Ironically, it is the Nigerian state that fostered it through its acts of omission or commission.
Evidence has continued to emerge by the day that insecurity in the country has gone haywire, which the gruesome massacre of 17 soldiers by hoodlums in Okuama community in Delta State on 14 March is an irrefutable corroboration. The deceased were not only killed; 14 of them were beheaded and had their internal organs, such as hearts, and private parts gouged out. This is a heinous, inhuman and most wicked act of savagery.
As the tragedy coincided with the kidnapping, by bandits and Boko Haram, of over 500 pupils and citizens in schools and in Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) camps, in Kaduna and Borno states, clearly, the country's security apparatchiks have their work well cut out. As expected, the grotesque incident in Okuama has awoken national consciousness and outpouring of grief and empathy for our military personnel. But the inherent lesson is not lost on anyone: that nobody is safe.
The President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Bola Tinubu, the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) and the Chief of Army Staff, alongside all well-meaning Nigerians are united in their denunciation of the act and resolve that the masterminds of this dastardly act must be made to face the consequences of their action. This is the best honour Nigeria owes the late soldiers and the families they left behind. Among the 17 victims were Lt. Col A.H Ali, Commanding Officer, 181 Amphibious Battalion, Nigerian Army; two Majors and a Captain.
Unlike in a similar recent massacre in Shiroro, Niger State, in August 2023, during which 22 soldiers were ambushed and slaughtered by bandits, while conducting an offensive operation, the victims of the Okuama ambush were there to maintain peace, following a land dispute between the Okuama and Okolaba communities. Regrettably, the involved felons have shattered the peace of Okuama, the residents have fled to neighbouring villages, while others are hibernating in forests, not knowing when the storm will be over. Apparently, this is not likely to be soon.
There is the disturbing report that a section of that community has been razed and is littered with cadavers in a purported reprisal by aggrieved soldiers. This is further accentuated by Joint Task Force operatives' denial of journalists access to the area. The same happened to part of Governor Sheriff Oborevwori team, when he visited the place four days later, to assess the situation. However, military authorities have vehemently denied involvement in any illegality in the area, describing such allegation as pure propaganda. Yet, the response of the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Taoreed Lagbaja, that the murder of the troops "was a community orchestrated attack against legitimate forces" is dreadful in the assumption of a premeditated act. This necessarily insinuates the basis for collective punishment - as it has been claimed, leaving its wake, those who knew next-to-nothing about the atrocity as casualties.
Nevertheless, such criminality anywhere, in our view, is always carried out by a limited conspiratorial cohort. As a result, the army should be painstaking in its intelligence gathering and operations, so as to nab only the culprits and spare the innocent, in tandem with the DHQ's assurance that the military would not be led by emotions, but must be guided by the laws of armed conflict. It is only in this regard that we will appreciate their declaration of "measured responses and injurious consequences for the perpetrators of this dastardly act."
There is also disquiet in Bayelsa State, with the spread of the manhunt for the perpetrators of this evil to the place, where some of them have allegedly fled to. Purported reprisal killings in Igbomotoru provoked a former governor of the state, Seriake Dickson, now a senator, to call for caution and adherence to the rules of engagement in such operations during a Senate session on the Okuama tragedy. Our concern in all of this stems from precedents such as the Odi massacre in 1999, and Zaki Ibiam in 2002, after policemen and soldiers had been given the "Okuama treatment" and the military then responded in more than equal measures. The reprisals almost entirely wiped out the affected communities.
President Tinubu, in a strongly worded statement, which he personally signed, in reaction to the tragedy, talked tough. But one paragraph stood out in our opinion: "Members of our armed forces are at the heart and core of our nationhood. Any attack on them is a direct attack on our nation. We will not accept this wicked act." He couldn't be more correct. The insanity that led to this national grief should be thoroughly dealt with.
Ironically, it is the Nigerian state that fostered it through its acts of omission or commission. It still has no answer to the proliferation of armies of non-state actors and their tools of violence - arms and ammunition they brazenly wield to assault, kill and question the integrity of the nation. With Nigeria's loss of the monopoly of the use of coercive force or violence, in Max Weber's conceptual framework of a state, or control of it, as others add, the country in this context can rightly be said to have failed as a state.
The anomie has been on for far too long. Sergeant AM Linus and his wife, both soldiers, in Imo State in 2022, were killed by unknown gunmen and decapitated. Policemen are easy preys to gunmen in the South-east. The story is not different particularly in the North-east, North-west, and South-south, where the military are in operations against jihadists, bandits and oil thieves. The Okuama massacre can only become the end of this sadism and depravity, by not allowing these merchants of egregious deaths to escape justice.
The message is very clear: government has nobody to blame but itself. Certainly, the police authorities in Abuja and their State Security Service (SSS) counterparts did a lot of harm to national security when they unwittingly allowed the impunity of the Ombatse cult members that ambushed and annihilated 63 police officers and 10 SSS operatives in Nasarawa State to escape from punishment, during the strife between Eggon and Alago communities in 2013. The then Director-General of the SSS, Ita Ekpenyong, curiously said, "We have forgiven" them during obsequies for the 10 deceased officials. But most unbelievable was the police failure to fish out the fifth columnists in their midst, who passed information to the cultists of the planned raid on them, which led to the bloodbath.
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Across the federation, "Okuama and Okolaba" communities might not be the only ones with land disputes on the brink of snowballing. The notorious conflict of the Umuleri-Aguleri communities in Anambra State, also over land ownership, which lingered for years and claimed many scalps, are instructive for the governors to act fast when such matters rear their ugly heads. The past is very critical in governance, as Wilson Churchill instructively put it, "...In history lies all the secrets of statecraft."
Again, the poignant security system that has encumbered the military with police duties all over the country must be fixed through the creation of a more comprehensive and effective model, for the nation to extricate itself from this vice-like grip of outlaws and recurrent moments of grief. Enough is enough!
