WHY ARE WE SOUND ASLEEP IN A HOUSE ON FIRE?

WHY ARE WE SOUND ASLEEP IN A HOUSE ON FIRE?

Is there left yet in this government, as much as a drop of conscience and empathy? Does the live of a single Nigerian still mean so much as to spare a thought and an offering of condolences at least, when one is snuffed out in the most crude and violent manner, as the Boko Haram terrorist are wont to?

When will the land be so drunk with blood that she will refuse a drop more? When is this government going to wake up to one of her premodial duties, as representatives of the Commonwealth, vested with the powers of the people, which is to within and above secure the lives of her citizens? While the perennial questions continue to reverberate with hisses and sighs, as the only answers the Presidency seem to be skilled regurgitating are past sympathy messages from 2015 of fallen victims of Boko Haram. All that is needed to complete the insensitivity is a little date change and if need be a name change to conform with the present family bereaved.

Nigeria is not at war technically, yet the figures of casualties brewing out from the pool of an enemy of state that has been technically defeated, is too technical to comprehend. How do you explain it away, when the president’s profile reeks of his gallantry in the military uniform, how he fought bravely in the over two years of civil war. After all what he lacks in scholarship feats, he may as well make up in the Arms wielding profession that he spent a third of his life in.

How do you explain it that the Chief of Army staff is from the same region where all these madness persists and he’s yet unable to decisively quench this, at least have the frontliners silenced? Is he not personally pained that his kinsmen are being slaughtered and subjected to worse fate than cattle in an abbattoir?

The Nigerian army, a world acclaimed elite land fighting troop is yet to kill Shekau and other Shekaus that may rise afterwards. The Boko Haram group and her evil twin sister ISWAP continue to dare the sovereignty of the Nation, taking hostages and even neutralising Army bases. But according to Femi Adesina, Nigeria has never been safer than it is today. Who are we kidding?

The Media is either tired of reporting the same story of 50 killed here and 72 massacred there or they’ve been muffled by powers that be to the extent that they only report when the menace takes a high profile personality, which it seldom does or when it breaks out independently on social media.
The apathy of the citizens completes the vicious cycle, so much that it is no longer breaking news when the ineptitude of government and silence of the people takes another score. Our conscience has become so deadened by over exposure to evil that we sigh a relief with each report of massacre. We argue in both public spaces and in our conscience that it could have been worse. That 27 dead is better than 375 killed, and so it demands no further thoughts than “evil is technically defeated.”

However, we are quick to tweet a full thread of sympathy and even cry in the event of a crisis elsewhere in the world, however natural or accidental, that claimed a dozen less than our last number here. But then don’t blame international sympathisers too soon, that is just one of the ripple effects that overexposure to unmitigated evil can precipitate.

It minimizes the evilness of evil and just soon enough it becomes difficult to find tears in the ducts of eyes that behold the horrific beheading of someone else’s father, son, uncle, brother and friend. So Femi Adesina could easily take the audacity to mindlessly declare on Sunday January 26, that we ought to be celebrating and praising his boss because the insecurity challenges have improved. Fortunately, this was a position that the National Assembly didn’t agree and have in one breath declared that insecurity has worsened in the past few years. A position unpopular with the peddlers of this government’s righteousness, will be that the security challenges now dwarf whatever evil in the Jonathan’s era, when Boko Haram had dozen of villages and areas under siege. Nonetheless, history will be unkind if it launders Jonathan’s humanitarian crisis with GMB’s ever rising numbers of inactions.

While you may like to blame the Boko Haram and Fulani Militia crisis on the government, about 64% of such blame should be on the continued silence and misplaced priority of the people. We as a people allow the politicians use the ethnic and religious cards at will. Now, without even thinking it, everything is viewed from these coloured prisms. Hence it would be difficult to not find anyone react to this piece as being only critical of the government of the day,and quite aptly as a political attack on the retired General.

It is because of such persons, who are not necessarily even benefiting directly from this government, who feel that the General is not only incorruptible but actually in charge of National issues. People who seem to find their voice in support of Sowore’s abduction cum arrest for treason and terrorism, and suddenly become deaf, dumb and blind when members of a world renowned terrorist group like Boko Haram are granted amnesty and released back into the society.

It is because of such selective sense scarcity that Nigeria as a nation can be described by the proverbial mad man who went to bed sleeping in a burning house, his excuse? the fire has not gotten to his room, so he is safe.

The South Western Nigeria in one radical move has taken the bold step in protecting their flats from the fire that is burning from the North East downwards. Yet rather than other regions taking the cue to strengthen their security positions, using the community policing system of the Federal government to create their own variance of Amotekun, they are casting aspersions against the SW region.

Kingsley Dominic