By Akaninyene Esiere
I carry burdens; just like many people, I have always carried burdens. One of which is the burden of seeing a functioning Nigeria. For as long as I can remember, the dysfunctional situation in Nigeria has not left me. One major reason why I ended up studying mass communication in school was for me to use the platform of journalism to change situations in the country. Thirty-five years after graduation, the situations are even more dire. This column, REFLECTIONS!, was born out of these burdens. One cannot but be restless and highly concerned about happenings in the country. The stunted, if not negative growth; the unparalleled and endemic corruption (David Cameron’s “Nigerians are fantastically corrupt” slip is epic now); a sea of insincere people; ubiquitous indiscipline (Nigeria is perhaps the global capital of indiscipline). All of these are lesser worries compared to the persistent security situation…because innocent lives are just being wasted with ease.
Nigeria is at war; at war with bandits, at war with kidnappers, at war with insurgents, at war with killer herdsmen, at war with separatists and, more fiercely, at war with Boko Haram, an extreme Islamist group that lives on killing anyone who is not its member. The war against Boko Haram has lingered on for nearly two decades having started in 2009 under the government of late President Umar Musa Yar’Adua. Unfortunately, just as it is with other issues affecting Nigeria, the country payed lip service to the threat of Boko Haram until it turned to the festering monstrous group that it is today.
Seventeen years after, and a fourth commander-in-chief in power, one a retired army general, and trillions of Naira down the security drains, the armed forces of the federal republic of Nigeria has been unable to defeat an insurgency in the country. Currently, it does occur as if the Nigerian State is losing the war against Boko Haram. That war alone has consumed dozens of army generals and officers, and thousands of soldiers. There is no mention of the tens of thousands of civilians who have been killed in the fight against this bloodsucking non-state group, nor of the millions displaced and their traditional lives obliterated. In just one week this month, Nigeria has shamelessly lost a general and a colonel to the war.
When Brigadier-General Oseni Braimah was killed two weeks ago, rather than bring its full weight on the battlefield to exterminate this murderous gang, the army laboured hard to gain the narrative and to downplay the incident. Their spin on the incident was effectively punctured by the straight-talking governor of the war weary Borno State, Professor Babagana Zulum, who said that the armed forces received intelligence on the attack THREE FULL DAYS BEFORE IT HAPPENED! This has yet to be refuted. Zulum, still cut in the coat of an academic, is known to have the courage to say things as they are.
With such revelation that there was a 72-hour intelligence before the attack that took the brigadier general, heads should have long rolled as to why the attackers were successful. Who received the intelligence; who acted or did not act upon the intelligence; was the Air Force brought into the picture; why did the war planes not go after these people before they got to the military base? What has been done to those who received the intelligence and did little or nothing about it; could it be that they deliberately kept the intelligence or even pass it to the attackers; who in the armed forces are sympathetic to the warped course of Boko Haram; what has been done to the apparent fifth columnists in the military and intelligence communities? Several questions demanding answers.
Methinks that without dealing with these issues surgically, it would be futile to expect the war to end. We cannot afford to be so used to this kind of abnormality After nearly two decades of the same story of senseless killings, we have finally developed numbness. The humanity in us has evaporated in the wake of the killings, the trauma, the tragedy, the suffering, the destruction, the pain of what we have gone through. The word “Empathy” has now lost its meaning in us.
Because the country’s armed forces could not exterminate Boko Haram long ago, criminals of no known agenda got emboldened to group in the NorthWest and start killing civilians and destroy communities at will. Interestingly, this was under the regime of the late President Mohammadu Buhari, himself a northwesterner and a retired army general. He made vacuous promises of ending the crisis even up to weeks to his handover of power. Like cancer, the insurgency has spread to all the northwestern states but Kano.
March 2026 has become the Ides of March indeed for Nigerians. In the Plateau, in Kwara, in Kaduna, in Benue, in Taraba, and in Niger states, hundreds of lives were lost in March alone to insurgents and armed herdsmen. The one in Plateau State caught the attention of the world as bloodthirsty people went on rampage killing tens of defenseless civilians and destroying their homes. Of course, no one has been arrested for the killings. The armed forces and the police always arrive the scenes of violence after the crimes have occurred.
In the last ten years, Plateau State has been attacked at least twenty-five times by armed groups seeking to dispossess indigenous people of their farmlands (these attacks date back to the 1980s). As Plateau was burning last month, our commander-in-chief was jetting out of the country. When he returned, and the noise that he acted detached and unconcerned by not visiting the grieving families and communities, he responded with an even more detached action: a ten-minute stopover at the airport. The governor of the state, perhaps so as to win a second term in office, had to sheepishly pack some of the victims of the attack to the airport to see the face of the commander in chief. The reason given for this insulting behavior was that the Jos airport (located at Wase) lacked electricity for the president to drive to town, meet with the victims and drive back to the airport before dark to enable him fly to Lagos. As if it was the responsibility of the victims to provide electricity to a federal airport, as if the president could not choose another day to go visit these grieving people who his government abdicated its responsibility to protect from the frequent attackers, as if the president could not go there hours earlier and concluded everything before nightfall, as if the president will not get to Jos town later in the year to solicit for the votes of those he failed to protect, as if…
The President’s airport visit achieved nothing. Though he promised that such attacks would not recur, his plane had hardly landed in Lagos when two follow up attacks took place in the State. In fact, the President was still in Lagos “receiving security briefings” when one of his generals was killed in Borno State. As I write, gunmen have just killed nine people in Apa local government area of Benue. Some poor communities in Katsina State have been instructed by criminals to pay for peace with hundreds of cattle and sheep. In Kwara and Niger States, hundreds of civilians kidnapped by armed gangs are still languishing in non-state detention camps.
When a nation is fighting a war and its generals are being so cheaply killed, it means so many things, a message that is lost on the government. How do we explain that the armed forces of the federal republic of Nigeria have not only been unable to defend the country but also themselves from the threat of insurgents? How do we explain that a country whose military and police forces used to be sought after by troubled parts of the world is now surrendering to the threat of killers who are running parts of the country aground? I will remember that as late as early 1990s an uncle of mine was part of the police contingent sent to Cambodia to fight for the peace of that country. He returned triumphant.
Today, it is all talk, more money and little action. In none of these hot zones does one see tangible progress in disarming those who attack innocent people. When they complete their mission, they disappear into thin air and then security personnel in their hundreds would surface at the scenes.
Not many people in this government speak against the lip service that government pays to the killings in the country. Kudos to Mohammed Ali Ndume, the senator representing Borno South Senatorial District from the ruling party. He is poles apart from his Senate President, Godwin Akpabio who likes to be economical with the truth by saying that these killings are happening because of the forthcoming elections so as to discredit the government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. The senate president is invariably saying that he has not been in this country because there has not been a month that one community or the other has not been attacked by these murderous criminals since this government came into power.
As things stand, is government invariably telling Nigerians that it is overwhelmed by the actions of the insurgents? May God forbid Nigeria from being a killing field.
**Esiere is a former journalist!
@2026
