This write-up is just an addendum to Simon Kolawole’s piece titled: Amnesty for Boko Haram – let’s have the debate we badly need. However, I do not intend to go in form of a debate but to go straight for the jugular and call the devil by his name, no matter whose ox is gored.
Yes, they are straight from Dante’s hell. You might want to describe them as psychotic psychosis or paranoid schizophrenic. Just any word in the superlative will not be as fiend and grisly as the macabre dance of death scripted daily by the Islamic militant group called Boko Haram.
Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, former aide to President Obasanjo called them “agents of the devil’. If they are not possessed by a million demons, they are probably driven by some alter-egos whose delight in the putrid smell of blood and charred bodies betrays them more hideously than Bram Stoker’s Dracula. These guys invoke the mantra of doom and destruction in executing their avowed task of wiping out mostly Christians and southerners. And they do this with confounding complaisance spiced with glaring gusto.
Yet, just as death has become the insidious power that torments the minds of these sadists, so also have killings become the fringe upon which they are pacified. They love death, they love blood, and they love killings. They bomb, they shoot, and they stab and even decapitate cleanly their innocent victims and use the severed head as trophies.
Few days ago they ambushed some innocent students of Monguno secondary school in Borno state who were returning from their WAEC exams and slit their throats. This was just a dose of their dastardly act of barbarism. They continue to attack and burn down churches, motor parks and public places. They continue to torment and terrorise and kill. Sadly enough, in all of this enterprise of doom, the government appears lame and lost.
This chasm between the government and the murderers from the Sahel has made it impossible even for the establishment to see beyond their noses and find a clue to halt this wanton murder and destruction which the sect executes banally every day. In Nigeria today, the safety of life and property is as guaranteed as the hollow rhetoric of stopping Boko Haram and hounding them into some pokey.
This has led many people from the North, including an avowed supporter of the sect and a man fighting to govern Nigeria a second time, General Buhari – whom the government has even accused of conspiracy on account of his alleged ties with the sect – to clamour for amnesty for the faceless group.
Buhari himself is very inflammatory, or so it seems, as he appears to hold a keg of petrol on one hand and an Olympic flame on the other. So he is not trusted by many for his pro-north stance and also for failing to prevent his supporters in the North from maiming and killing southerners after he lost the 2011 elections.
Like many, if not all of Nigeria’s past leaders, Buhari has got one finger of a leprous hand soiled in the oil of petro money too, either as petroleum minister under Gen Obasanjo or as a maximum ruler or even as chairman of the defunct Petroleum Trust Fund. But the scale of graft may not be as preponderance and bewildering as the ones we have noticed since 1999.
Today our politicians have elevated sleaze and debauchery to an art, and to a height that confounds organisations like Transparency International which rates Nigeria as the 35th most corrupt nation in the world. Anyway, this is a discussion for another day.
Back to Boko Haram. The group reminds us of the monster in Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein published in 1818. Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made. She then wrote Frankenstein. The only difference between Frankenstein’s monster and Boko Haram is that one was a fiction born out of a dream, the other a reality born out an illusion to Islamise Nigeria.
That illusion has continually been starved off until recently when government uncovered a grandiose plan by the sect to bomb the 11.8km Third Mainland Bridge in Lagos. This was coming on the heels of the recent Kano bombings targeted at Ibos which killed no fewer than 25 people with almost a hundred injured. The group has therefore attracted international attention with its spate of horrendous killings.
This has further reinforced the arguments in some quarters that Boko Haram is just a pressure group surreptitiously put in place by the northern elite to wrestle power from the south. The contention is that the Yorubas used OPC and Afenifere to fight the June 12 struggle and actualise their claim to the presidency. The Niger-Delta people used their various militant groups to fight against marginalisation, poverty and environmental degradation to get a shot at the presidency. While the Ibos have not been successful yet with MOSSOB because of deep-rooted internal wrangling among the rank and file, the north seems to be on same page with the Boko Haram script playing out it last episodes.
Since it was founded by Mohammed Yussuf in 2001, the group has promoted sectarian violence and responsible for no fewer than 3000 deaths. It is presently led by Sheik Ibrahim Shekau, a man who recently mocked the federal government for its plan to grant amnesty to the sect. According to him, it was ironical that the government was contemplating amnesty for Boko Haram members, who according to him had not done anything wrong by waging a war against the nation. “It is we that should grant you (Federal Government) pardon,” he mocked.
The Christian Association of Nigeria which is opposed to any form of amnesty for the dreaded group recently flayed Boko Haram’s rejection of amnesty by the Federal Government, saying it was a further proof that the militant Islamic sect was bent on islamising the country.
Said Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor: “We have said it before, to whom do government want to give amnesty? Where is the prison and where are the people? I understand Shekau said it’s Boko Haram that should give the Federal Government amnesty. So, where do we go from here?”
Pastor Oritsejafor need not go any further because there are many people, particularly from the north who are in support of amnesty for the dreaded sect. Arewa Consultative Forum, and the Northern Elders Forum are rooting for amnesty just as northern clerics and leaders like Rev Father Mathew Kukah, The Shehu of Borno, Abubakar El-kanemi and a host of others are saying that amnesty for the group will restore peace and bring about development in all parts of the north ravished by the scourge of naked terrorism.
But many are of the opinion that the northern elite are clamouring for amnesty to enrich their pockets at the expense of their impoverished population. This is because Boko Haran has not cried against marginalization or poverty or unfair distribution of wealth. Their objective right from the starting blocks is to islamise Nigeria. This has led people to ask: why do these northern leaders want the federal government to grant amnesty to the sect, rehabilitate the members, send many abroad to study, send others to vocational schools, pay salaries to them and make many more billionaires when the sect only has one agenda?
Even then, the position of Boko Haran against amnesty for the group has put the government in quandary. The government has been using force and the machinery of state to resist the violence of this killer group. But the monstrous tentacles of Boko Haram seem to be growing each time some tissues are severed off. And its rejection of the amnesty offer clearly shows “they are anti-establishment,” as Simon Kolawole put it, because “we are dealing with extremists who are thoroughly schooled in religious hate.”
President Goodluck is favourably disposed to granting amnesty to the group even though he’s deeply harried by reminders that victims of Bokom Haram onslaught needed compensation and their families, rehabilitation. He is also beginning to sense that amnesty may not be a full-proof solution after all, but a stop-gap.
And the monster remains unleashed and untamed.
Johnson works for a GSM company in Nigeria and sent this piece from omonighojohnson@gmail.com.
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