By 
ANYONE who watches the trending video of heavily armed bandits taunting Nigeria and its doddering leadership and emotionally assaulting passengers of the Niger State Transport Authority, NSTA, bus without feeling sorry for the country must be subhuman. The victims were abducted in the Yakila district of the Rafi Local Government Area of Niger State on February 15. I had goosebumps watching babies crying, women frantically pleading, men humiliated and resigned to fate, and of course, their tormentors, having the fun of their lives, celebrating their successful haul of human cargo that will soon translate into millions of naira.
The Niger State governor, Abubakar Sani Bello, has confirmed the video and the N500 million ransom already demanded by the bandits. The video graphically illustrates how low the country has sunk under President Muhammadu Buhari’s watch. It depicts the helplessness of Nigerians in the face of the existential threat they collectively face. Under Buhari’s watch, it is sorrow, tears and blood, as the Afrobeat legend, Fela, would say. But the consolation is that Nigerians, South of the Niger, have also resolved never to roll over for the hoodlums from the North ever again.
I had resolved last week to stay off the tomfoolery of the Nigerian elite, having come to the inevitable conclusion that they are dyed-in-the-wool hypocrites, set in their adulterous ways. They have no fidelity to the common good. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to stay aloof when an issue is existential threat – Nigerians are at that dreadful moment when many are increasingly questioning whether their lives have meaning, purpose, or value in their own country.
We are at that scary juncture where though bandits have become existential threat, yet the Northern elite, like the ostrich, are burying their heads in the sand, pretending that by so doing the country’s woes will be wished away. On Tuesday, Islamic cleric, Sheik Ahmad Gumi, the chief ideologue of the Fulani supremacist agenda, was on the Africa Independent Television, AIT, where he made the bold-faced claim that bandits learnt kidnapping from Niger Delta militants. That is a lie.
To dissuade terrorists from maiming and killing fellow citizens, he doubled down on his vexatious demand that they be granted amnesty and handsomely compensated if they magnanimously agree to be persuaded to lay down their arms. To them, we, the lesser mortals, don’t have the right to live peacefully or otherwise. It is a privilege at their whims and caprices.
The hubris is suffocating. Rather than address the issue of insecurity, what you hear from the Northern elite is this condescending admonition to the rest of the country not to provoke their wrath. Rather than telling their brothers to stop the kidnappings and senseless bloodletting, they are angry that Nigerians have the audacity to call them out. They are enraged that other Nigerians have the guts to push back on their brazen expansionist agenda.
Why would a governor from the South demand that Fulani herdsmen be flushed out of the forests in his state? They are enraged that non-state actors like Sunday Igboho would dare challenge the suzerainty of the Fulani and defend their people in the face of government’s shameful abdication of its primary responsibility which is the protection of lives and property of the citizens.
They are deploying every trick in the book to deflect the blame from themselves. In all their posturing, they do everything to shield President Buhari, the man on whose watch the country is going to the dogs, from any blame. Curiously, a people that long ago elevated to an art the tendency of blaming the group for the sins of a few are today crying foul that Nigerians are blaming herdsmen for the mayhem across the country. They are now saying that crime has no ethnicity, which is true. But remember the egregious lie of branding the January 15, 1966 coup an Igbo coup?
Yes, that is the hypocrisy that rules the land. They pretend not to know what happened on that fateful day – a group of army officers, the majority of who were Igbo, on their own planned a coup without consulting ordinary Igbo people in the street. Yet, they conveniently branded it for the singular purpose of exacting maximum revenge on the Igbo. Over 55 years after, that lie has persisted and it is at the root of all the injustices meted out to the Igbo in Nigeria. Yet, these same people are protesting loudly that Nigerians are calling out those who have turned Nigeria into a huge killing field.
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