Before the next terror victims

I stared at the gory picture, tears running down my face; an image that would be my torment through the week.

And it was not to be my last! For, I saw others, just as the week went by, at Bayero University, Kano, and on the streets of Jalingo. The blood of innocent - too much of it!

The young man lay lifeless and prostrate on his back,a in his own blood, still wasting out from his mangled flesh and flowing on the tarmac. His guts were splattered beside him and his right leg blown clean off from just below the knee. I cried, not for the young man, for he was already on the other side of life - death. I cried because I suddenly realised someone who knew him must have been in the crowd, and would run to the young man’s home to relay the bad news to his family. Would it be a mother? Would it be a wife, equally young? Would it be his children - too young to understand why daddy, the bread winner is not going to come home again - ever! It would be the worst day in this life, and all for what? The dead man is one of the 8 that died at the This Day attack which a spokesman has claimed, was perpetrated by Boko Haram! He certainly did not come to ThisDay in expectation of this gruesome end! He came I presume to feign for food, using whatever means he was capable of - him and the seven others!

What did they do to be killed? And poor students of Bayero University Kano, along with their two professors and lecturers. The whole week, they looked forward to the worship of Sunday! A chance to sing and clap in praise of God, to fellowship with friends of the same faith and to be told by their pastors that they can begin the week, ransomed, healed, restored, and forgiven! Oh life! Little did they know; for how would they know? While they planned all week to come to this worship the God they were coming to pray to had allowed the devil to take possession of human minds - 20 and more bent minds. While the students chose their Church dresses, the men selected their weapons. While they made their hair and cleaned up for a morning with the King, their assailants were in counsel with the devil. A bullet in the magazine, in place, same time as a pair of trousers got ironed.  Fuel in the bikes, as the shoes took their polish. The little offering money in the pocket and hand bag, and on the other side, grenades and rockets, tucked away and both teams had begun their way to the halls used for Church. The Titanic would hit the iceberg! And ended would be, lives in their prime, none of them knowing what they got killed for. A nation bleeds. A conscience dies in mortals who relish the anguish and enjoy a sense of victory. And the devil imagines he is winning, because the killers can sleep!

It hurt when President Goodluck Jonathan told Radio Deustche Welle that the insecurity in Nigeria was being exaggerated. “Their type of confrontation is a matter of concern. In terms of safety, Nigerians are safer than most. The security situation in Nigeria is being blown out of proportion. It is exaggerated”, the president said President Goodluck Jonathan made this assertion in faraway Germany in order to woo German investors to come to Nigeria and displayed the highest degree of naiveté. First the Germans did not believe him. Their embassy in Nigeria was in agreement with the US, and the Australian embassies’ situation assessment which warranted a unilateral announcement that more attacks were being planned by the extremists - announcements that the Nigerian National Security Adviser quickly discountenanced, saying everything was under control. Of course, like the German’s, Nigerians did not believe their government. Their helplessness is how they sit like ducks and are plucked off violently without being able to lift even a finger in defence, like the young man that lay in that “prostate finality of death” so untimely, and so cruel.

But there is reason to give thanks to God, even for the loss of lives, because the pressure of the Boko Haram insurrections has caused the truth which sets free, to begin to come out, for whatever ailment God names, has a cure He has also named.  After a spending spree from a Federal Budget which allocated a lion’s share of N921.91 billion, the National Security Adviser, Owoye Azazi, has told a bewildered nation that “the current escalation of insecurity in the country, particularly the rampaging activities of the dreaded extremist sect, Boko Haram, is traceable to some undemocratic practices by the political parties during elections, especially the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP).” This thesis cost the nation N921.91 billion?

Mr Azazi, said the festering insecurity in the north eastern part of the country, which has been exacerbated by the frequent and deadly attacks of the extremist Boko Haram sect across the country, could be traced to the politics of exclusion of the PDP in the region.

“But, then I must also be quick to point out that today, even if all the leaders that we know in Boko Haram are arrested, I don’t think the problem would end, because there are tentacles.”

It stands to reason where those tentacles are tethered - to powerful people in the government, keeping tab on arrests of the “extremists” pinpointing the jails and steamrolling rescue and where necessary, and killing for cover up. The tentacles are tethered on merchants of arms and security schemes, who for the money they make, the killings is big business.

President Jonathan has found himself between the blacksmith’s hammer and the anvil. Under PDP pressure particularly the powerful block of Governors, the President has dissociated himself from Azazi’s comments, as if he was hearing them for the first time! His kith and kin sensing their own Azazi is in boiling water, hit President Jonathan from the other side - he must sustain Azazi. Meanwhile all hell seems to have broken loose, with talks of the country’s dismemberment in the air. Radio Biafra has resurrected and is replaying the nightmares of 1966 and the years of war.

Then trust him to pick his moment to poke a finger in the eye. Former President Obasanjo speaking at the 2012 Cambridge Africa Business Network chided the Jonathan Government’s approach to the Boko Haram disaster. “All these security problems pooled together are nothing compared to the civil war from which the nation pulled through,” the former president reportedly said, underlining his ego of the best leader Nigeria ever had.

The coming days will be interesting, even as Nigerians are filled with trepidation that more deadly attacks could occur. The kingpins are talking. Deployment of IEDs in Nigeria began with the parcel that killed renowned journalist Dele Giwa. General Abacha was to see more deployments in the heydays of NADECO, leading to the humiliation and jailing of General Obasanjo with a death sentence. From here he was sprang out of prison and made President, but not before Andrew Owoye Azazi on issues linked to the burglary of weapons from 1Division of the Nigeria Army, during his watch, - weapons that turned up in Niger Delta where Jonathan was Governor of Bayelsa. Azazi was sanctioned and retired. But not before under the watch of Governor Ali Modu Sheriff, leader of Boko Haram was murdered, and many suspects shot on a video that turned up on Al Jazeera triggering today’s mayhem.

Unless we account for the stolen weapons, and unless we account for the bomb technicians that Obasanjo sacked ignominiously from the service to the labour market with their technical knowhow - useful in times like this, Andrew Owoye Azazi is right. The PDP Government is behind Boko Haram, the cause, and the antidote, paid for, from the security budget.

There is that flash again.  A young man lies on his back, dead and mangled, bereaved family, wailing, bewildered. Students cut down in their prime in Bayero University two professors, four PhD holders, to teach no more, their God given Boko has turned Haram.

Timawus Mathias Writes!