Trouble sleep, Yanga go wake am, wetin e dey find o?
Palaver, e de find; palaver, e go get … — Afrobeat King, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti
When do “Avengers”, of felt injustices, become scavengers for trouble?
When self-ruin and needless disaster beckon!
That would appear the long and short of the latest unrest in Nigeria’s Niger Delta region, with a group that calls itself the Avengers blowing up key economic infrastructure and getting a kick out of it.
When the Avengers get kicked, as viciously as they are kicking — and enjoying it — now, what happens?
Perhaps then, the one-shoe-fits-all human rights muses, the lucrative NGOs, their media siblings and allied romantics, conveniently dumb right now, would find their voice in a rush.
Then, agitated and animated, lyrical and poetic, they would drone the alchemy and metaphysics of citizens’ rights, the manifest evil of a hard crackdown in a civil jurisdiction, and the bogey of “dictatorship” in a democracy!
But who dictates what? If the Avengers dictate, from the blues, unforced violence (like “unforced errors” in tennis), should the state just buckle over and surrender its legitimate rights?
Legitimate rights? Yes. This might sound trite but it bears restating.
At the basis of the modern state and government, its chief agent, is the Social Contract. That contract presumes everyone in a jurisdiction agreed to forgo parts of their rights to a central Leviathan, in exchange for general security.
That Leviathan is the government. The jurisdiction is the state. The contractees are the people. So, between the people and trouble, the Leviathan interfaces as a shield.
That is why the Police are there to protect the people from everyday criminals. That is why too, the government usually has a standing army, to shield citizens from enemy bullet, in case of war.
And that is why, by the way, the state has a monopoly of lawful force. Anyone that contests such with the state strays into outlaw territory; and faces the full and devastating consequences.
So, if a body that calls itself Niger Delta Avengers starts blowing up oil installations; and causing innocent citizens needless pains, sabotaging gas-powered electricity supply nationwide, it is infringing on the legitimate right of the state to care for other lawful citizens, who have committed no crime.
Only a castrated state would take that lying low. But then a state castrated, to the point of not imposing its will, is technically no state.
So, beware of sowing the wind. You just might reap the whirlwind! That is what the so-called Avengers should take home — if they are not too far gone!
Still, a state is inviolate only when it obeys its own laws. If it does not, the cheated and infuriated may just risk taking up arms to contest its monopoly of legal coercion. It is called loss of legitimacy.
Somalia is the contemporary classic on this sad score, resulting in equal-opportunity anarchy. The Somali government raped and raped its own laws until a virtually mono-ethnic state convulsed and collapsed under rival arms.
Rwanda (which melted under a hideous genocide) and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (within which murderous ISIS fanatics now roam free), groaned under minority domination: the Rwanda Tutsi dominating the majority Hutu; and the minority Sunni, the slightly majority Shiite.
In pre-Civil War Nigeria (1960-1966), ethnic tension was it. A so-called Igbo officers’ coup that toppled a corrupt civil order, led to ethnic triumphalism, which provoked the heinous Igbo pogrom in the North and a revenge coup and killings of Igbo officers in the Nigerian Army, which ignited Igbo insecurity and anger, and climaxed in the Civil War, and a defeated Biafra (1967-1970).
Stretch this unfortunate history further and reach for the tail end of cruel military rule, and the unconscionable devastation of the Niger Delta; so much so that that region “died”, so the greedy oil hustlers, in cahoots with greedy elements of the Nigerian state, could live and wallow in conscienceless money.
That was the moral justification for the first wave of Niger Delta militancy, which President Umaru Yar’Adua ended with the Amnesty Programme. But that is if you discount the Isaac Adaka Boro 12- Day Revolution, which birthed on 23 February 1966, but collapsed 12 days later.
Ironically, however, what Yar’Adua’s amnesty has delivered is stupendous wealth to the so-called militancy “generals” — smart alecks that milked their people’s collective misery for private treasure! — with their obscene mansions scowling down at shanties; not a better deal for the majority, who still grind in pre-militancy penury!
Indeed, the way these over-fed “generals” growled and barked of the Armageddon to come, should “our son”, Goodluck Jonathan, lose the presidential election, and how they would take “our oil”, you could feel their divine right of the minority, to trump the majority, in a democracy!
Gentlemen, that Armageddon is here!
Still, if a few rogue elements could launch an Armageddon, why not a counter-Armageddon from the state — if only to assert itself, and wean these criminals from their grand delusion?
The so-called return of Niger Delta militancy, through the so-called Avengers, is history repeating itself as farce. That is clear from their rather infantile charter of demands.
But the Avengers are only one side of that farcical coin. The other side is Nnamdi Kanu and his Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) project.
Kanu throatily campaigned for Jonathan, a sentiment awesomely popular in his native South East. That is democracy.
But when Jonathan lost, he launched his IPOB project, assured of the infinite gullibility of many a Nigerian — or, as he would prefer in his grand reverie, Biafran! That is criminal mischief, bordering on treason.
So, the difference between Kanu’s IPOB and the so-called Avengers: the one launched its own stampede very early; the other delayed its until now. Talk of two sides of the same farce!
Still, between history and farce is the cold motive. Pray, if Biafra 1 went to war on the soulless Igbo pogrom, what excuse would Biafra 2, of Kanu’s IPOB, give?
If Niger Delta Militancy 1, romanticized by the likes of the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, and given muscle by Tompolo, Asari Dokubo and co — a trio that by the way, bloated while their people wilted — what reason would the Avengers’ Niger Delta Militancy 2 give?
That Goodluck Jonathan lost an election he lacked the numbers to win?
And didn’t these blokes boast they would ground Nigeria should their own lose, even when clear Jonathan’s was fast becoming an undertaker presidency, by that government’s sheer incompetence and abominable corruption?
In terms of equal opportunity justice and fairness, Nigeria is no model. Almost every section of the country has its own grouse.
But what concretely did Jonathan, Nigeria’s first minority president, do to forge structural corrections, along minority aspirations? His election-eve Constitutional Conference? That was a laughable Trojan horse!
So, criminal bands playing to the gallery, hunting for personal fortune hidden behind collective good, are execrable.
That is what the so-called Avengers epitomize — and they represent no one but their greedy selves!
That is why the Nigerian state must assert itself, and spare no effort to bring these criminals to heel.
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