Politics and Nyanya bombing

I overhead an interesting con­versation in a business cen­tre in Abuja the week after the April 14, 2014 bombing at Nyanya, which reportedly claimed seventy-five lives and injured many more. The con­versation was between two or­dinary Nigerians, a man and a woman, and their dialogue provided part of the stimulus for this piece. The remaining stimulus came from the report of someone who telephoned to inform me of the deadly explo­sion, as I was out of town when it happened.

Incidentally, the bombing has been ascribed to the Boko Ha­ram Islamist sect, which has re­portedly accepted responsibility.

The conversation in question centred on the atmosphere of insecurity – and terror – precipi­tated by such attacks, launched with explosives, guns, etc., the latest of which was followed by the reported abduction of some 230 girls from a school in Chibok, Borno State, by sus­pected members of the Boko Haram sect, insurgents whose activities are perhaps the great­est threat to the peace and unity of our country since the Biafran war.

In the middle of the conversa­tion, the man, wearing a mourn­ful look behind which I could discern the contemplation of scores of dead and injured per­sons being borne away in am­bulances from the scene of the blast to either hospitals or mor­tuaries and realising that, as the saying goes, “There go I but for the grace of God”, had asked the question: “But why are they kill­ing people like this?” The wom­an replied with a question that could only have been rhetorical: “Isn’t it because Jonathan is in power?” She then added in an affirmatively tone: “They don’t want him in office! They don’t want him to rule!”

Then, the report I received af­ter the Nyanya explosion, from an acquaintance who lives a few kilometres from the motor park where it reportedly went off from a “red Mazda car” in which the bombs were allegedly planted, was that shortly after the explosion she heard passers-by saying: “Jonathan should leave. Jonathan should leave.” And then she added: “I wonder why their first reaction would be to call for Jonathan to leave rather than condemn the attack.”

Clearly, the attack has further exposed the type of dangerous place to which some people want to turn our country – where grisly and untimely death per­petually stalks ordinary citizens going about their normal busi­nesses, unmindful of the politi­cal interests which, I insist, un­derlie such deadly attacks. And the two anecdotes I have shared above hint at such political inter­ests, which I believe are mainly to blame for the seeming failure of our government to defeat the insurgency.

Elsewhere I have expressed the view – in diagnosis of the dis­ease of this political component to the survival of the insurgency – by stating that the insurgency now smacks of the use of terror and violence as tools of political blackmail to dissuade President Jonathan from running in the 2015 election or, should he still choose to run despite our county having apparently become “un­governable” owing to the seem­ing reign of unmanageable terror, Nigerians would find it expedient not to re-elect him. So what we have witnessed recently in Nyan­ya and other places as attacks by Boko Haram insurgents can be summed up as a disguised power struggle being waged with naked and ruthless violence, and whose main strategy is to induce terror in our citizens and the potential electorate in the 2015 presidential election.

I believe that those who fash­ioned this strategy may have thought that, following the an­nulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election and the death (in detention) of Chief M. K. O. Abiola, its acclaimed win­ner, some forces from his part of the country, galvanised by the Odu’a People’s Congress (OPC), apparently used their political ac­tivism that threatened the peace and unity of our country to cre­ate the situation that ultimately led to the emergence of a man from their part of the country as President. They may also have thought that the violent political activism of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) contributed to the sub­sequent emergence of a Nigerian President from the Niger Delta, as pacification for those behind the campaign.

So what the Boko Haram sect has metamorphosed into, I think, is a response to such strategies once used by others from differ­ent parts of the country, by those desirous of using terror to force the hand of franchise and democ­racy in their favour, believing that those others had successfully done so in the past. This, to me, explains way, as my acquaintance noted in my second anecdote, some people, in aftermath of the Nyanya explosion and the death and injuries it brought to so many, would react by muttering “Jona­than should leave…” rather than condemn the atrocity as clearly inhuman and reprehensible.

Indeed, the “weakness” of a President or the security appara­tus under his tenure – whether the “weakness” is real or imagined – cannot be a justification for the mass murder committed through the Nyanya bombing. But the detractors of President Jonathan who blame the “worsening” of the Boko Haram attacks on his “weakness” and the “inadequa­cy” of his administration’s efforts to combat the insurgency would rather think otherwise.

*Oke writes from Abuja.