Given his current position as a state governor, and as a retired senior naval officer who has had the distinction of serving the country in other sensitive political and professional positions, Murtala Nyako should not be seen to be making frivolous statements.
Unfortunately, this is not what the septuagenarian did in his malicious and preposterous letter to the Northern Governors’ Forum. If one had thought that the letter was intended to rally his colleagues to finding a lasting solution to the insecurity crisis currently plaguing the nation, especially the North, then it came far short of expectations. What the letter succeeded in doing, instead, was to expose the fact that, given the opportunity to either proffer a solution to the gargantuan security challenge facing the country or to play primordial politics with it, the Adamawa State governor would opt for the latter. And this is so sad.
In his infamous letter, Nyako did not mince words in blaming the Federal Government for practically all the problems that have bedevilled the northern part of the country. Not only is the central government responsible for the insecurity in the North, in Nyako’s perverse estimation, it also stands accused of committing “genocide.” These are weighty statements that should be substantiated.
At a time when all hands should be on deck to fight the threat posed by Boko Haram, the Islamist terrorists and merchants of death that have been waging a campaign of terror against the country, the governor left no one in doubt about where his sympathies lie by some carefully selected words used in his letter. Not only did he continually refer to the mass murderers as “so-called Boko Haram,” he also, at one instance, called them “‘innocent’ Boko Haram members,” whatever he meant by that.
But Nyako’s angry sling should not come as a surprise, given previous similar sentiments expressed by many northern leaders at one time or the other over the ills plaguing their part of the country. Following a false premise, they have had cause to blame the poverty in the North on the 13 per cent derivation of oil revenues given to the oil producing states. They have also wrongly blamed the Federal Government for the high rate of illiteracy in the North, despite the fact that the first nine years of a child’s education in the country is supposed to be provided by states, freely and compulsorily, under the Universal Basic Education scheme. But, what should readily come to mind when such allegations are made is why other non-oil-producing states in the South have not been making the same false complaints.
The point should be made that the lion’s share of the problems in the North, especially the problem of insecurity, can be traced to years of maladministration and poor leadership by its own elite. When children are deliberately thrown into the street, armed with begging bowls, utterly devoid of any form of parental care, as practised under the almajirai system, what kind of adults are they expected to become? Kano State Governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, gave an insight into this when the Presidential Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of Security Challenges in the North came visiting last year. He said, “Parents no longer take responsibility for their family. We have a situation in this part of the country where parents give birth to 20 to 30 children, choose only two out of them and send the rest away to God-knows-where.” It is such children that have formed the pool from which Boko Haram has been drawing its foot soldiers.
Though Nyako tried in his seditious letter to accuse humanity of inaction while the killings in the North snowballed, it is pertinent to ask what he did as a governor and elder to nip the problem in the bud. Has he ever considered how rabid Islamism took firm roots in the North? What action did he and the other Northern leaders take when Gideon Akaluka was killed in broad daylight and his head spiked and triumphantly paraded around the city of Kano? What did he and the other elders do to exact justice for Oluwatoyin Olusesi, a teacher who was lynched by her students in Gombe for allegedly desecrating the Koran, even though she was trying to stop them from cheating during an examination? What action did he take to stop the mass killing of southerners in Borno over a cartoon that was published in far-away Denmark?
When Boko Haram started veering off its original target of attacking government institutions, the next targets were churches. What action did the northern elders take to stop it? In case he fails to appreciate the situation, the idea of killing with impunity started from such actions and has now developed into a monster that spares neither Christians nor Muslims.
Let us be clear. Nyako’s ludicrous rantings are deeply disturbing. He has taken cheap blackmail dangerously too far. Even if international organisations decide to give a helping hand in the ongoing war against terror, as demanded by Nyako, it can only succeed if people like him admit that they have been a part of the problem and decide to cooperate to find a solution. At a time when concern should be on how to end the unnecessary bloodletting, what is, sadly, uppermost in Nyako’s mind is how to lift the state of emergency and hold elections in the affected states next year. This is a bad idea and should be rejected.
