I write this piece with a heavy heart. My soul is stricken within me. I have taken very badly the news of the killing of innocent children at Federal Government College, Buni Yadi, a few kilometres from the Yobe State Capital of Damaturu. This awful event occurred on Tuesday the 25th of February.
As reported by the global media, the Boko Haram insurgents invaded the school at dawn while the innocent children were fast asleep. Wearing army uniforms, the assailants gathered together as many of the pupils as they could.
They then went ahead to separate the girls from the boys before opening fire on the latter. The entire school buildings were razed to the ground by fire. The whereabouts of the girls remain as yet unknown. They are most likely going to serve as sex slaves before they meet a similar fate as their male counterparts. Authorities at Damaturu General Hospital announced a body count of 59, with perhaps many more yet to be discovered.
This is nothing new in the well-known methods of the insurgents. In a previous year they had attacked a school in broad daylight while the kids were taking their WAEC finals. What a sad destiny – to come under gunfire in the middle of your final school examinations!
We all recall how,in October 2012, the same devils descended at dawn on the campus of Federal College of Education, Mubi, in Adamawa State; killing 40 students and maiming many more. On that occasion, they brought with them a register and read out the names of students from room to room. Anyone whose name did not sound Hausa-Fulani or Muslim swiftly came under the sword.
In the month of February alone, more than 400 souls have perished in the hands of these devils totally devoid of any iota of Humanity. In rural communities in Yobe, Borno and Adamawa, a silent Jihad is being waged against women, children and entire families. Nobody is keeping the statistics. There is no one to help – no one to speak on behalf of the silent lambs.
President Goodluck Jonathan described the recent atrocities as “callous and senseless murder … by deranged terrorists and fanatics who have clearly lost all human morality and descended to bestiality”.
All men and women of conscience in this country are deeply traumatised by these acts of madness.
But it is not words that weneed now. It is action. For the first time, I am inclined to believe those who insist that our country is at war.
These people believe neither in God nor in Humanity.
Some prominent Northern politicians say Boko Haram derives from poverty and injustice. We are not taken in by dissimulation on the part of those who are the likely sponsors of the insurgency, in cahoots with the backward sheikhdoms of Arabia.
I have been a student of political violence; from Jewish terror groups in Roman-occupied Palestine to the Phalangist militias and Hezbollah in Lebanon; from the Irish Republican Army in Northern Island to the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and Shiny Path in Peru. None of these terrorist groups have deployed the methods used by Boko Haram. They have never gone into college hostels at dawn only to slaughter everyone indiscriminately.
They have never gone to a university campus on a Sunday whilst students are worshipping, as they did in Bayero University in April 2012; where they went on a bloody spree, indiscriminately gunning down students and their professors and families. They have never bombed a church filled with worshippers on Christmas Day. They have not gone into villages hunting down women and children as though they were wild game.
What Boko Haram has done outweighs many of the methods of evil perpetrated by ideological parties anchored on pure hate.
Both Muslims and Christians have been victims of these cruel and wicked demons. The bulk of the Muslim Ummah are living in fear because of these demons. Nobody wants to speak out. Everybody is a prisoner of fear. But there is no doubting that the primary target are Christians and the whole thing amounts to a systematic genocidal war on Christian communities in the North.
This is the time to declare outright war on Boko Haram. All the borders with neighbouring countries in the north east should be closed until we have fully wrestled down these demons and brought them to their knees. The Senate recently opined that our military High Command should temporarily move their headquarters to Borno. I do not think this is necessary. When we were fighting our tragic civil war, a catastrophe that was far bigger than Boko Haram, we did not need to move army headquarters from Lagos to Enugu or Port Harcourt.
What we need right now is total mobilisation of our military capability to defeat the lords of terror. I was appalled by the unfortunate exchange between Governor Shettima of Borno and my friend
Reuben Abati regarding the preparedness of our military high command. I am proud of the Nigerian army.
All patriots must rally behind the government and the military to defeat the enemies of our nationhood.
We should speedily acquire the necessary materiel and deploy the best of our men and officers to the north east and the frontier bordering our neighbouring countries.
But we must remain sensitive to the fact that nothing from the military strategy viewpoint could be as complicated as fighting insurgents the bulk of whom are your own citizens.
I say ‘bulk’ advisedly. I suspect that a significant section of Boko Haram are not Nigerians. A foreigner who invades our country and engages in the killing of defenceless citizens must duly be treated as an enemy combatant. We should also confront our neighbours to take tougher measures to stop the use of their territories as bases by the terrorists. Under international law, nations have a right to pursue war enemies to their hiding holes anywhere — even if it happens to be neighbouring territory.
OBADIAH MAILAFIA
