I’m no doubt a fearless person, if you so choose to believe, even though you have the right to contest my assertion. I haven’t come out to beg you or to appeal to your conscience today, because the country belongs to all of us, and I must not beg you before you consider peace and dialogue as the ultimate and important option.
I don’t want to accept any kind of political or religious reason for the ongoing insurgence in our country. Undisputedly, some people have decided to create hell for themselves in the name of uprising, and I laugh, because violence is never the best approach to addressing national grievances. It’s only dialogue that can create such forum. It’s only when bombs and grenades are not in our hands that people can establish contact with us. We don’t expect people to share the same table with us when we continue to build bomb factories in different states. We can’t be putting on masks, and expect our father to believe we are his children. We must first of all, let go the masks, and bare our faces.
One very awful feature of insurgency is how rarely those involved attempt nonviolent arbitration. Most of the time, the Militants would want the government to submit to their own desires, because they believe they are holding the government and the people to ransom. In the Nigeria’s case, the militants have only succeeded in killing their own brothers and sisters. They have succeeded in killing many innocent Nigerians who know little or nothing about leadership, who cannot even say exactly why they were killed. Even the Northern elders who are now clamoring for amnesty cannot be so sure of what the war is all about. In such situation, it becomes very difficult for a legitimate government to grant the insurgents legitimacy as a negotiating partner. Such government would be considered weak and unresponsive to the plight of the people. We all know when the former leader, Olusegun Obasanjo fearlessly went to Maiduguri on a reconciliation mission, moments after he left the state, the militants struck harder than they had in the past, the same thing was replicated after Jonathan’s recent visit to Maiduguri and Yobe states. Some innocent people struggling for their daily bread in Kano were all perished in a motor park.
That peace has eluded us completely tells me that justice has abandoned us. This is because, from my own point of view, violence should be viewed as a continuous absence of justice. Peace does not depend on one culture, religion, political party and an ideology to survive, peace incorporates every necessary ingredient in the most harmonious way for its survival. What this means is that all the aforementioned must co-exist without war, killing, & overpowering individual fellow.
Individual peace depends on the peace others around him enjoy. An individual must first of all feel that all is right with the world, the continent, the country, the state, the local government, the village, his extended family and his immediate family. It’s only then, he can be at peace with himself. No one can be at peace with himself when all he does is to either kill people around him or kidnapping fellow human beings for financial gains.
We all are so committed to our busy lifestyles, so individualistic and sentimental that whatever happens to our neighbor does not really bother us. How can nurses and doctors see peace when all they blow around their patients is total negligence of the duty they owe them.? Yet, we all want to live peacefully, we want to enjoy the peace we so desire but don’t deserve. You need to call on peace. You must never cease to be at peace with peace. If you go to war with peace, what you find will be nothing short of war.
Until we have a change of mind, with the full acceptance of our amalgamated structure; until we accept that we are truly amalgamated; until we agree that we have come to live as brothers and friends with one ‘God, one Allah’; until we stop the mindless game of sentiment; until we see ourselves as one indivisible body that once fought collectively for the emancipation of this country, things will continue to choke us.
Take this down if you like; acceptance, compassion, and tolerance are the foundation of peace in every nation. When there is no love and acceptance, the Alu 4 kind of mutiny is bound to happen, the Mubi kind of massacre will continue to hit us, kidnapping will take over our land, and then Boko Haram will continue with the incessant killings. We should be wise. We can’t continue to kill ourselves because of some few interest. I was taught that the interest of the people supersedes all other interests. Why have we sold our souls to the devil, because of some people? There is nothing as evil as taking another’s life, as you can’t even make a single hair. You can’t even make a doll. You can only make some local explosive devises, which will kill you one day, because it’s written that those who kill by the swords, fall by the same swords. Think of the blood you waste every day. Put yourself in the shoes of the man you killed. I blame all of us for discarding the foundation of love we were given by our past political fathers. Do you know that the resources we share together is already a bond? The market we buy and sell is already an oath of goodwill, so why breaking the solid oath?
When will our religious and political leaders realize that our blood is not meant for political sacrifice? When will they realize that we have them at the tip of our fingers? When will they realize that a single walk by concerned Nigerians will change things? Tell them if you know them that we are all done with the daily tears. Our faces are now desiccated, and we can no longer watch them play politics with our blood, our lives.
Again, how very stupid are we that we continue to kill ourselves because they asked us to do so? I think it’s high time we stopped hoping on internal or external security forces to protect us. Peace is our best security, and until we embrace peace and understand the essence of our oneness, we may never be secured.
Mahatman Gandhi and Neson Mandela had proven that it’s only peace that frustrates suffering and oppression. Blessed are the peacemakers. Let’s return to the North and to the South in peace as a sign of true amalgamated Nigeria. Peace… I preach today.
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