By Yabagi Mohammed
Those saying no one has patented lunacy are wrong; there is. Ask the northern youths. While the Igbo in Nigeria agitating for Biafra pretend to having it, the northern youths demonstrate it on a regular basis. The Igbo have been threatening fire, brimstone and mongering war since God knows when. They say they want to burn down their country (which their demented leader, Nnamdi Kanu regularly refer to as “the zoo,”) the youths from the north have woken up and said “enough” with their Kaduna Declaration. People are surprised as to why the entire world has suddenly taken the matter of “secession or no secession” seriously.
Is it easy to take up arms against your own people? The north is the only place where you have confirmed lunatics ready to go to war against the state and are killing their own people in the name rejection of western education. They say the name of their group is “Boko Haram.” They are killing their own kits and kin on the altar of not sharing the same ideology. I wonder what those mentally maladjusted and psychopathic nuisances would do to the Igbo and their N44 trillion investment in that region at the end of the three months ultimatum if the threat does not get more than the attention it is currently receiving globally.
What many youths of Igbo origin do not understand is that whenever the beating of war drums reaches its crescendo, it awakens emotions among several interest groups. If only those doing this to themselves and their kinsmen know the nature of trouble they are courting, they would have probably sought a nonviolent approach to their agitation than the use of threats and singing of war songs. They don’t know that events that led to the very first coup in the country, just seven years into Nigeria’s nationhood and the counter coups that followed and resulted in the three years civil war are refreshed in the minds of many in times like this. This is not saying that the nation has not moved on from that time, it has. But then, you cannot threaten the corporate existence of a country as an individual or group on the basis of not being satisfied with governance in your country. There are institutions to channel your grievances rather than resorting to barbarism and empty threats.
I think one thing that suddenly awakens the world to the matter is because they know that youths in the north, rather than make empty threats, make promises and they never fail to fulfill them. They are good at keeping promises and that is why theirs is a legit lunacy. They are certified set of lunatics who started maitatsine, caused several havoc across the north before they were eventually quashed. They are the ones with the deadliest set of people, who look at death in the face and say “bring it on.” They are the ones who would rather look to heaven where they expect to meet their seventy heavenly and beautiful virgins (I want to laugh here, but the seriousness of this piece prevented me) than sleeping with worldly ugly ladies. They are the ones whose majority religious instructors teach violence and need to be heavenly conscious than take this world seriously. In fact, those youths embrace and kiss danger than avoid it.
How many northern youths are members of the dreaded Boko Haram? Several. They are living in the country and have taken arms against the state. They are fighting and are being killed in their numbers; yet, they hold forth to their resolve to get their ‘caliphate’. That, to them, is bravery. Believing in something and making concerted efforts to achieving it. This is a stark contrast to Nnamdi Kanu, who, before his arrest and imprisonment by the Nigerian state, had himself cowardly hidden in parts of Europe and America from where he used his Biafra propaganda radio and television to incite his gullible followers into taking up arms against the state.
As it is, I cannot even count the number of criminal offenses committed by Kanu and how treasonable most of the said offenses are by his pronouncements. In the same vein, the terror group, Boko Haram, have also committed uncountable criminal acts against the state and humanity through multiple killings and terrorist acts of immeasurable proportion. These guys are killer machines.
From Prof Ango’s pronouncements, it is like some elites in the north are in support of the actions of those miscreants in that region. It is the same thing with how the Boko Haram menace started. Before it reared its ugly head to the full blown calamity that we currently faced, several elites came out to shout at the top of their voices that their youths have rights to airing their grievances and that they should not be stopped. Some even played the religious cards. To those people, they were being repressed and being prevented from practicing their faith as they saw fit. When some groups tried to classify them as terrorists, people were so careful in doing so because of the sensitivity of religion and the fact that it is capable of easily turning one part of the country and one religion against the other. So people and groups were careful in their categorisation of what was happening; they all played politics. Some people supported what we now know as one of the most dangerous terror group in the country morally, some did so logistically while others did so through volunteering. Now, we have a monster difficult for the entire world to tame.
It is at this point that I see the cowardice and hypocrisy of all elites; political and religious leaders in the south eastern part of the country. I think theirs is a double-standard in the business of Nigerian nationhood. They all want to display and assert some level of authority countrywide, but lack requisite authority to call their youths to order. No one can lead in a heterogeneous society if you cannot put your house in order. It is really sad that despite the muscle that some of them flex on the nation, they lack that cutting edge for effective leadership in their regions. This is why crimes such as armed robbery, kidnapping, baby factory and others are so rampant among their youths.
In the final analysis, those at the receiving end are those who put themselves forward to be used as sacrificial lambs by the spineless leaders who cannot fight the fight they claim to have passion for. Like the Late Odumegwu Ojukwu, when the heats reaches boiling point, just as Nnamdi Kanu was also doing, they would ship themselves and their families to safety elsewhere, while the poor among them face the fire.
The same way people like Prof Ango and other so-called northern elites would hide and also put their offspring away from harm’s way when it comes to it, leaving the children of the poor at the mercy of the resultant consequences of their machinations.
