WAY OUT FOR A NATION UNDER TRIAL BY DAVID OYEDEPO As we are all aware, the Nigerian state today speaks of restiveness and unrest. It is therefore with a deep sense of responsibility as a stakeholder, a patriot, as well as one of the leaders of the day, that I will, in communicating my thoughts on this issue, be constructively pungent, factual, objective, positively futuristic, as well as passionately optimistic. At this point, I want to believe that a detailed diagnosis of the current state of our nation is vital. Medical doctors as we all know will always demand the running of a series of tests before embarking on any treatment; this is the process of diagnosis. To disregard the result of diagnosis, is to expose a patient to the risk of death. I believe it is high time we began to X-ray and explore the root causes of the prevailing issues in our nation in order to come up with applicable solutions to the grave situations bedevilling our nation. However, it is glaring that in Nigeria today: • Danger is looming, but there is hope • The nation is fast drifting towards disintegration, but there is hope • Nigeria is facing challenges that openly threaten her existence, but there is hope • Some are bent on religious war for whatever their reasons, but there is hope In a recent article, titled, Boko Haram led pogroms, ethnic cleansing and medieval bestiality in Nigeria’s North-East, co-written by Dr. Pogu Bitrus, Rev. Ibrahim Dauwa, and Rev. James Yaga, JP, and published in The Guardian of June 10, 2014, the following issues, which should be of grave concern to every responsible Nigerian, were outlined: “In 2012, in a widely publicised video recording that is easily accessible on the Internet, Abubakar Shekau, the late leader of Boko Haram announced the mission statement of his sect. Among other things, he said, ‘This war is not political. It is religious. It is between Muslims and unbelievers (arna). It will stop when Islamic religion is the determinant in governance in Nigeria or, in the alternative, when all fighters are annihilated and no one is left to continue the fight. I warn all Muslims at this juncture that any Muslim who assists an unbeliever in this war should consider himself dead”. Secondly, the writers stated; “As communities in the defunct Northern Region, we are not unaware of the inspiration of Boko Haram and its sponsors. It is no news that the average Northern Muslim thinks that Nigeria is his to dominate, and its riches his to dispense. In October 1960, the late Premier of the defunct Northern Region and Sardauna of Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello, had declared: ‘The new nation called Nigeria should be an estate of our great-grandfather, Uthman Dan Fodio. We must ruthlessly prevent a change of power. We use the minorities of the North as willing tools and the South as a conquered territory and never allow them to rule over us, and never allow them to have control over their future.’ (Parrot Newspaper, October 12, 1960; republished on November 13, 2002, by the Tribune Newspaper, Ibadan.)” The above statement is quite pregnant and portends a political time bomb should the present generation of the defunct Northern Region dare to pursue this stance. Thirdly, the writers further stated that; “Before the late Sardauna made this very revealing statement, the Conference of Northern Chiefs, in response to the Northern emirs asking them to support the constitutional evolution of Nigeria into an independent nation, had declared ‘holding this country together is not possible except by means of the religion of the Prophet. If they want political unity, let them follow our religion.’ (Obafemi Awolowo, Path to Nigerian Freedom, London: Faber and Faber, 1947, p.51.)” Again, I see another bombshell here, which is more of a call to a religious war. Most disturbing is the reported raid of the Boko Haram sect across 26 villages in Borno State which are predominantly Christians; where homes and churches were razed down and thousands scattered. The data from this article indicated that well over 500 people were killed in 20 of these villages, while the number of deaths in the six others was not determined. Also, over 50,000 were reported displaced and fled to neighboring Cameroon and other parts of the country. It is disheartening to note that the Boko Haram sect is reported to have brought down the Nigerian National Flag in the raided communities and hoisted their own flag in its place. From all the forgoing and without mincing words, the nation is already at war. The leader of the Boko Haram openly claimed that the sect is an Islamic Jihadist group and they have proved this over and again by their heartless atrocities. They have declared, and that openly, a total war against Christianity, Western education, with a vow to dragging Nigeria back to the Stone Age. Furthermore, certain painful thoughts can be gleaned from all of these; a religious war is looming, in fact, in some parts of the nation, that war in my view has already broken out. To pretend not to see this simply amounts to hypocrisy. We must therefore not politicise this issue. Action is not only needed but a timely action. Taking a cue from the case of Iraq, I want to believe that if the Iraqi Government had taken timely action, the catastrophe that now plagues that nation may not have arisen. We must indeed wake up to the truth that we have a deadly battle in our hands as a nation; we must therefore rise up to speedily address this grave situation, before it becomes too late. To be concluded. https://facebook/groups/paff.789/ Paffcomm paffcomm
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 19:04:09 +0000
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