Prime Business Africa
When the most lethal War machine in human history serves you notice the least you can do is stop living a lie and take stock.
A tweet from US President Donald Trump on the killings in Nigeria set off a storm of a debate on a truth long left on the side burner. This is probably why conversation on the Nigerian condition is now more serious than the usual platitudes when citizens and journalists point to the killing fields of Nigeria.
We owe the Americans a huge debt of gratitude for calling us to order.
Arguing about who gets killed the more, Christian or Moslem further makes the point about the vacuous nature of the Nigerian political class and why such people should never be allowed near public life.
The dignity of the human person is what makes us civilized. No society that does not place a premium on human life deserves to be treated with respect.
For years I have repeatedly pointed to the fact that Nigeria was in a rolling civil war and that more people were killed every day in Nigeria than in most of the hot wars in the world. But it seemed that once the powerful could use state resources to secure themselves, scores of Nigerians dying did not seem to matter to Nigeria’s narcissistic political elite who seemed to profit from the anarchy all around.
They were often quick to rationalize the situation in their remarks and in the writings of hags in media they own. Even worse, the internet warriors they fund insulted any who dared suggest the state shirked its duty as the primary obligation of the leviathan was security of life and property.
READ ALSO: Averting Nigeria- United States Conflict
Many times I questioned the morality that allowed the world look away as politicians whose values confused priorities, inclining Nigeria towards anarchy only they could not see, held sway. Is it not better to avoid another Nuremberg trials or Rwanda by threatening action or doing something before the harm is done. This led me to spend part of a sabbatical year abroad in 1996/97 campaigning for an International criminal court before the treaty of Rome that set up the ICC. Where national institutions were often too weak to protect the more vulnerable, I argued back then, supranational institutions were an imperative of civilized human community.
Now that a threat from abroad, however it is couched, has woken us up we must act.
Punishment, whether it be local or international, must go to those who are responsible for this orgy of killings. Political restructuring and electoral reforms to restore legitimacy to the state needs to be put in place as political parties are reconstructed and purged of miscreants who currently dominate as party apparatchik.
Deliberate effort to build a new judicial system in the way that of Somalia was being recreated is required now in Nigeria.
Pride should not make us pretend we still have a judiciary.
More importantly character and competence need to be key in recruiting new players into public life.
We can make a new beginning help us escape the current fate of Sudan if we let the truth of this moment speak to us for our own good. There is no point in patching things up only to return to worse situations as the story of Sudan teaches us.
Leadership is about seeing tomorrow and plotting a path to it, including circumnavigating identified storms.
When Robert Kaplan published The Coming Anarchy 25 years ago, pointing to where we are now, especially in the Plateau and Benue, I bought and distributed copies to people in security agencies as a citizen’s duty. I had hoped for proactive decisions that could have prevented the nightmare of the last 15 years.
But the leadership failure that has marked our recent experience meant little was done. Worse still, scores of politicians and Security agents found the anarchy that loomed a way to corruptly enrich themselves. Greed had blinded them to the cost of betraying the people they vowed to serve.
Look where it has left all of us.
Now elders must arise and speak, youth stand up to hold people to account and people demand a new way that is just.
