The Nigerian political system faced a thunder volt penultimate week with President Donald Trump of the United States designation of Nigeria as Country of Particular Concern, CPC, over allegations of Christian persecution and genocide.
Since that declaration, government officials at both the federal and sub-nationals have been scurrying to mitigate the designation with denials and vexatious rebuttals.
The unfortunate development in the government’s responses is that there is grave dissonance in the whole mix. At one hand, some government officials have alluded to data provided by the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra, IPOB, to the US government.
In another development, the fallout has been attributed to opposition politicians who lost to the incumbent in the 2023 elections. Yet, it has been pinned on some nebulous reasons as pressure by the Americans to have a military base in the country.
Whatever reasons have been adduced is good to the extent that the Nigerian government is holding conversation on the tenuous security situation in the country and the need to do more to safeguard lives and property that is now in abeyance with thousands of citizens killed, denuded of human dignity, and left as refugees in their in own country.
For a long time, successive administrations have dithered on the protection of Nigerians and have seemed hapless in living by the constitutional demand in Chapter 14 (2) that the primary responsibility of government is for the security and welfare of the people.
It became a refrain of sorts for government officials to wax lyrically of their commitment while in actual fact citizens were left at the mercies of marauding gunmen steeped in Islamist ideology.
Community after community, village after village, state after state, this flea ridden insurgents traded violence and fear as they worked their way from the far north to the north central and with reported incursions into southern Nigeria.
Further, a country with a secular constitution slept on its watch as Sharia was introduced with full compliment of policing and legal consequences. Emboldened by the complacency of the federal government, non-state actors took it as sign to entrench their warped belief and engaged in a war of attrition to wipe out Christian communities.
For us at The Abuja Inquirer, while there is no verifiable state policy on Christian persecution and the attendant violence targeting non-Muslim communities especially in Southern Born, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Kaduna and other places with considerable population of Christians, the Nigerian government is vicariously liable in failing to protect these communities and people who for nothing other than their beliefs have been targets for extermination and take over of their lands and businesses.
Much more than that is the failure of federal authorities to allow states control over capital crimes motivated by religious dogmas and mob action like in the cases of Deborah Yakubu: A student who was stoned and set on fire in Sokoto in May 2022 after being accused of blasphemy for comments made in a WhatsApp group.
Usman Buda: Another individual stoned to death by a mob in Sokoto in June 2023 after being accused of blasphemy.
In all of these and more, none was held accountable. Mob killings have left a climate of fear around false accusations.
It is therefore a welcome development that the spotlight is on the Nigerian government and how President Bola Tinubu seizes the moment may ultimately determine his fate in the next elections.
It bears repeating that while this newspaper is against having American boots on the ground, it looks forward to intelligence sharing, hardware support and logistics assistance to the Nigerian military to boost its fight against these terrorists, bandits and their likes.
However, the Nigerian State must demonstrate the political will to unmask the sponsors of violence and terrorism, prosecute them, and speedily arraign all those in its custody.
For now, it should suspend the rehabilitation of terrorists, secure communities and ensure that all those in IDPs’ camps return home and become useful again.
The time to reclaim the initiative is NOW!
