As Nigeria`s free but forceful descent into the doldrums of insecurity has continued unchecked, it has become customary for violence to episodically erupt various parts of of the country, claim life or limbs, sow fear, and then go on to echo in other parts of the country.
The terrorists who have reinvented the mechanics of death and destruction have been especially active in recent times, sending many to their early graves, and irreparably altering many lives. These terrorists who now operate under various guises are found all over the country and a feature common to all of them is that they kill and destroy when it is inconceivable that they can have any right to do so.
A Strained response
As Nigeria has woken up to the necessity of confronting the killers who sometimes pose as messiahs, it is men and women of Nigeria`s security agencies that have necessarily and naturally been put at the forefront of the national response. They are the men who have been tasked with leading the charge against the combatants of death. By no means has it been an easy task.
As civilian casualties have piled up from Kaduna to Niger, the men who defend Nigeria`s sovereignty and integrity have been called upon many times to pay the supreme price. And it is an aghast country that has been forced to watch some of its finest officers, many of them in their prime, reduced to battered bodies.
It is why whispers about the poor welfare of those who defend Nigeria have always gone to the heart with the question being if they are not properly taken care of to put them in the best conditions to defend the country, what hope can the Giant of Africa have of winning the battle against terrorism.
An atrocious attack
Like Pilate, the Indigenous People of Biafra Movement (IPOB) may have since washed its hands off incessant attacks going on in many parts of the Southeast, and the noxious grounding of activities in the region every Monday. However, because it was under its acquiescent watch that the security architecture of the region first crumbled, it cannot escape responsibility, or at least suspicion, each time there is a gruesome attack anywhere in the region like the one that happened at Umunze, Anambra State on Wednesday, September 28,2022.
On that day, gunmen attacked an army post in the town and killed no fewer than five soldiers. The images and videos of the slain officers have since gone viral to shock the sensibilities of people in a country that has in the last seven years witnessed what no country should have to witness in a thousand years.
No one has yet claimed the attack, but the history of bloodletting in the southeast generally and in the region particularly unmistakably rakes a giant finger of blame along the backs of self-styled freedom fighters who because they are supposedly fighting for the freedom of the region consider Nigeria`s security personnel enemies and prime targets. They have succeeded in turning the Southeast into a killing field.
But they are not freedom fighters and have never been. They are degenerate cowards who fight for nothing and no one but themselves. It is by their hands that a region that lived through the gripping horrors of the Nigerian Civil war is being forced to remember that which it prefers to forget.
The Nigerian army must respond forcefully to what is an unpardonable attack on its men who continue to put their lives on the line to defend the country from killers and their minions. It should never happen anywhere in Nigeria that gallant officers are killed under any circumstances without the killers attracting the direst of consequences.
Those who do these things do not act from a place of any rational grievance. Their experiment is quickly proving to be a colossal failure which has its source in their own colossal folly.
The long-suffering people of the southeast deserve a region free from guns and ghosts.
Kene Obiezu,
Twitter @keneobiezu
