How to win 500,000
Naira?
Ok, just joking…just
want to talk about stuff
Serious Stuff.
What’s Wrong?
If it weren’t for
ISIS, Boko Haram would have dominated news stories of Islamic extremism in
2015. This Nigerian terror group recently held a territory roughly the size of
Costa Rica and spent their time massacring entire villages. Today, they’re
still setting off deadly bombs in the capital and generally acting like
murderous monsters. But all this fury is masking a positive development. The
members of Boko Haram are getting their asses kicked. Since incompetent
President Goodluck Jonathan was replaced by Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria has been
stepping up its efforts to coordinate with Chad, Cameroon, and the US. The
result has been a series of devastating strikes against the insurgent group
that have crippled Boko Haram and taken back large swaths of their territory. The
Nigerian military are now saying they may totally defeat the group within a
year, and for once, local officials and foreign observers agree with them. In a
single raid in October 2015, 338 hostages were freed from the group’s
northeastern stronghold—a far cry from April 2014 when they kidnapped 276
schoolgirls. That’s not to say that Boko Haram is a spent force. The group is
expected to continue launching attacks for a long time. But they are getting
much weaker. Any chance they had of becoming another Islamic State seems to
have vanished…at least for now.
Unfortunately, there is a new silent deadlier wave sweeping Nigeria- Tribalism.
If you are familiar
with the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, it would be expected to assume that such an
atrocity can never repeat itself being that we live in a modern age where
everyone is enlightened (relatively) and tolerant(even more relatively).
The genocide was
planned by members of the core political elite, many of whom occupied positions
at top levels of the national government. Perpetrators came from the ranks of
the Rwandan army, the Gendarmerie, government-backed militias including the
Interahamwe and Impuzamugambi. The genocide took place in the context of the
Rwandan Civil War, an ongoing conflict beginning in 1990 between the Hutu-led
government and the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), which largely consisted of
Tutsi refugees whose families had fled to Uganda after the 1959 Hutu revolt
against colonial rule. Waves of Hutu violence against the RPF and Tutsi
followed Rwandan independence in 1962. International pressure on the Hutu
government of Juvénal Habyarimana resulted in a ceasefire in 1993, with a
road-map to implement the Arusha Accords, which would create a power-sharing
government with the RPF. This agreement was not acceptable to a number of
conservative Hutu, including members of the Akazu, who viewed it as conceding
to enemy demands. The RPF military campaign intensified support for the
so-called "Hutu Power" ideology, which portrayed the RPF as an alien
force who were non-Christian, intent on reinstating the Tutsi monarchy and
enslaving Hutus. Many Hutus reacted to this prospect with extreme opposition.
In the lead-up to the genocide the number of machetes imported into Rwanda
increased…
The rest is
history..or you can look for the movie: Hotel Rwanda to see how things panned
out.
Now lets shift a bit.
The Biafran War, (6
July 1967 – 15 January 1970), was a war fought between the government of
Nigeria and the secessionist state of Biafra. Biafra represented nationalist
aspirations of the Igbo people, whose leadership felt they could no longer
coexist with the Northern-dominated federal government. The conflict resulted
from political, economic, ethnic, cultural and religious tensions which
preceded Britain's formal decolonisation of Nigeria from 1960 to 1963.
Immediate causes of the war in 1966 included a military coup, a counter-coup,
and persecution of Igbo living in Northern Nigeria. Control over oil production
in the Niger Delta played a vital strategic role.
Within a year, the
Federal Military Government surrounded Biafra, capturing coastal oil facilities
and the city of Port Harcourt. The blockade imposed during the ensuing
stalemate led to severe famine—accomplished deliberately as a war strategy.
Over the two and half years of the war, there were about 100,000 overall
military casualties, while between 500,000 and 2 million Biafran civilians died
from starvation…
…
War..
On 29 May 2000, The
Guardian reported that President Olusegun Obasanjo commuted to retirement the
dismissal of all military persons who fought for the breakaway state of Biafra
during the Nigerian civil war. In a national broadcast, he said that the
decision was based on the principle that "justice must at all times be
tempered with mercy."
Biafra was more or
less wiped off the map until its resurrection by the contemporary Movement for
the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra.
The bottom line is
that 1, we are in Africa…. 2, there is no public declaration that dictates the
commencement of War.
Regardless of how
modern we claim to have reached, being ok with Bobrisky or laughing at Speedy Darlington’s IG post of “Buhari is dead”…when shit hits the fan, it spreads. As
long as there’s an Arewa group to the North hating the south, and a Biafran
group to the south hating the north, coupled with an unstable government
without a president and a senate house filled with self-actualizing and corrupt
men—I put it to you that this a recipe for a modern day civil war.
But like every war
that has taken place throughout history, it can be stopped before it begins.
And it all starts with you.
Author: Eric Katmahan
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