On the eve of this year's workers'
Day I was in a popular five star hotel in the Nigeria's political capital city
attending a social function alongside some friends that visited me from Lagos,
Kaduna and Bayelsa States when suddenly a call came through from a mutual
friend Miss. Victoria Osareme Oladapo, a final year Political Science
Undergraduate of one of the public Universities, that there is a bomb scare somewhere
around some of the most popular and frequently visited multipurpose commercial
complexes in the Wuse two area of the Federal Capital Territory.
These commercial business premises
owned by some private developers are located few minutes drive from the ThisDay
Newspaper Abuja office which was only recently bombed by suspected suicide
bombers from the armed Islamic fundamentalist group which has operational
headquarters in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital in the North East Nigeria.
Immediately this shocking news
reached us, the journalism instincts in me drove me to make several
calls to some knowledgeable sources who also confirmed that there were indeed
credible threats of bomb attack at the commercial multipurpose buildings as
narrated by my mutual friend.
The story forced every one of us to
cut short our social meeting which should ordinarily had lingered till the wee
hours of the night. We were forced to disperse to different safe locations to
await further information on whether actually those who made the threats have
successfully made good their words. But not without a major drama that played
itself out. As we made to rise from the meeting because of the nature of the
information that reached us, one of us informed us that the Minister of
Information of the Federal Republic of Nigeria Mr. Labaran Maku has made it
inevitable that every right thinking Nigerian should act promptly
to every alert of possible security threat from the armed Islamic
insurgents because of a number of spectacular gaffes that he the minister of
Information committed in recent times which probably endangered the lives of a
lot of Nigerians.
Further buttressing his claim that
the Nigeria's Minister of Information has become one of the most notorious
marketers of doubtful information and raw barefaced propaganda, my friend
reminded us that it was the Minister of Information that incongruously
dismissed the well thought out security alert issued by the United States
Embassy in Abuja warning American travelers to the Nigerian capital to be
security conscious because of credible threats of bomb attacks allegedly by the
armed Islamic fundamentalist which may target specific public institutions or
hotels. The American diplomatic mission in Nigeria had issued this information
just a few days before the media offices in Abuja and Kaduna were actually
bombed by the Islamic religious insurgents. But on the day the security alert
was issued by the American Diplomats in Abuja, the Nigerian minister of
Information had sought to debunk it by warning the Embassy of the United States
in Nigeria to desist from raising unfounded security alert and creating undue
panic among Nigerians and other international visitors to Nigeria. But the
Nigeria's information minister goofed because exactly after he [Labaran
Maku] exhibited this scandalous show of shame, the armed Islamic extremist
waging a relentless insurgency against the Nigerian state actually struck the
ThisDay office. For this reason our friend said the best thing we should do is to
disperse and find safe havens to hide pending the disappearance of these
threats.
Amid the panic that greeted this
security alert I dashed into my car and drove straight home only to discover to
my amazement that most of my neighbors had travelled out of the Federal Capital
Territory for fear of the unknown particularly when these two commercial
complexes were also a stone throw from our house. I was still in contemplation
on whether to relocate to a fortified fortress of a three star hotel in another
part of the Federal Capital City then came the sound of a knock in my
door that woke me from my subconciousness and the visitor turned out to be
the same mutual friend that in the first place informed me about information
making round in the eve of May 1st 2012 that the members of the armed Islamic
insurgents had issued a bomb threat targeted at those two business
premises mostly frequented by buyers in Abuja.
She had hardly sat down when
she requested passionately that is change the television station from
the news channel that I was viewing before she visited to a popular movie
channel and the first in the series of films shown that evening was aptly
titled 'Ghost'.
A little research showed that
this particular movie which was originally released on July 13th 1990 had
won two Academy awards, the United States equivalent of the Nobel Prize for
films. The story line of 'Ghost' was reportedly written by Sami
Al-Taher and it was indeed a story of two persons that I chose to
call 'love Birds'- namely Mr. Sam and his girl friend Miss. Molly. Sam and
Molly were very happy couple and deeply in love. Walking back to their new
apartment after a night out at the theatre, they encountered a thief in the
dark alley, and Sam is subsequently killed. He [Sam] finds himself trapped
as a ghost and realizes that his death was no accident. He must warn Miss.
Molly about the danger she is in. But as a ghost he cannot be
seen or heard by the living, and so he tries to communicate with Molly through
Oda Mae Brown, a Psychic who didn't even realize that her powers were real.
Deep in contemplation on the import
of this beautiful but incomprehensible film when Miss. Victoria Osayeme
Oladapo, the 21-year old undergraduate sought to know from me whether Nigeria
our dear country has been overrun by some 'ghosts' that are unleashing
unrelenting vicious cycle of bloody violence all across Nigeria hiding under
the guise of some strange religious ideology.
But before she could finish, my mind
went straight to a recent public statement carried in the media credited to the
Chief of Army Staff in Nigeria-General Azubuike Ihejirika that the armed
Islamic religious insurgents have perfected the art and craft of fighting like
'ghosts' because they know us and we do not know them and that they strike us
and disappear. General Ihejirika then proceeded to warn his soldiers to be
constantly in 'war mood' as they try to combat these armed religious extremists
blamed for the gruesome killings of dozens of innocent Nigerians.
The Nigeria's Chief of Army Staff
had stated thus; "It is high time for you and your men to be in war mood
to be able to deal with the challenges".
My mutual friend asked again
whether Nigeria is over run by ghosts because according to her, she read in a
newspaper that the Acting Inspector General of Police Mr. Mohammed Abubakar
said his operatives have not yet defeated the terrorists because the members of
the public fail to offer meaningful information to the police for fear of
reprisal. She also reminded me of the phenomenon of ghost workers that have
infiltrated the Federal and State civil service in Nigeria and the cases of
ghost pensioners and recently the discovery in Plateau state of the existence
of a 'ghost commissioner' who has consistently drawn salaries and huge
allowances meant for that office for several months before the recent
discovery.
Do you remember the last time that
President Jonathan addressed we the troubled and distressed members of the
public worried about the unprecedented violence across the North?, she asked.
This question was thrown at me
by my mutual friend as a follow up to her first inquiry on whether ghosts have
invaded Nigeria. I quickly feigned ignorance of which of the speeches of the
President of Nigeria she referred to because President Jonathan has made
several of those empty rhetoric regarding the so-called determination of the
current Federal Government to bring the violence to a quick end and each time
he made the speech, the armed terrorists will launch more deadly and
devastating attacks.
The last time our President spoke,
she stated, he assured us that by June 2012 that the violence will come to an
end but as things stand now those responsible for these attacks have upped the
ante of their bloody attacks and the operatives of the security community paid
with tax payers' fund still behave as if we live in a country over -run by
ghosts.
The drift of our debate with my
mutual friend forced me to look into the Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia
whereby I learnt that in traditional belief and fiction, a ghost is the soul or
spirit of a deceased person or animal that can appear, visible form or other
manifestation, to the living. In many traditional accounts, ghosts were often
thought to be deceased people looking for vengeance, or imprisoned on earth for
bad things they did during life. The appearance of a ghost has often been
regarded as an omen or portent of death.
Now to the aforementioned question
concerning the ghosts and the possibility that they may have over- run Nigeria,
my rumination of it led me to two trends of thought namely whether we as
contemporary Nigerians are now facing the consequences of the actions and
inactions of our deceased political leaders who contributed in no small way to
the mess that Nigeria has become or whether we have truly been overrun by the
ghosts of all those citizens of this country that died because of the collapsed
of basic infrastructures of road and hospitals or more
appropriately, the twin evils of bad roads and poor health infrastructure
which are the largest causes of premature deaths suffered by hundreds of
thousands of Nigerians.
The collapse of these infrastructures
of roads and hospitals was caused by massive corruption on the part of
political office holders both in the past and in the present day the extent of
the heist has assumed frightening dimension.
The more research I conduct to know
if Nigeria has become a failed state, the more I am confronted by the question
of whether Nigeria has been over -run by ghosts.
Reading through a well researched
legal essay by Ngozi Udombana[Mrs.], a Senior Research Fellow at the
prestigious Nigerian Institute of Advanced Legal Studies titled;
'Constitutional Constraints to the realization of the right to the dignity of
the human person', I came across the scholarly essay on
Nigeria credited to an intellectual named Sen. Y., in a symposium
paper delivered at Carleton University Ottawa, Canada titled 'Challenges and Prospects
of Nigeria's development at 50' in which an expression of shock over
Nigeria's stunted growth was made.
The writer stated thus;
"Nigeria is enormously endowed. It is a country with almost one million
square kilometers of land, more than 60 percent of which is cultivatable for a
variety of soil and vegetation determined crops as well as livestock
production. It is the eight highest producer of oil and contains the sixth
deposits of gas Worldwide. Its estimated 150 million people, comprised of about
400 ethnic groups, rank it as the largest market in Africa".
Ngozi Udombana then added thus;
"It is, therefore, irksome that with such enormous endowment and potential
for greatness, Nigeria is still a groping 'giant of Africa'.
I think Nigeria is showing the
symptoms of a failed state that has been infested by the ghosts of corruption,
indiscipline, anarchy and bloody crimes but one thing is sure that the moment
Nigeria gets a disciplined leadership these ghosts will automatically be
exorcised.
Scott Peck in the work titled 'The
Road less Travelled' stated realistically that; "Discipline is the basic
set of tools we require to solve life's problems. Without discipline we can
solve nothing. With only some discipline we can solve only some problems. With
total discipline we can solve all problems".
I think this principle indeed was
the then President George W. Bush's guiding light when on September 11th
2001, the United States of America came under attacks by the international
terrorism gangs based then in far away Afghanistan, and the then President Bush
launched a totally committed war against terror which was built upon by his
successor President Barrack Obama that has relatively made the American nation
one of the safest places on Earth.
In his book titled "Decision
Points" the former United States President, Mr. George W. Bush of the
Republican Party, wrote down what compelled his government to take a
totally disciplined approach to wage war against terror. His words;"...I
caught enough fleeting glimpses of the coverage to understand the horror of
what the American people were watching. Stranded people were jumping to their
deaths from the top floors of the World Trade Center towers. Others hung out of
windows, hoping to be rescued. I felt their agony and despair. I had the most
powerful job in the World, yet I felt powerless to help them".
For the compelling reason that
as the then United States President, he is obliged to show disciplined
leadership and not sit back and watch his country attack again and again by
these blood sucking terror gangs, the then President Bush implemented
far-reaching security measures and counter terrorism strategies that have
helped to make the United States of America peaceful. President Obama
followed the totally disciplined anti-terror
campaign institutionalized by his predecessor in office George Bush which
enabled his Democratic Party-led administration to locate and kill Osama
BinLaden, the leader of the terror group that attacked the United States on
September 11th 2001.
In Nigeria however while the
ordinary people are gunned down and bombed out of existence by armed
terrorists, government officials at the state levels are busy erecting formidable
fences around the Governors' offices for the purposes of protecting only the
immediate family members of these politicians even when millions of other
unarmed civilians are left to die. At the national level both the political and
military leaders continuously inundate Nigerians with half baked rhetoric that
paints these terrorists as ghosts who elude capture because the ordinary people
fail to volunteer information to the security personnel. What a shame?
Nigerian political and military
leaders must work to exorcise this and many other ghosts such as the ghosts of
corruption, indiscipline, greed, avarice and impunity that have taken centre
stage in the affairs of Nigeria or we may face the ever more terrible
consequences associated with an irretrievably failed state. God forbid!
4/5/2012
