It is true that Boko Haram as we know it today is political thuggery gone wild. Their origin and marriage with the Borno State government seems to be swept under the carpet and how the extra-judicial killing of their leader opened the door for their seeking sponsorship elsewhere. Where did they get that support? I guess to say that they got it from forces of Arab Muslim expansionism. Some of the group’s ideologues think that the Islamic leaders in Nigeria have grown complacent and now in bed with the Nigerian statecraft that is not purely Islamic. It was for these that the group warned the Muslim leaders that they are part of their target in the cleansing and expansionist war.
The same situation brought threat to others who dare not call the devilish spade by its name. In his recent documentary, America Imagine the World Without Her (July 2014: Lions gate Studios), the American conservative critic and commentator, Dinesh D’Souza, indicated that when the United States of America emerged as a world supper power, she changed the previous political world order characterised by growth through conquest to growth through the freedom of association.
Although there are people who will context this conclusion, nobody will deny that it will be a better world order if people can freely choose where to belong. Is it that Islam is unable to win the argument for the inalienable rights of peoples to pursue their own paths to spiritual happiness that they have adopted the age-long conquest mentality as seen in the Boko Haram push?
Ojukwu saw this and responded to the call by his brethren to fight for the freedom to live in a polity where they would be convinced to choose rather than be coerced to embrace a particular way of life. Yes, Biafra lost the battle for territorial self-determination, but the people held back the forces of Arab Muslim expansionism, thereby winning the war of freedom.
And with the fear that the logic of freedom, love and learning is arousing a spring to change the status quo to grow by force, the instinct to survive hijacked the spring to further its expansionist thirst through another wave of conquest. How may this be true? Because the majority who have died in the spring have been Muslims who were perceived or accused as collaborators with forces, which in the long run may shrink the territory that the Arab Muslims are holding sway. When will people wake up to this realisation? When will Ojukwu’s ‘good morning’ he heard again?
Third Contention: White Economic Imperialism
The third premise is hinged on white economic imperialism. People can give different expressions of this in the Boko Haram conflict. For example, where did the thought that it is a Western-instigated conflict to actualise the forecast that Nigeria will disintegrate in 2015 come from? A balkanised Nigeria is not to the interest of Nigeria as it exists today, but to the interest and glory of those fanning the embers of disintegration. These are the people selling the weapons of war and whose economies are buoyed with the purchase of more arms; those who will step in to grant loans or ask for concessions to rebuild places they supervised their destruction and by so doing gain a greater foothold in the future economies of the disintegrated people. It is not the man who abhors western education that manufactured the military hardware, and it takes one who has benefited from western education to learn how to operate them, read the signals, and camouflage the dissemination of information using the channels developed by western education.
This impression is supported by the comment of an analyst as recorded by Dr. S. Okechukwu Mezu (Nigeria Ojukwu Azikiwe Biafra, 2012. Baltimore, MD: Black Academy Press) who said, “You see, we quit colonising by force; but we colonise by money.” Elaborating how the colonisation by money works, Mezu went on to write: “Consequent on this, smiling from the comfort of their distant chair and manipulation, foreign economic and political potentates help sow in Africa the seeds of discord where there is relative peace, and the flames of civil war where there is a misunderstanding. Naturally, this facilitates the cheap exploitation of Africa’s natural resources…” (pp. 76, 77).
Therefore it is not only the pathological hate of western education; it is not only about expansionist Arabism; there is equally the aggressive western economic imperialism. All these put together and complicated by the fact that majority of Nigerians are still asleep to what Ojukwu woke up and saw decades ago; and for which he became the arrowhead of those who woke up with him but were crushed by forces that benefited from the sleeping giant, are the bane of Nigeria of which the Boko Haram is only an outgrowth.
Surely people can still be deceived that true to their name, it is Boko Haram (Western education is an aberration that needs to be eradicated) because of how they have come to attack schools and truncate people’s education. I don’t buy that. For me, it is all about inciting a religious tension in order to actualise the agenda of the tri-forces that Ojukwu saw and fought against without success decades back. This ploy is intended to exploit the weaknesses of religion which appeals in the mind of many to the fanatical instincts.
If not, why did the insurgents not attack the schools where majority of the population are Muslims, or do you think that such schools do not exist? Religious wars touch on the faith sentiments of peoples which are seen from the prisms of a do-or-die thing. That is why some people see religion as opium and an irrational enterprise. Once this irrationality gets the upper hand, you can only imagine the level of destruction that can come from it.
The abduction of the girls is bait for the release of jihadists. The silence of the elite whose region is on fire is evil in intent, in orientation, in execution and definitely in the outcome. The monster, which grew as political thuggery gone wild, can grow even madder to choke up the space for any rule of decency in the future. Learn from the Biafran enclave that had no armed robbery, for instance, before the civil war and what came to be after the war, since all the weapons can never be mopped up when hostilities end. The sleep today is creating the seed ground for an uncontrollable evil wind tomorrow.
I therefore applaud every structure in the government and peoples of Nigeria that tread the path of sanity rather than embrace the insanity that plays into the hands of the three forces which Ojukwu saw as the enemy of the black man. On behalf of everything and anything we hold dear as a nation, I plead that we should wake up now. The Igbos say, “Taa bu gboo” (today is early enough).
Most importantly, we should all accept that these forms of brazen madness are alien to our African spirit. Ours is a communitarian cosmology where life is sacred, where the concept of live and let live is observed, and where the sense of taboo is part of the moral proposition.
Let us all wake up to know when we are being used against ourselves. Now is the time, and when we miss it, tomorrow will be characterised by passion of unhinged lost opportunities which no fanaticism can recapture. And that tomorrow will be more painful if somebody tells us that day, “Good morning, good morning, good morning.”
• Rev. Fr. Okeahialam, is a Catholic priest based in Colorado, United States.