Five years ago, security agents grossly mishandled Boko Haram’s unorthodox approach to social and religious engineering. Many analysts, including this column, and rights groups warned stridently that government’s approach was counterproductive. No one listened. The consequence, today, is a full-blown rebellion unmitigated by any panacea the government might throw at it. Indeed, the prospect of a complete overthrow of the old order is now absolutely not impossible. Five years after the folly of 2009, the government’s security agencies, which act more like a neo-colonial force and custodian of a diseased order, have enacted another brutal repression of a religious movement, this time one headed by Sheikh El-Zakzaky, the Zaria-based Shiite leader. About 35 of his movement’s members, including three of his sons, were killed by troops.
This immense tragedy shows there is something fundamentally wrong with the structure and orientation of the security services in Nigeria. According to the Shi’a leader, his three sons felled by bullets were: Mahmud of Al-Mustapha University, Beirut; Ahmad, a chemical engineering student at Shenyang University, China; and Hamid, an aeronautical engineering student at Xian University, China. The fourth son, Ali, according to him was shot in the leg but is alive. Mahmud was shot in the abdomen but bled to death because “soldiers blocked everywhere along the way.” In addition, he claimed more ominously, his two other sons and many of the followers were “simply arrested by the soldiers and thereafter killed in cold blood.”
Investigations are underway, says the government. But like the so-called investigations that took place during the early stages of the Boko Haram challenge, it is not clear of what use these will be. I think as a country we should simply brace up for more perilous and probably defining times ahead. Events in the Middle East, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere, not to say the undefeated and growing Boko Haram menace, should instruct us to build a just society along new and unifying paradigms. Sadly, we have instead chosen a different and dishonourable path, and are determined to stew in our juice.