By Ozodinukwe Okenwa
Terrorism is a global menacing anti-civilisation phenomenon! Since 2011 World Trade Centre horrific terrorist attack in New York, the US, the world has known little or no peace! Then, about 2,977 people were killed in the deadliest terrorist attacks in American history! Two planes, hijacked by Islamic jihadists vowing death to all Americans, plowed into both towers at the World Trade Center in New York. Another plane was flown into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
The late Osama Bin-Laden was the brain behind the horror of 9/11. The Saudi-born Islamic dissident had founded the pan-Islamic jihadist organization called al-Qaeda. Post-Bin-Laden terrorism on global scale has evolved going ‘nuclear’! Today the world is a less safer place to live in. Never before in the history of mankind have we had it so bad in terms of insecurity and jihadist bloodletting.
Back home in Nigeria the late Mohammed Yusuf had begun what he termed “Boko Haram” (meaning, loosely translated: Western education is forbidden) in the city of Maiduguri, Borno State. He was extra-judicially executed by the security forces upon his capture. That criminal act led to the emergence of the late Abubakar Shekau, a more vicious bloody animal out to kill and destroy everything and everybody in sight.
Shekau waged a brutal war against the Nigerian state, sometimes releasing video clips online mocking the President and security agencies after they claimed bogusly that he had been killed. He used the Internet while arguing blindly that western education amounted to an aberration!
He effortlessly ‘revolutionalized’ the Boko Haram terror machine incorporating kidnapping and ransom negotiations with the federal government. While the late Yusuf was moderate in his violent campaign Shekau was deadly and satanic in his efforts.
Today, we could heave a sigh of relief that Bin-Laden, Yusuf and Shekau had all gone to the Hades but the Islamic fundamentalism they left behind still endured. More recruits are pouring in especially in Nigeria where poverty and illiteracy are daily staples!
Boko Haram and ISWAP have killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Nigerians taking thousands more prisoners! They had kidnapped thousands including college young girls. Sister Leah Sharibu is still in their custody forcibly breeding children for them!
While the Buhari administration often claimed that they had degraded the military capacity of the terror group or that they have ‘technically’ defeated terror Boko Haram is still going strong killing, maiming, kidnapping, committing arson and rape on a massive scale up north.
Recently, Reuters news agency had done an extensive investigation into the Boko Haram terrorism and specifically the sex scandal that went with it. Investigative professional journalists like Paul Carsten, Reade Levinson, David Lewis and Libby George had visited Maiduguri and unearthed what amounted to a sex/abortion scandal of the century involving the Nigerian military.
The explosive report claimed that “since at least 2013, the Nigerian Army has run a secret, systematic and illegal abortion programme in the country’s northeast, terminating at least 10,000 pregnancies among women and girls, many of whom had been kidnapped and raped by Islamist militants, according to dozens of witness accounts and documentation reviewed by Reuters.”
They spoke to witnesses and concluded that it was a pattern meant to hide the criminal sexual savagery girls were subjected to by the demented terrorists and the ‘liberating’ federal forces. The report indicated that the abortion programme had taken place in the northeastern states of Yobe, Borno and Adamawa. And that it was done clandestinely, sometimes kept secret even from colleagues in the same hospital!
Giwa Barracks was one of the detention centres cited as places where the crime of forced abortions took place.
While the Nigerian military high command had rejected outright the conclusions reached by the credible international news agency, gray areas remain to be elucidated. Indeed, the Nigerian authorities are very good at denying anything that tends to portray them in a bad light internationally. That is why “Lie” Mohammed, Shehu ‘Garbage’ and Femi Adesina are there to always ‘puncture’ the peddled ‘lies’ and ‘misinformation’.
Perusing the report I must confess that I was shocked by its content. Girls hitherto kidnapped and later released recounting how they were injected with substances that led to bleeding and consequent abortion of their pregnancies without their consent or knowledge!
Perhaps, the soldiers administering the abortion drugs were afraid of population explosion! Or better still, the future risks inherent in allowing the teenagers having the children they could not cater for!
Boko Haram in particular and Islamist insurgency up north in general directly or indirectly led to Goodluck Jonathan falling from the presidency in 2015. He was seen as a ‘clueless’ leader incapable of taming insecurity in Nigeria! President Buhari came in as a retired military General, a coupist who undermined democracy in 1984!
PMB campaigned vigorously about restoring Nigeria’s violated territorial integrity, surging corruption and economic paralysis. But seven years down the line his presidency is buffeted right, left and centre by intractable insecurity, historic devaluation of the Naira and ‘fantastic’ corruption.
The presidential pestilence Nigerians are subjected to under Buharism was hard to predict way back in 2015. He has proven to be more clueless than Jonathan, all things considered!
Beyond the lurid abominable exposition of mass abortion by the Nigerian military what the Reuters investigative report showed is that the Boko Haram islamists are sexually proficient indeed! Apart from their determination to kill and render Nigeria ungovernable they take prisoners and enjoy sex outside the battlegrounds.
Now that the hidden truth has been revealed to the eternal shame of the Nigerian high military command it is hoped that the crime of forced abortion would cease henceforth.
Rather than engaging in mass abortion programme the soldiers waging war against the terrorists should consider wiping away Boko Haram as more important than leaving their breeding legacy intact.
The glorified bastards they father could be recruited in the future into the underwhelming military institution as children of a lost generation!
The Boko Haramic sex scandal goes beyond mere commission of egregious humanitarian crime. Nigeria is a crime scene, loading. And the criminal enterprise that passes for government at the centre must be dismantled come next year.
SOC Okenwa
soco_abj_2006_rci@hotmail.fr
