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Bombing Of The UN:Our Chicken Is Coming Home to Roost! By
Comrade Abiodun Aremu
Newsdiaryonline Fri Sep 2,2011
Tuesday, August 23rd 2011, the United States of America, which
is the godfather to
Nigeria’s Presidency of Mr. Jonathan, prompted him to make an
irresponsible statement
recognising the counter-revolution rebels in Libya; despite that
Gaddafi is yet ousted
and the African Union (AU) hasn’t meet to state its stand.
By Friday, August 26th a
suicide car bomb attack wrecked havoc in the United
Nation office in Nigeria
killing scores and with several in critical conditions. Sad it
is, but do we deserve to live in agonies and fears?
On a deeper reflection,
we should hold responsible Mr. President Jonathan and
his Foreign Minister
Gbenga Ashiru for kowtowing to the global violence being
perpetrated by US in
particular, in the guise of imposing its model of democracy
everywhere; and in the
instance of Libya, hold US-NATO responsible for the war
of aggression and
genocide started since March 19th 2011. What should be clear is
that any system of rule that compelled any person to
take his/her life in a
suicide action is unjust and that system must be
abolished. M.E.
Kolagbodi in a 1991 lecture said “… rationality ends where
hunger begins”. I add that “when rational beings leave vacuum in
the social space for those dehumanised and criminalised by the
State to occupy, the consequence
make the rest of the society victims”.
It would be inconceivable that the same Nigeria that produced a
military Head of State
Murtala Muhammed whose January 11, 1976 speech at the
extra-ordinary OAU Summit
in Addis Ababa - “Africa has come of age” rallied other African
countries to call off
the bluff of US, and gave total support to anti-apartheid
movement and liberation
struggle in Southern Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Namibia,
Zimbabwe and South Africa); would now become the stooge of the
US – courtesy of an
uncle tom President.
We are all potential victims whether we like it or not. How did
we get to this stage we
are agonising about? We got there by our collective complicity
and we now have to pay
dearly for our submissiveness to US imperialism. Fela Anikulapo
(the Black President)
declared UN as “egbekegbe” decades ago, we never bother
and we are the latest
victims of its being the US’ tools for perpetrating global
terrorism. We have
become a country dominated with parochial thought process for
the past 2 decades and
accept all the foreign concoctions to the extent that it
took the US State
Department’s pronouncement on our April 2011 General elections
for us to join the
chorus to delude ourselves: the election is free and
credible.
We don’t like oppression, we don’t want exploitation, yet the
human in us could not
activate us to ACT the way we feel. There are vacuums to fill to
better our society, yet
we fold arms and assume rationality can prevail over
irrationality of those
who have chosen the only frustrating option open to them, which
is “threats to our life
and properties”.
Security isn’t about arming the army and the police or bringing
imperial police to fish
out culprits after the worst has been done. It is about the
people. How can a
country whose army and police commit extra-judicial killings
while its president,
governors and local government chairpersons neglect the security
of the stomach and
essential necessity for decent living required by majority
Nigerians; expect
anything less from the unseen elements we call senseless and
murderers?
We are daily breeding desperate youths and adults who must
survive, and since we so-called
rational and righteous people cannot understand their feelings;
they are tutoring us in
an agonising way what is called transferred aggression
through sophisticated
armed robbery, hostage taking, kidnapping, 419ing,
bombing, etc.
When Adolf Hitler (then a nobody) in the early 1920s jumped on a
table in a beer parlour
and declared that “state boundaries are created by men and are
altered by men, Germany will either be a world power or there
will be no Germany”; the world
failed to take notice of him until his madness caused over 60
million death between
1939 – 45.
When the Boko Haram through a public statement after the
extra-judicial murder of
their leaders warned that they would be back to retaliate
against Governor Bunu
Sheriff, the Nigerian state and its agents for criminalising
them for exercising
their right to freedom of association; the presidency and the
rest of us ignored them
as empty boast; now we should know better.
We expect the Boko Haram (BH) to be rational in their reactions
against the rest of us
assuming ourselves as ‘rational’; yet we are not enraged by the
criminal and fraudulent
acts of Mr. President and the Governors who loot our collective
patrimony in the guise
of security votes and the neo-liberal privatisation and
deregulation of our
life. Governors have failed to disclose their security votes and
its purpose (except Imo
State Governor Rochas Okorocha who admitted that he keeps N2.5bn
out of the N6.5bn his
predecessor collected annually as security vote); yet we are not
angry enough to dispose
them to the dustbins of history, and insist that
election is not our
priority now; but TOTAL INDEPENDENCE as stated by Professor
Eskor Toyo about 8 years
ago, that “we have lost the country and we need to reclaim it”,
which I agree completely with.
We should ask ourselves: where were the lawyers, the NBA and
civil society groups
when the Boko Haram leaders were extra-judicially murdered and
pogrom committed against
their suspected members? We must still be in deep slumber to
assume that the BH are
miscreants, bunch of illiterates and Islamic extremists
that state violence must
mercilessly crush; yet we expect such people to be
rational in whatever
methods they adopt to air their grievances.
We must certainly be the ones that are irrational if we expect
rationality from a
suicide bomber without regard to taking his/her life to respect
the right to life of
others. May be if the NBA and lawyers had seen the BH as a
metamorphosis of the
irresponsibility and executive recklessness of those in
government at all levels,
and rose up at the time their leaders were exterminated
extra-judicially the way
they are now doing on Ayo Salami’s case, the BH would probably
not acquire the lethal
sophistication it has now.
Another question: why was the rule of law not in force by NBA
and lawyers since March
23rd 2011 when the 2011 Minimum Wage Act was signed into law?
And why is the NBA and
lawyers not seeing the violation in the implementation of the
Minimum Wage Act by
lawless governors as an issue germane to upholding the rule of
law? Certainly, the rule of law then has a class character!
As long as the uncle toms’ sharks so-called president and
executive governors dictate
the pace of our life and we reduce serious issue of national
redemption to a corrupt judicial system that only protects the
elites when its interest is impaired; we would remain
politically and socio-economically backward and underdeveloped.
If we don’t want the BH, then we must be prepared to rid away
the present state actors through an organised revolution that
must put power in the hands of the working and oppressed people
(not directionless uprising and funders’ driven projects
so-called protest or those benevolent protests at the instance
of a section of the ruling class) to transform the life of all
for the better including that of the BH members.
All the talks about restructuring and true federalism will never
come to fruition as long as we don’t understand that every class
society carries out its politics and economy with an instrument
of coercion called the State. Without some forms of physical
threats and capacity to balance forces with the ruinous Nigeria
ruling cabals, we should keep agonising until the eternal life
cometh!
As an individual in this irresponsible society, I have accepted
the inevitable of being a potential victim of the BH and other
potential threats that may unfold as long as we remained
collectively indicted by Frantz Fanon’s: we have “taken refuge
in an attitude of passivity, mute indifference and sometimes of
cold complicity”. Those still sunk in empty phrases of blames
and curses on the faceless
BH operators had better re-examine themselves.
THIS IS MY CALL TO ORGANISED REVOLUTION AS WE CELEBRATE EID
FITR.
Comrade ABIODUN AREMU
biod_abi@yahoo.co.uk
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