Nigeria’s Insecurity Conundrum – Making the Corpse Walk by Austin Isikhuemen

Making the corpse walk is a title from James Hadley Chase’s stable. I have borrowed it to address the state of inertia Nigerians have found themselves in since the country entered the Hobbesian state where life is nasty, brutish, and short.

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We appear to have been trying to make the corpse, sorry, the government, walk albeit, unsuccessfully. Is an objective to make the corpse walk achievable? Could that be an example of what is called mission impossible?

I do not know. But I will attempt, in the paragraphs below, to show that it does appear as if our collective efforts and results have been in that direction.

It got to a head last week when the women of Uromi, Edo State, abandoned household chores, petty trading, and other important things to embark on a protest to call the attention of the Government to the rampaging insecurity in their town and environs.

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For about three years now it has become a nightmare for them and their husbands and children to go about their businesses in the land of their birth. It started with cattle eating up their crops and entire barns of a year’s toil being fed to cattle by itinerant herders.

It has since graduated to killings, kidnappings, raping of women, and stoppage of economic activities especially farming on which about 90% of the population depend for their livelihood.

The murder of the son of my friend Mr. Festus Ojieriakhi of Ugboha on 16th March 2018 readily comes to mind as it occupied social media and the conventional press for many weeks.

The son, Collins, was shot by herdsmen along Uromi – Ugboha road near our farmland around the current National Institute of Construction Technology and Management, Uromi.

The life of a young undergraduate, together with his friends, whose future looked very bright and whose parents looked forward with hope was cut short in mid-trajectory for no reason at all.

He was on a commercial motorbike along the road and neither posed a threat nor stood in the way of the herders. Why was he shot? Till today, no one can tell. But his life just ended and all his dreams buried at Ugboha. On the same day, a man was killed too at Odiguetue in Edo South.

There have been several incidents of attacks around Edo State. In Edo Central axis, it has become a tale of woe in virtually every town. Igueben, Ewatto, Ewohimi, Ewossa, Ewu, Iruekpen and Uromi have all tasted this bitter and wicked pill being administered by herdsmen armed to the teeth.

It has not always been like this. At Uromi, I know some Fulani’s who have been in the cattle business from when I was in secondary school and they have settled and speak Uromi language and relates with all as brothers.

They are still there today and they neither threaten anyone nor are they regarded as strangers by anybody else. When I went to buy cows for my mother’s obsequies at the cattle market, I spoke Esan with the herders and sellers throughout.

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They called me Owanlen. I have also had Fulani’s who treated me like a brother while an Edo state supposed brother treated me like an enemy. That’s why I cannot demonize all Fulani’s by tarring all with the same brush!

So how did it happen that gradually people are being dispossessed of their ancestral lands and prevented from engaging in farming on lands that their ancestors have farmed for centuries?

Lands over which our legendary Onogie, Ogbidi the great, gave heavily armed British invaders and colonizers a bloody nose for many years after the fall of the great Benin Empire.

When the British Army killed our King, Prince Okojie killed the British Army Major in retaliation. So was the strength of these people now being kidnapped, maimed, and raped, and prevented from carrying out their century’s old occupation.

When did live and let live become outdated? How did Nigeria become the most unsafe and insecure country in Africa, pushing Somalia, Eritrea and Libya to lower ranks?

Recently, the issue of the gruesome murder of Abuda who had come to bury his dead parent at Fugar covered the media. He had completed the ceremonies and was on his way back to Lagos, where he would have flown abroad when he and others were kidnapped by herdsmen as revealed by those who witnessed it.

He was shot when he got tired of climbing hills inside the forest where they were being taken. His decomposing body has since been recovered by the police. This was a man who came home from abroad, hale and hearty, to carry out a ceremony our culture requires of him and contribute to the development of his community as he has always done.

He must have told his family in the US that he was on the way back and they must have been expectant and planning to go and welcome him at the airport. Then bang, and his sunset at noon!

These tales of woe across the country, from Edo to Oyo, Yobe to Zamfara, Delta to Abia, Niger to Benue, Nasarawa to Jigawa, and even Katsina have turned Nigerians from the Happiest People on Earth (remember) to the Most Hopeless.

The most unsure of tomorrow. Traveling across the country has become a hazardous undertaking. People are sending their kids abroad in order to guarantee that their bloodline will not go extinct.

People fly now not because they can afford it but because they are sure there are no herdsmen and sundry criminals in the sky. That is why a one-hour one-way flight from Abuja to Ibadan on Overland Airline costs N79,500 and an airline can ask you to cough out N65,000 – N80,000 on a 35 minutes flight from Benin City to Abuja.

Most government people on estacode can afford this but the rest of the people risk their limbs and life to go by road at N6,000 only and they sometimes get the Aduda treatment, unfortunately. Going by road on the Kaduna-Abuja Road is similarly hazardous despite the female soldiers said to have been stationed there.

The government has failed the people in their primary responsibility. Thomas Hobbes, the renowned English philosopher predicted this in his seminal work. He articulated this in his book Leviathan in 1651.

Hobbes saw government as having a social contract with the people and while the people vest the government with political authority, it expects in return, collective security. When government fails its part in this contract, society returns to what Hobbes called the state of nature where life is nasty, brutish, and short.

If anyone still thinks we have not reached that state of nature, let him check all Nigerian newspapers of today, Sunday 8th February, 2021. A cursory glance at their front pages will do.

Thisday:

• How troops over ran Terrorist Camps, Killed 60 Insurgents in North-East.
• Soyinka: Herders-Farmers Can Degenerate into Civil War…
• Tribune:
• Deploy soldiers in South-West to protect Northerners. Unogo, NEF leader tells Buhari.
• Black day: Gunmen kill man, wife, daughter inside church in Anambra.
• Killer Herdsmen: Untold story of Ibarapa’s worst nightmare.
• Vanguard:
• Enemies Within: How moles in military work for B/Haram – Prof Dikwa.
• Herdsmen from Oyo, Enugu, Niger, others heading to Kano.
• They used military to fraustrate our anti-grazing law – Gov Isiaku
• Horrors of kidnapping, tough ransom negotiation – by survivors
• Daily Trust:
• How Arms Proliferation Fuels Insurgency in Nigeria.
• Revisiting Zamfara’s ‘Cows For Guns’ Amnesty Pact. -editorial
• President Act Quickly To Avert Anarchy.

Guardian:

• Abducted Punch Newspapers reporter, two others released.
• The Sun:
• Fayemi begs Ekiti residents to see police as their friends, confidants.
• Violence mars Magama/Rijau House of Reps bye-election in Niger.
• Decades of torment, oppression, silence.
• Seek external help to tackle insecurity, CAN tell Buhari.

If all the above, in peacetime, do not paint the picture of a Hobbesian state of nature, I wonder what else would.

Daily killings, kidnappings, armed robberies, government spokesmen defending the aggressors rather than the aggrieved, difficulty in distinguishing between a government publicist and an insurgent spokesman, and resort to self-help by citizens and communities are now a daily occurrence.

Defenders of the government’s inertia need to go and read what Gen Malu said when he leveled Odi and his position later when Zaki-Biam got the same treatment. History has a way of repeating itself and karma has an elephantine memory.

This state of anomie, this somalisation of Naija, will benefit no one in the long run. It was Northeast before, and some would have been happy that they were not from that zone. Like a thief in the night, this insidious insecurity has crawled, surely, steadily, across the land and no one is safe today.

Having armed guards is no guarantee. It may even facilitate your capture – especially when your guard is hungry and may also like a couple of free millions from the one, they see you with.

So how do we make the corpse walk? I would have asked Rene Lodge Brabazon Raymond, the man who used the James Hadley Chase pseudonym but he died in 1986. No, not the corpse of Abuda.

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The immobile and immobilized authorities who like a corpse have remained in one position and let this insurgency and banditry fester. That snores while the people starve, grieve, hurt, and die.

Who will stir the cadaver in the endless morgue that Nigeria has become? According to the Delta songstress and award winner Omawumi, if you ask me, na who I go ask?

Nigeria can do better than this and all Nigerians deserve peace and security. The recent change of service chiefs, though belated, is a welcome one. Let the new chiefs put their hands on the plough and show us they are deserving of their new appointments and promotions.

They have an opportunity to write their names in gold by restoring peace to the Nigerian space and people. They can, and should, remove the tag of a big-for-nothing big brother from Nigeria’s curriculum vitae before Siera Leone or Togo begin to send troops to come and restore law and order to Africa’s Hope currently wobbling and staggering along on arthritis-infested legs.

Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport, Abuja, 7th February 2021 – Austin Isikhuemen

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