For the life of me, I never thought that any Nigerian, irrespective of religion, gender, social class or ethnicity, had it in them to be a suicide bomber. I had always believed that our love for life surpassed the love for anything else, especially an ideology of suicide, and this is further compounded by the fact that we do not have a culture of honour in suicide in any guise and in almost all cultures in the country suicide is sacrilegious. As a result, even when I read reports of suicides in the newspapers, I always put it down to poor investigation on the part of the police; to me, the person was killed but staged as a suicide. Assuming it was possible to convince me that Nigerians were capable of suicide, I doubt that I could have been convinced that we were capable of senseless mass murder, via suicide bombing, because again, I believed that our belief in the life after and the punishment that comes with it was enough to keep us from such dangerous foolishness. Now the young Abdulmutallab has taught me that not only are we capable of suicide, we are capable of senseless mass murder. Now I have to be more careful in crowded places.
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| Chichi Aniagolu-Okoye |
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has taught me many more lessons. I was not alone in the belief that Nigerians are not capable of suicide bombing; many Nigerians’ shock at the break of the story came from this belief as well. My second Abdulmutallab lesson, therefore, is that one cannot generalise the behaviour of 150 million people. We all recognise that Nigeria is big and complex, but this recognition has never been taken into consideration in nation building. Instead we pigeon-hole each other into the easily defined compartment of Christian, Muslim, traditional worshipper, ethnicity and gender and assume we know exactly how each will act in those neat compartments. In reaction to the Abdulmutallab story, the government has immediately taken this easy road. Every government official who has spoken on the matter has argued that Nigeria should not be put on the terror watch list because ‘it is not in our nature’. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is to be seen as an isolated case. But does the government or anyone else for that matter really know what our nature is? Did they see a Farouk coming? Can they predict what else is waiting in the wings? Were they able to predict the Boko Haram crisis, and the more recent Kala Kato sect of Bauchi and all the other religious crises we have had? Are all these now under control? What about the Superscreen Television bomb explosion? I would like to believe that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is an isolated case, but I really do not know that and neither does the government. I think that instead of taking the usual easy road of glossing over issues, and in this case trying to defend our ‘nature’, of which I do not believe they know anything of, the government needs to stop assuming they know Nigerians and use the occasion of this incident to seriously discover who Nigerians are, what they want, what grievances they have and how much rage is stored up inside of them. I thought it was shallow that the concern of the Nigerian government has been the travel restrictions and greater checks Nigerians will now be subjected to at international airports and borders. Of course they are concerned about that because it will affect them and members of their class. The truth is that the percentage of Nigerians that travel abroad is less than 1 per cent of the population. The government needs to be more concerned about what this incident portends for the internal security of the country. For instance, is government or anyone thinking of or taking precautions over the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack within the country in the face of Nigerians’, both Muslims and Christians, total condemnation of the failed bombing attempt?
I have listened to and read many television, radio and newspaper stories on this issue, not one has really done a thorough investigation as to what is really going on in Nigeria. Is Nigeria changing? Is Nigeria on the brink of becoming something scary and dangerous? If ever this country needed a referendum or a national discourse, it is now.
If we took corruption for granted all this while, my second Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab lesson is that we are now at the stage where we could be consumed by it. Can the immigration official who has been collecting bribe for years and looking the other way, be suddenly transformed to start honestly patrolling the borders? Can the police whose lives depend on N20 per vehicle suddenly be made to start paying attention to policing? Can the politician be made to stop rigging elections so that capable hands can make it to leadership? I think we know the answers to these and so does America, which is why they put us on the terror alert list and we will remain there for a while. The truth is that we do not have the government or security system to protect us from terrorism or any major guerrilla-like threats and should we become seriously challenged by such threats, with a government and security system so compromised, we are doomed.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has also taught me that Nigerian government needs to stop taking Nigerians for granted. Many of those who rule us are out of touch with Nigerians, their aims and aspirations and most of all their rage and grievances as they are with information technology. The Nigerian government needs to learn from this incident that they really do not know Nigerians and what they are capable of anymore. This humble admission will go a long way in helping us to find out how to save ourselves from a most uncertain and perhaps dangerous future.
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