Restore Our Network [II] —Abdulhamid Al-Gazali, algazali@yahoo Maiduguri, 14TH September, 2013. At least, Borno being our homeland, the insecurity and emergency situation it has called for notwithstanding, we deserve the courtesy to be told why we must accept to live without communication, not for one month, but two, three, and as of today, four. It is for this that, when declaring the emergency rule, the president himself had to address the whole nation about it; and ordinarily so should every development afterward. While, for instance, nobody can question the military for its arrests, none should be made without telling the public the reason why if it demands to know. You arrested my neighbor, days on, I come to seek for explanation, you cannot tell me!; you instead also arrest me!? So for this, nobody even dares to start it. This is foolishness! It is this kind of complacency with which we treat situations like this—which of course, we are apparently, always placed at the receiving end, unjustifiably; and fear—in this case, of the military—that we cannot talk when obviously we are mistreated and discomfited by its inexplicable policies. Once and for all, let me reluctantly declutch here to address this piquant element that has been chipped into our atmosphere for some time now: fear. First, fear, I think at least of the military, derives from ignorance—both religious and Boko. Second, individual human rights, has been surrendered to this fear; this is indeed because it is not understood in the first place—still therefore, the product of, you can be sure, ignorance. This fear, it is felt, is of or takes the form of being afraid to be labeled as Boko Haram, or any form of such conspiracies that can qualify a case against you, if you dare talk. This is added more reason to be believed in and taken so seriously by the fact that certain big men were indicted and arrested in this way. Truth is, there is no reason why anybody should give in to fear. The military is not to be feared; and must be told the very gospel truth whenever necessary; but this is only for those who are not into any criminal activity and not guilty of any crime and not preparing for any war with it, to do. Anyone who fears it, and he is not ignorant and claims to have known his rights, in the real sense, I make bold to conclude, is a criminal—too short, too clear. And even if our military is one which acts before it listens, and the best way to avoid its wrath is to fear it, we can, all the same, say it is the product of ignorance—this time of everything. Who in this world today thinks he can dodge death? Only the most ignorant of people. I heard a very unfortunate ‘announcement’ going on in my area last night as I came out from Isha’I prayer, that tomorrow, Saturday the 14th, for reasons unstated, probably because there isn’t one, the military ‘orders’ everybody to sweep his compound or “face its wrath”. The question that this unfortunate development calls for is: when is it added to its rules of engagement the duty of the environment ministry; or even, when were the two sectors—security and environment management—decomposed into one? Of course the question is not so much why, because ordinarily we owe it to ourselves to keep our environment clean; but it is not the military’s business to order it, and even threaten a punishment for refusal to do, even if the environment appears dirty. What it should have done is to advise the community to do; but it cannot, because, by and large, what all this points to is in fact the extent to which it belittles the civilian population, particularly of Borno because it (the military) capitalizes on the fear it is treated with by the people and their rights which they have not understood properly and hence allowed to be abused. It is somehow understandable if one fears the insurgents because to them—unlike the military with whom one pays the same allegiance to a covenant which also prescribes one’s rights and obliges it, the military, to abide by it—one has no right. There is no any binding between you and a terrorist as such; therefore, if there is what is called sanity in you, you should not even start to talk of rights. And even with this, there is one binding on you: self-defence. You owe it to yourself when a terrorist comes to kill you, to put up a defence. I hope I can stop here and feel a little satisfied to say that I have cocked my share on this intrusion into what we may suppose, offers no any help to the matter at stake. Last time when I wrote on this, not because I am oblivious, I did not deem it fit to stop to deal thoroughly with another fallacy that has equally been forced into our way—whoever it author was. Communication was shut, civilian volunteers emerged, Boko Haram dwindled, and it is concluded, it was the closing down of the network that caused all. Sincerely speaking, not in a way of looking down to people, I suspect anyone who upholds this view of mis-education, intellectual-indolence, you can say, even ignorance—and this, I concede, may partly be as result of my, what, people call ‘victimhood of little knowledge’, myself. Allow me to digress in the midst of this digression. I have long been labeled a victim of this, what they chose to call ‘empty drum syndrome’ and I have over time learnt to see myself as one. I have never taken the time to respond, because I have never claimed to have known too much; so to respond, is to take the blame. I am however, I know, to the dismay of my detractors, mirrored in them—a very difficult thing for one to do for oneself: self-mirroring; and this fuels me to seek more and more knowledge in every opportunity that hands itself while they keep on doing what makes them less and less. Whenever this detraction is drawn to my way, I am reminded of one very funny remark: ‘he thinks he is knowledgeable and truthful’, that someone made about me when I belied the deputy governor on… Whenever one has no points to make in an argument, he disguises his ignorance and pointlessness, dressed in sophisticated words, in what logicians call ‘red herring’; they resort to employing some linguistic gimmicks, juggling of words, and confuse the truth with: irreverence, provocation and even incitement. Enough for this too, I think; but I shall not be content until I add: whenever such trick is played on me, I have very sharp eagle-eyes to recognize the hidden agendum. In logics, there is one simplistic error they call ‘post hoc, ergo propter hoc’, meaning, ‘after this, therefore because of this’. What is overlooked in the case of the former ‘digression’, I suspect, is the fact that the emergence of the civilian volunteers is what was in the main responsible for the defeat of the Boko Haram, not the network; and that their emergence too had no any connexion with the network. I asked a nephew, a pioneer volunteer, as to whether they had any arrangement to shutdown the GSM network with the military, then JTF, before they emerged; but in fact to my utter chagrin, he couldn’t recall whether when they emerged the network was on or off. I think, with this, enough is said. I am not, however, unaware of the fact that, a single reason cannot result in the defeat of BH. Last week, I have tried to show some of the reasons. The emergence of the volunteers itself had reasons, as does the shutting down of the network. But the fact that the two—the emergence of the volunteers and the shutting down of the GSM—took place at about the same time, in what was a coincidence of sorts, does not mean one was the cause of the other or happened for the other. Here, what is to be said, should be that, they both helped in the fight against the insurgents. This conclusion too, there is need to assign some order to them, since one is naturally more significant than the other: civilian volunteers, then communication. Another thing one should presently try to put to perspective is whether the shutting down of the network has had the kind of impact it is believed to have had in the successes now achieved. It has widely been held that, the network blackout has made it impossible for the BH to mobilize its rank and file for a comeback—to the extent that saying to the contrary, stands a risk of getting slapped. I shall, to save time and space, like to refer the reader to my last piece, “Musing from Maiduguri: Apropos the Call for Dialogue”, where, as the outcome of my extensive study on its membership and recruitment (which I shall subsequently come to deal with), I tried to show that, BH is a coalition of different armed groups united by common operational tactic. It is this incoherence, if this can qualify as the best word here—we can be confident, at least to some degree to state, for now—that made it impossible for it to unite and launch a retaliatory attack. Also, there is one disturbing view now held that if the network is restored—I have raised it in the previous part, but did not drive it home—that the civilian volunteer group says, according to unverified info, it means the end for them. This, I feel reluctant to say, is outside the daylight of commonsense, if indeed true. The same volunteers who go to the strongholds of the BH in Bama, Gwoza, Monguno, etc hunting for them, are now afraid of them to come to their doorsteps? Isn’t it more sensible if it said it is afraid to go looking for them in where it knows is their strongholds? If it can go there to look for them, as it no doubt does; and it says the network will bring them back to Maiduguri, isn’t it made a walk over for them to catch them when they come without much labour? Here too, I confess, I will stop little satisfied that for the present situation at hand, I have done my share to put issues in plain words—and allow those who wish to disbelieve and live in unthinkingness to run riot with the reality of the day, and feel irritated and unhappy with us who cannot keep quiet. Right now, our problem is not really about restoring the network, but why it has remained off. In the very first place, no explanation was given as to why it was shut, and nobody demanded for one; it was only deduced from the look of things what the possible reason was. Now, we demand to know, and if there isn’t one, we appeal to the military overloads to restore our communication. If it says that restoring the network will give BH the room to retaliate, well, it comes near to concluding —we better wake up and be prepared to do without it for, ever—that the network is the real BH. Can I seek the frill to roll out my suggestions? If indeed this is what it fears, we thank it for the undue respect it accorded to our lives; and call on its headquarters to restore the network; give us its contacts, so that whenever they come to attack us, we promise to call through, since, we know, they are on the wanted list and even searched for. The commanders of the civilian volunteers of all units should exchange their phone numbers amongst themselves, and also with the ‘civilian nothings’—so that whenever and wherever, and indeed God forbid, there is any suspicious move, the area will call the attention of the relevant authorities. This is especially important, I feel, if the alleged story of what happened in Benisheik (?) is anything to go by, where—I heard in a town gossip—that the village was attacked by the BH and when the villagers ran to the nearest JTF unit for help, it said it had no fuel… You have phone in such situations; you call those who have fuel. Simple! Afterword: Bye for today, we continue next time, Insha Allah, but we should not forget to continue praying, reciting those powerful ‘al-kunut’, that does not spare anyone and that has demonstrated its worth so clearly in the case of BH, which the people of Borno are best at, against our enemies, those we know and those from amongst us who we do not know. Anybody who wishes to put the good people of Borno to any form of undue hardship, we pray to Allah, the ever Listening and Responsive to crush them totally, whoever, and a repeat of this word is not wrong anyway, whoever, they are. Amiiiiiiiiiin!
Posted on: Sun, 15 Sep 2013 13:18:00 +0000
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