DANJUMA IN A BUSH OF THORNS

DANJUMA IN A BUSH OF THORNS

Theophilus Danjuma, a retired Lieutenant General of the Nigerian Army and former Minister of Defence, has been a subject of unedifying crossfire in the last one week. The reason is simple. He is guilty of illicit jump. He jumped into the fray without being mindful of the entire dynamics of the situation. He took on the sub plot of the story while side-stepping or overlooking the main plot. His action fell short of the Achebean postulation that he who does not know when the rain began to beat him will not know when he dried his body. Such selective or deliberate oversight is unsustainable. It is even unacceptable. That is why the man has come under fire.

It would appear that Danjuma, an active player in the socio-politics of Ni­geria, just woke up from a deep slumber and decided to stray into a bush whose name he does not know. That is why he could not call the spade by its proper name.

How did Danjuma lose his bearing? He woke up the other day and called on security agents to arrest ex-Niger Delta militants whom he said were threatening war against the country in the unlikely event of President Jonathan not being reelected. Anybody who witnessed the way Danjuma flew off the handle on this issue would think that the threat by the ex-militants is the beginning of the story. But we know that it is only the sub plot.

The main story actually started with some trouble makers from the North. Prominent among them are the likes of Junaid Mohammed, Ango Abdul­lahi, Isa Kaita and Adamu Ciroma, who had, at different times, threatened that hell would be let loose on Nigeria if Jonathan remained president of Nigeria beyond 2015. Some of the threats even date back to 2011. We can do with some details.

We begin with Major General Mu­hammadu Buhari who, in truth, is more of a war monger than any of the afore­mentioned northern irredentists. While still smarting over his loss at the 2011 presidential election, Buhari, in May 2012, threatened thus: “If what hap­pened in 2011 (alleged rigging) should again happen in 2015, by the grace of God, the dog and the baboon will be soaked in blood.” He said in effect that there would be bloodshed if the 2015 election is not conducted transparently.

That was Buhari’s threat. Many decent minds were appalled by the spectre of blood bath that he invoked. The threat was worrisome because, going by Bu­hari’s mindset, the 2015 election cannot be adjudged by him to be transparent if he does not win. What this means is that he is going to be the standard bearer of the election. Whatever he adjudges as right or wrong will be the article of faith. We have to accept it as the eternal truth. Should this be the case, it then would mean that we are stuck to this man. If he wakes up a day after the polls and tells us that something was wrong with the conduct of the elections, we should not expect him to go to court to seek redress. He does not have the temperament for such niceties. We should, instead, expect unmitigated blood bath. This disposition of Buhari is actually the beginning of all the threats and counter threats that we are experienc­ing today.

As a good disciple of war and war-mongering, Prof Ango Abdullahi, a former Vice Chancellor of the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), took over from where Buhari stopped. In May 2013, Ango Abdullahi, who is today the chair­man of Northern Elders Forum, insisted that Jonathan would not be president of Nigeria in 2015. He said he was putting those behind Jonathan on notice. He even challenged them to foment trouble if they wished as, according to him, “we in the North are waiting”. That was Prof Abdul­lahi sounding the drumbeats of war.

Ordinarily, it would have been surpris­ing and disappointing that an educated man like Ango Abdullahi would sound so brutish and nasty. But the man has an antecedent. We know him as a man deficient in civility. Those of us who were undergraduates of Nigerian universities in the mid 1980s still have a sour memory of Ango Abdullahi. The famous ABU crisis of 1986, which eventuated in the shutting down of all Nigerian universities at the time took place under Abdullahi’s watch. Trigger-happy policemen had shot four defenceless students of the university in cold blood. The incident caused an out­rage, especially among Nigerian students. The students populace across the country had expected that the ugly incident would elicit concern from the chief executive of the university. But Ango treated it as a non event and even remarked heartlessly that “only four” students were killed. This number, certainly, was not enough. He would have wished for more. He did not understand why Nigerian students should be agitated over the death of “only four” students.

That is the essential Ango Abdullahi. Blood does not scare him. He seems to even yearn for it. But, perhaps, the only surprising thing is that age has not sobered him.

This story of blood and war did not stop with Ango Abdullahi. Many others who are against Jonathan’s reelection for what­ever reason borrowed a leaf from him. They began to speak in like manner. By December, 2014, their tribe had swelled. That was when Junaid Mohammed, another prominent northerner, issued his own note of warning. He said that there would be bloodshed if Jonathan stood for the 2015 election. He said that northern­ers whose population he put at 85 million would rise against it.

This is the gist of the story. It is the main plot that Danjuma ignored. He obvi­ously did not take the war- mongering from the North into consideration before he spoke. If he did, he would not have ig­nored the Muhammadu Buharis, the Ango Abdullahis and Junaid Mohammeds of the North while focusing attention on the Asari Dokubos, Boy Loafs and Tompo­los of the Niger Delta. Can you see why Danjuma ran into a storm? He applied discriminatory criteria in his handling of the issue.

But why did Danjuma fall into such a grave error? The problem, I believe, has to do with perception. Danjuma and others like him are driven by an oligar­chic mentality. They are the people who believe that the North can and should ride roughshod over the other segments of the country. The northerner, in Danju­ma’s view, can afford to be careless in his speech. He can afford to talk down on the Nigerian from the other side. He can threaten fire and brimstone. He can even threaten the corporate existence of Nigeria. It would not matter if he does any of these. It has no consequence on him. This is because he is believed to be privileged. He controls a bigger and better chunk of the instruments of coercion and suppression. This makes him somewhat above the law.

The same thing cannot be said of his southern counterpart. The southerner, in the eyes of the Danjumas of this world, is vulnerable. He cannot take certain liberties. He must live in fear of author­ity and the law. He must weigh his statements before he pushes them out so that the law will not descend on him. He is not even permitted to say certain things, which his northern counterpart can feast on without qualms. That is why Danjuma is calling for the head of the ex-militants. They have no right to say what they said. But their northern brothers can say the same thing ten times over. That is the problem. That is why things are what they are. That is why Danjuma did not see anything wrong with the war threats from the North but sees everything ugly with the response from the Niger Delta. That makes NIGERIA a country of double standards.

But that mindset still exists only in the minds of the Danjumas of this world. Nigeria, under the present dis­pensation, has commenced the march towards the breaking of strongholds. The old order is fast collapsing. It is yielding place to the new.

Certainly, the problem the likes of Danjuma face derives from what Ni­geria had been. Danjuma, particularly, likes to remind the people of the East that they (the federal troops), which he was an integral part of, were once there on a mission of conquest. He is still feeling upbeat about it. The euphoria of triumphalism has not left him. He is imagining that they could do it again if those he sees as renegades from the conquered territory do not behave themselves. Danjuma is certainly living in the past and those who turn a blind eye to the reality of their situation end up hitting the wrong side of eternity with their mental flights. I hope that he wakes up before his environment be­comes a strange bedfellow to him.
Dr. Amanze Obi, The Sun Nigeria.