NIGERIA: OUR POCKETS OF CIVIL WARS

The sleepy town of Kafanchan in Kaduna State witnessed one of the worst forms of civil unrests when some well armed political hoodlums suspected to be of northern extraction unleashed a regime of terror, killing, maiming, arson and general destruction of assets of persons of southern extraction who were suspected to have voted for the Bayelsa born Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party, Dr. Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan who is now the President elect as a result of the April 2011 general elections.

In the wee hours of Monday 18th April 2011 I was violently awoken by the persistent phone calls from a distressed relation of mine from Kafanchan, Kaduna state who told me in a voice dripping with emotional trauma that two of our cousins namely Mr. Ebere Ogbonaya and his lovely wife were massacred by some armed rioters suspected to be of northern origin.

This midnight caller who happens to be a serving National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) member attached to a secondary school in Kafanchan further informed me that she alongside all residents of the house were she was putting up and who are all of South East origin managed to run into the thick bush by the river bank which is a safe distance from the scene of rioting. I managed to hold back my tears and put a call to one of the numerous numbers published on some online journals purportedly emanating from the office of the National Security Adviser and a lady who picked my call informed me that soldiers have already been drafted to quell the violence in Kafanchan.

Assured that at least my distant relation trapped in the thick bush somewhere in Kafanchan could at least be rescued by the soldiers who were said to have been sent to quell the riots in Kafanchan, I then went back to sleep. But before you could say Jack Robinson, my set was further bombarded, this time around from a child hood friend in Kaduna city who informed me that he has just been informed that his entire family members who lived in Bauchi street, Kafanchan were set ablaze by the rampaging rioters and that the rioters were so well armed that they over powered the soldiers drafted initially to the troubled spots in the town.

Few days after the violence, the Justice Development and Peace Commission (JDPC) gave graphic account of the bloodshed that was unleashed by alleged supporters of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) who unleashed terror on the innocent residents of Kafanchan who were mostly of Southern extraction.

According to the body; “The way people were hacked to death during this crisis for simply being Christians or Muslims shows total lack of respect for the sacredness of human life. There are many who survived death but suffered serious injuries that may render physically handicapped for life”.

The United States based Human Rights Watch in a report on the post-election violence said 800 people were killed in parts of Northern Nigeria where these mass killings took place last month.

Human Rights Watch in the report issued on May 16th 2011 said the victims were massacred in three days of rioting in twelve northern states.

The question to be asked is how come these spates of civil unrests and what I may call pockets of civil wars took place in twelve states in Northern Nigeria and the Armed forces of the federal republic of Nigeria were found wanting and incapable of preventing this bloodshed from occurring in the first place?

Before the late President Umaru Musa Yar’adua organized a truce and declared amnesty for the militants in the oil rich Niger Delta region, that region was at war because the militants carried out all manners of atrocities including kidnapping for ransoms, bombing of oil facilities and bunkering.

Another issue that reminds us that Nigeria is indeed witnessing pockets of civil wars is the fact that some Islamic religious extremists, renegade and rebels in the name of Boko Haram have continuously unleash terror on the civil populace of Borno State and the members of the Armed forces are unable to combat this ugly scenario?

Freedom of worship particularly by Christians are severely restricted because of the constant bombing of churches and wanton assassination of pastors by these so called Islamic militant groups in Northern Nigeria but yet the military establishment in Nigeria is yet to find workable panacea for this informal and irregular war being levied on the Nigerian State.

Major General Vinod saighal in his book “Dealing with Global Terrorism: The way forward”, provided what I may call the intellectual foundation to my conclusion that we are fighting pockets of civil wars in Nigeria. He wrote thus; “There are several factors that are leading to greater dehumanization of war or warring in the recent times”.

Saighal said that the first change relates to the fact that direct wars between States are being increasingly replaced by proxy wars or sponsored wars through agents or agencies that are hard to assign a concrete form.

The second aspect he said relates to the high-tech nature of warfare, where the persons unleashing the high-tech weapons do not directly face the enemy or the target.

As earlier stated, the various dimensions of pockets of civil wars in Nigeria include The Boko Haram’s insurgency in Borno state which began in 2009 and was described by scholars as a conflict between the Islamic sectarian group and the Nigerian Security forces. The 2009 violence led to the killing of 700 persons including the founder of the Islamic militant sect-Mohammed Yusuf who suffered extra-legal execution in police detention center hours after being captured by Nigerian Security forces.

But why will a human being with flesh and blood unleash violence on his fellow human being? We are talking here about violence on the part of rational human beings as distinct from what Philosophers call the aggressive instincts found in lower animals.

It is a fact as stated by a lot of philosophers that while aggression in irrational animals can be explained as mere animal instinct necessary for survival, violence in human being is both animal instinct and something more.

More shocking development about these pockets of wars is the ineffective way that the current administration is adopting in tackling these spate of civil unrests or pockets of wars.

The methodology of setting up panels made up largely of old and retired bureaucrats or technocrats to unravel the circumstances surrounding the spate of violence in northern Nigeria as done by President Jonathan is preposterous and unworkable.

Why set up a probe panel to investigate why political hoodlums took up sophisticated arms and ammunitions and unleashed a state of warfare in twelve states of the North even when the institutionalized and constitutionally backed bodies like the law enforcement agencies are there?

A.B. Danbazau, a retired Nigerian military General in his book “Criminology and criminal justice”, stated that a crime in law consists of two basic elements namely the ‘actus reus’ and ‘the mens rea’.

The author of the four hundred and ninety one page scholarly book stated thus; “The actus reus is the physical element or the guilty act and it requires proof. Where there is no actus reus, there is no crime. It includes all the elements in the definition of the crime with the exception of the mental element. The actus reus could be made up of conduct, its consequences and circumstances in which the conduct takes place. The second element, mens rea, is the mental element or the guilty mind. It is basically the intention, and a man is said to intend doing something if he foresaw and desired it”.

In effect, all those who wage these pockets of civil wars in Nigeria as enumerated above ought to be arrested, prosecuted and punished by the competent courts of law because what they have done are still doing amount to crime of the severest dimension.

It is because most people believe that they can do anything in Nigeria and get away with it, that is why Nigeria is currently witnessing the worst forms of impunity and the law enforcement operatives who sought to do the needful by providing security of lives and property are also most times caught up in the trap of extra legal executions of suspects in their custody and by so doing the regime of impunity in Nigeria widens and keep widening.

All those who participated in the post-election violence must be arrested, prosecuted and punished.

Again, the federal government must investigate whether any foreign government has a hand in the arming of the various insurgent groups that are waging wars against innocent Nigerians in places like Jos, Plateau State, Bauchi and Borno States.

Emmanuel Onwubiko heads Human Rights Writers’ Association of Nigeria.