with them. The law certainly does not, and I do not.
But, at least, they have a point of view that can be engaged either through dialogue or force by the state. Boko Haram is implacable. They want to forcefully convert ME to Islam; an impossibility that will wait till Christ’s kingdom comes. In any case, is it not the same Boko Haram whose 180 detained were released in Maiduguri shortly after Buhari was sworn-in, kitted out in trendy jalamiyahs and escorted home like war heroes? Is it not the same people that huge sums are already being set aside for a kind of “post-amnesty” bazaar when (and if) their insurgency is finally defeated? It is actually Boko Haram fighters that will be treated like repentant Niger Delta militants, even after what they have done to fellow citizens. The mind that sees them in the same light as Niger Delta militants will definitely “deal with them” the way the late heroic President Umar Yar’Adua treated the militants who surrendered their arms and accepted the amnesty programme. That is what I make out of Buhari’s statement, and I am sorry for Nigeria.
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