We already have our ethno-religious clashes which have occasionally escalated from verbal arguments to physical confrontations, often requiring the engagement of military forces to quell such violent unrests. Banditry is flourishing in our sickly economy, which has been struck by two recessions in just six years and there’s a thin line between life and death in the hands of kidnappers. These kidnappers seem to have a network that spreads across the regions of Nigeria so that the incidents of kidnappings are not localised. If banditry and terrorist attacks have become a lucrative business venture to some misled entities it is dangerous to not see that Nigeria is at war with the products of its own failures.
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Let us take a look at the Syrian example today. Syria has been involved in a civil war for over ten years now, this war is ongoing. A conflict that has gone on for so long that many people around have forgotten about it, but the sporadic gunshots and bomb shelling are still a part of the Syrian reality. The war in Syria started with protests, protests stemmed from the discontentment with the Syrian government headed by President Bashar al-Assad. These protests which were a part of the 2011 Arab Spring started on the 15TH of March 2011 and quickly devolved into violent suppression and armed conflict. A conflict between the government and its own people.
The war quickly became factional and there were more than two factions warring against themselves in no time. So, the Syrian Armed Forces of the government have been in armed conflict with Salafi jihadist groups, the mixed Kurdish-Arab Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) on Syrian land. The United States, Russia, Israel, Iran, and, Turkey are among the countries that have granted support and relief in this decade long war. What cannot be denied though is the fact that the war has rained down unimaginable suffering on innocent children. No amount of peace talk arrangements, even from the United Nations, has helped to halt this terrible international phenomenon. The war goes on as the number of refugees and internally displaced persons keep rising.
There are many things Nigeria can learn from Syria at such a crucial time. The failure of the state to support and encourage young people to tread productive career paths is turning them into rebels of the state. It does not take a genius to realise that it is not old men and women who are kidnapping people off the highway.
Yakubu Dogara, the former speaker of the house of representatives, has confessed that the inability of political leaders to put the country’s youth on “sustainable” career paths has turned them into “disaffected rebels”. I will hold my peace and refrain from roasting Yakubu Dogara because he too has been in the position of power long enough to be guilty of this. Whether he did his best when he was legislating and when he was an executive is open to argument, but he has rightly stated that the failure to share public utilities equitably has created a mindset of marginalisation by many sections of the Nigerian people, including the youths. No education, and where there is little education there is no engagement in gainful employment. This is why it is so easy to influence some members of the young and idle population with extremist doctrines and dangerous ideas of violence in exchange for ransoms.
The information minister, Lai Mohammed, once said that the activities of the Biafran apologists are an invitation to war but he and his fellow PMB cabinet members cannot describe the vile violence sweeping across the country as a precursor to war. Nigeria is not on the brink of chaos, we are in it already. The unending bloodshed across the country cannot be handled with kid gloves anymore. President Muhammadu Buhari must dump his coy approach to the insecurity menace, seek help from within and without, and do what needs to be done urgently.
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