Very soon, the armed bandits of the north will turn their guns at the northern oligarchs. They will understand that their enemies aren’t the peasant farmers or herdsmen of the northeast, northwest, and north central. The truth shall dawn on them in common hours, that they got it wrong murdering their host communities in the South- west, South-east and South-south.
They shall unlearn the menacing lore of their presumed ‘supremacy’ and ‘right to kill’ other people for grazing land across the country. They shall refute their entitlement to rob, steal and intimidate other Nigerians as maniacally advanced through circuitous hate-speech and tribal warmongering by the northern oligarchs.
As the scales fall from their eyes, they shall attain clarity of purpose and discover that their real enemies are the northern governors, lawmakers, sponsored ethnic cults and the presidency, who have deliberately kept them shackled to poverty and ignorance.
They will understand that the governors urging them to exchange their guns for cows, the clout-chasing clerics visiting them in the forest for photo ops, the lawmakers keeping them on retainer-ship, and politicians justifying the heinous murders they commit across the country are their greatest foes.
We are at the verge of the hour, when clusters of Boko Haram terrorists and armed bandits shall unite in rare enlightenment and rouse to the bitter truth of their reckoning and their lineages’ betrothal to transgenerational doom.
This minute, some Boko Haram commander or bandit leader is awakening to scarce consciousness; he is cautiously but passionately appealing to peers and underlings to stop targeting their guns and explosives at the poor, helpless masses.
At the dawn of their new awareness, they shall turn their guns and machetes against the northern political class. They shall invade the latter’s homes and abduct their trophy wives, daughters, sons, and grandchildren.
The Chilling Story Of Young Maryam
They shall whisk the latter off into the heart of Sambisa and the fringes of Zamfara, Kaduna, Yobe, Adamawa’s forest reserves among others. Just like they abducted little Maryam Alhaji-Wakil at the tender age of nine, from her family home in Bama – after killing her parents in her presence.
In 2014, Boko Haram terrorists invaded Maryam’s village and killed her relatives. They burned her home and decapitated her neighbours. Then they whisked her off to Sambisa Forest.
There, she was forcibly married to Modu, a lustful and violent Boko Haram insurgent. In two days, little Maryam was violently thrust into womanhood. Modu, 35, forced his way into her unripe orifice, robbing her of innocence and the mystic pleasure of first and legitimate adult sexual experience.
Modu was hasty and rough thus making her ‘first time’ bestial and replete with pain. She screamed in agony but Modu didn’t care. “The louder I screamed, the more violently he shoved into me until I passed out,” she revealed to me in a personal encounter.
Thus at the tender age of nine, Maryam was violently used and sexually abused. When she could not withstand the misery of living as a sex slave any longer, she opted to serve as one of the terrorist group’s female suicide bombers. Consequently, she was dispatched with a bomb to neighbouring Cameroon; she was taken on a motorcycle to blow up a soft military target in the country. But Maryam had other plans.
When the rider dropped her, she approached the soldiers and told them, ‘I have this thing on my body. It is a bomb. I was sent to kill you. Please, help me remove it.” Instantly, the soldiers sprung into defensive position but realising that she had come to surrender, they approached her, cautiously, and unstrapped the explosive from her body.
Maryam spent several months in the custody of the Cameroonian gendarmes until she was handed over to the Nigerian military. Hard as it is to picture the extent of bitterness devastating her heart, an intense gape into her eyes reveals a girl utterly torn apart. Beneath her pretty face lurks a battered soul.
Now 16 years of age, Maryam is yet to break out of the jailhouse of her past. She is still the frightened nine-year-old that got whisked off to Sambisa Forest, while her relatives and neighbours fell in a bloody heap, to the bullets of Boko Haram’s terror squads.
Maryam relives the days she endured hunger because her insurgent ‘husband’ was too poor and too lazy to provide her food. She remembers the excruciating nights that she laid captive and helpless under his massive bulk, while he violently plowed into her because she “was an unwilling bride.”
When Maryam eventually discovers that the men and women who were elected to ‘protect and serve her’ as all good leaders should do, were responsible for her misery, should she simply ‘forgive and forget?’
When she discovers that they embezzled the £2.1 billion disbursed to procure weaponry meant to subdue her captors and secure her release and that of the 276 Chibok girls, should she seek them out for a hug and bless their progeny?
Would Maryam be wrong to persistently utter heartfelt prayers that the daughters and granddaughters of the men and women who triggered and accentuated her misery, share similar fate with her?
Would it be humane and politically-correct to do that? Some would claim that it would be wrong to wish such retribution on innocent children of perceived bad leaders. They would counsel forgiveness saying: “Let the actual offenders be punished and not their bloodline.”
In a nation where rich, privileged convicts are given a slap on the hand and pat on the back, would it be wrong to wish that their offspring and wives experience similar tragedies as victims of their inhumanity?
The RUGA Fallacy
The RUGA toxic rhyme
The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) has perfected its plot to impose the RUGA on “uncooperative” regions through the backdoor. Of course, there is nothing wrong with the initiative as long as it is done in the interest of justice, peace and stability.
Critics argue that by imposing the scheme on southwest communities, for instance, government seeks to compensate killer-herdsmen for the mayhem and murders they continually visit on helpless, indigent farming communities. And what do the latter get in return?
It is extremely devious of any governor of the South-west states, afflicted by killer-herdsmen, to collude with counterparts from the north to impose the RUGA on southwest communities still on the receiving end of wanton killings by killer-herdsmen.
The latest plot involves the deployment of traditional rulers as pawns; the governors seek to bully poor, helpless communities into acceptance of the scheme, using their traditional rulers as muscles.
The latter depend on their individual state governors for their salaries and other luscious forms of patronage – and none of them would dare rebel against their benefactors.
The argument being espoused by the proponents of the scheme is both frantic and whacky; “You better tell your people to accept RUGA now or else herdsmen will kill them all.”
You could be forgiven for likening them to the proverbial huckster, who would market dystopia to seekers of Eden.
The government must adopt just and humane measures at resolving the farmers-killer herdsmen crisis. The situation deserves better handling unsullied by frantic war-mongering, bullying and artifice.
Courtesy: The Nation Online
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