By Basil Okoh
Blood flows everywhere as the elite of Northern Nigeria are in cowardly retreat and as their cherished and once powerful region sink deeper into dissonance and murderous violence.
The Sultan of Sokoto has cried out plaintively against unrelenting violence in northern Nigeria. So has the Northern Elders Forum (NEF). The Northern Youth Assembly has demanded the resignation of President Muhammadu Buhari over the helplessness of the security institutions to stem the killings. Northwestern governor’s and even President Buhari himself, in spite of his grandstandings, have railed against the killings.
The unrelenting bandits and gangsters have taken over the northwestern region, imposing a government system and tax regime of their own. And the government of Nigeria has lost control and conceded the northwestern territory to these purveyors of death and terror.
The only semblance of government left in the Northwest are the governor’s sneaking out of state capitals to Abuja to receive monthly allocations, most of which are now used to pay ransoms to kidnappers, pay debt and the balance used by the governor’s to live it up with family and friends in Abuja.
The entire elite of Northern Nigeria are forced to flee from the provinces and are all marooned in Abuja, Kaduna, Kano and Bauchi, afraid to be seen on the roads or identified anywhere in their territories. The bandits and terrorists own the provinces, the roads, farms and forests.
Never before has anyone seen an elite that empowered itself with so much firepower and yet now so mortally afraid of it’s own homegrown insurrectionists. All are running from their own homes and country. Was it to end up like this that the northern elite grew fatuous and arrogant?
Northern Nigeria, as the favoured protégé of Britain, has been determinedly assertive since independence, to hold military power in Nigeria against the other regions. It has quashed with deadly force every opposition and effort to change its vice grip on military power.
All known military installations and armament are located in northern Nigeria, the Zaria, Kaduna, Minna and Bauchi axis to be precise. But what has it all availed the north in the face of homegrown terrorism and banditry?
The armories so menacingly located in Northern Nigeria has become the principal source of weaponry for homegrown terrorists and bandits that are daily marauding northern Nigeria and chasing it’s elite away from their towns and countryside. People are been killed or kidnapped daily and all economic activities halted and abandoned across an area the size of Western Europe.
Northern political elite have always anchored their survival and economic progress on the control of and economic dependence on Southern Nigeria. Buhari finally put his death seal on the northern seizure of the petroleum industry, implementing a regional entitlement policy by removing any southerner in command positions in the oil industry and in every known agency of rent collection in the national economy.
The result has been the mismanagement and utter impoverishment of the country not known since the dawn of independence. The ineptitude of Northern managers of the national economy and bureaucracy has meant that the country cannot mobilize any redeeming brain power to rescue itself. The result is the unceasing borrowing to fill up deepening holes and to prop up a decrepit economy.
In all of these, the Southeast has been the focus of Northern hate and rage for wanting to get out of the Nigerian entrapment. All forms of archaic and modern war fighting machinery and sloganeering has been mobilized to the “dot territory” to teach the Igbo a final lesson and to stop asking to get out of the Nigerian trap, for Biafra or for self-determination.
For all the efforts to frighten and subdue Igboland, the people of the dot country still stand resolute to make progress and profit, even at the expense of a north in growing dissonance and disarray.
It does appear that the more determined the Buhari Government is at destabilizing the Southeast, the worse the north itself sinks into mayhem and murderous violence. Perhaps we need sorcerer’s to look into this connection between tyranny in Igboland and dissonance in northern Nigeria. The Buhari Government is unable to disentangle itself from its Igbo phobia and so the more the north aggresses the Southeast, the worse the murder and violence devastating the northern territory.
The northern elite are now caught up in their own scheming’s and destructive mischief. Their regional entitlement schemes while neglecting it’s Almajirai poor has been the recurrent decimal weighing down on the solution to the Nigeria project. Now the Almajirai have come of age and the result of their abandonment and alienation is expressed in the bloodletting and violence that now ravages the north.
The northern elite have been basking in the triumphalism of owning the country, its economy, the politics and the defense establishment.
The Almajirai have all grown up now as angry young men and the north only needed an implacable irredentist like Muhammadu Buhari to put flame to the anger in their territory.
And now what did all the haughtiness bring to northern Nigeria? A slow burning implosion that may never be put out. So let no one think that this violent phenomenon will go away soon. It will not. More Almajirai are been born and growing.
@basilokoh
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