For Nigerians, these are perilous and uneasy times as their lot is being made worse on daily basis by a myriad of issues that have gone beyond the daily and normal challenges of life and living. An otherwise rich country, Nigeria has become an enclave where lives of citizens simply mean misery and pain.
Poverty, hunger and long suffering have become national identities and stubborn visitors in many homes, all because the national economy is slowing and leadership seems inept, insensitive and clueless.
As if these are not enough, the country is today under siege with the activities of people who, for political convenience and other considerations, have been identified as bandits—a nebulous description that neither locates them to any region or district nor links them to any known sect.
The bandits are not only killers, they are also rapists and kidnappers who have made major highways in Nigeria dreadful, risky and unsafe. Like wild fire, the activities of these killer-bandits are spreading, leaving in their trail destruction, death and woes.
But there is a greater challenge and that is a seeming conspiracy of silence. The government whose statutory or constitutional role is to protect lives and property remains silent. President Muhammad Buhari whose duty is to ensure that this constitutional provision is pursued, has chosen to maintain a studied silence.
This silence, at such trying times as these in the land, is not golden. It is hurting and heart-rending. The silence becomes all the more thought-provoking and head-whirling when the mindless killings by the bandits are placed side-by-side with mere agitations by self-determination seekers in some regions of the country and the government’s swift reaction to them.
Nigerians are worried that the federal government which once vowed to ‘crush rascals and economic saboteurs’ in the country does not see the ungodly activities of the bandits bad enough to attract prompt and decisive action.
We join the rest of Nigerians to condemn, in its entirety, government’s un-golden silence and more the excuse by its apologists that it is dealing with this act against God and humanity silently. In street parlance, it is said that whenever and wherever there is crisis, any onlooker is either a villain or a conspirator. We cannot agree more.
These mindless killing of innocent Nigerians have brought to the fore the true character of an average Nigerian politician and nowhere has this been more clearly demonstrated than in Ondo State where many of them have been going to in the last couple of days to commiserate with the Afenifere leader, Reuben Fasoranti, whose daughter was brutally murdered by the so called bandits.
What many of them were heard saying in their brief interviews with the press amounted to dancing on the blood of that innocent woman who was cut short in her prime for the simple reason that she was a Nigerian citizen where human lives are worth less than people’s political ambitions or parochial interests.
The views expressed by some politicians right in the presence of a bereaved father that the killing of his daughter should not be allowed to divide the country, and also exonerating a known killer-group of perpetrating the killing before police investigation were not only hypocritical but also self-serving.
We are worried about all of this and the looming danger if nothing is done to halt them. We are all the more worried by the deafening silence and inaction of the president and, by extension, the government because this silence has created room for various interpretations of the activities of the bandits.
We believe that the unity of this country is sacrosanct and non-negotiable and therefore, we expect the government to promote this unity by rising to the occasion of protecting lives and property of all Nigerians irrespective of class or creed.
We take exception to the idea of government condemning “this dastardly act” and mobilizing all its security apparatus to “fish out the perpetrators” only when the killing or kidnapping involves a ‘big man’ and his family but turns blind eye and deaf ear when a poor man and his family are involved. The life of every Nigerian should be precious to the government and should be treated as such.
We believe that the impunity which these bandits have exhibited in carrying out their killing trade is because none of them has ever been arrested and none is being tried anywhere in any court, nor is anyone of them in detention anywhere for their actions. This, we think, emboldens them to do more.
