By Femi Fani-Kayode
What is it about the Nigerian that he always runs away from a fight and from battle? Where did this accursed cowardice and obsession with “peace at ANY price” come from? I hold that even if they slaughtered one million of our sad and beleagured citizens in one day our people would still call for peace, good neighbourliness and understanding with Boko Haram and they would still say that we should forgive them and make friends with them.
Boko Haram has shown the world what we are – a nation of cowards where honour does not reside and where righteous anger, when faced with pure evil, has no place. If this were not the case the narrative today would not be anything other than a passionate plea for us to bury our differences, come together as one nation and one people and to fight Boko Haram to the last man. What Boko Haram is attempting to do is nothing new. It has happened in many other countries and in those countries the people themselves were forced to make a hard choice- to either fight the evil or to succumb to it and allow it to overwhelm them.
Sadly the people of Nigeria have not yet made that hard choice and instead they are still busying themselves with mundane and irrelevant questions like whether they are in APC or PDP or whether they like or support President Goodluck Jonathan or not. They fail to appreciate the fact that matters have gone far beyond that. They fail to see that at this rate we may not even get to 2015 as one nation and least of all be in a position to conduct an election at that time. They fail to see that if things don’t change quickly and Boko Haram is not stopped this democracy may not even last much longer. They fail to see that Boko Haram seeks to destroy us ALL and not just Jonathan, the PDP, the APC or anyone else. Those that encouraged the Boko monster and fed the islamist beast at the outset and that silently supported and encouraged them in an attempt to destabilise the government and the nation have now become a victim of that hideous monster themselves.
Let us make no mistake about it: the agenda of Boko Haram and those that are behind it, both locally and their international backers, is not limited to northern Nigeria and neither has it ever been. Simply put they wish to conquer the whole country and establish their own caliphate. They wish to impose their strange values and barbaric beliefs on the rest of us by force. Those that think like that and that espouse such views are worse than the white supremacist Boers of South Africa during the days of aparthied and they are worse than the fascists of Nazi Germany under Hitler.
I believe that if Nigeria is to remain one then ALL her ethnic nationalities must be treated as equals, no matter how big or how small, and that the secularity of the state must be preserved. I have always believed that we must keep religion out of politics and that faith, being essentially a personal matter, must never be used as a political tool or as a weapon of destabilisation. Evidently not all share my view. Some believe that religion and ethnicity can and must be used as a means to achieve and preserve political power. Worst still others believe that islamic fundamentalism has a place in our country and they believe that it is right and proper to terrorise, kill, maim and abduct as many Nigerians as possible in order to establish it here. Surely this abberant philosophy and world-view must be rejected and resisted by all right-thinking people. It is time for Nigerians to wake up from their deep and satanic slumber and make the right choices. They must either fight this evil called Boko Haram or submit and capitulate to it..
They either stand up and identify the real enemy or they continue to bicker and argue about the most irrelevant, inconsequential and childish things. They either open their eyes wide and understand the implications of what is unfolding for their nation and for their children and grandchildren or they continue to wallow in denial, ignorance, cowardice and timidity until all is lost and we are completely overwhelmed. They must either demand that the Sambisi forest, where the filthy and cowardly cockroaches and vermin called Boko Haram are said to reside, should be bombed with nepam and burnt to the ground along with everyone and everything in it or they continue to whimper and cry from under their beds like little children and beg for mercy. At the end of the day the choice is theirs. Prayer has it’s place but it is not God’s job to fight this battle- it is ours. God bless Nigeria.
Femi Fani-Kayode is a former aviation minister
