The military high command has come out to say that the gunmen who abducted schoolchildren and murdered their teachers in Ogbomoso were JAS men. JAS (Jama’tu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad) is a splinter of Boko Haram. One of the kidnapped teachers was beheaded on camera by the terrorists who flung the video into cyberspace to our collective horror. So, finally, in Yorubaland, they have come.
I can count two, three, four people around me who watched that video and fell ill. Yet those who did it felt normal and may do it again because they always do. “Any savage likes to collect heads,” Iris Murdoch writes in ‘A Severed Head’, a story of victims who think they are survivors. And why the head, of all parts of the human body? Murdoch says heads are “the apex of our incarnation.”
Nigeria’s contemporary terror has historical roots. Almost exactly 200 years ago (1826 /1827), in that same Ogbomoso axis, Edun of Gbogun, an Aare Ona Kakanfo, suffered what the murdered teacher suffered at the hands of the Fulani.
Recorded as one of the notable figures of the nineteenth-century Yoruba wars, and the last major shield defending the northern Oyo frontiers against Ilorin, this Aare was defeated in battle by the Fulani, and the unthinkable was done to him. Samuel Johnson, in ‘The History of the Yorubas’, writes that “his head was taken off, put on a pole” and carried “in triumph to Ilorin.”
Because reuniting Kakanfo Edun’s head with his body was necessary if his spirit would rest, Johnson wrote that “Edun’s son afterwards went to Ilorin, and did obeisance to the Emir, who then allowed him to take his father’s head away; it was brought back and buried with the body at Gbogun.” Obeisance was the ransom exacted before the family could complete the Aare’s burial rites.
Now, almost exactly 200 years after that publicly displayed human head and humiliating ransom, the marauders are back. Has the body of the murdered teacher now been released for burial? No. The terrorists are possibly waiting for ransom. Ransom and a severed head? Read Edun’s story and remember history’s record of something similar.
I also read somewhere that the abductors holding the Oyo schoolchildren demanded that the state governor speak directly with them. Interesting and intriguing. What really was the motive behind all these? The abduction and the conditions attached to it jointly signal the possible arrival of Boko Haram in Yorubaland. So, unless this household wakes up and drives away the invading army, more heads may yet be hoisted on poles and carried as trophies by triumphant killers.
The president and Commander-in-Chief reacted to the Ogbomoso abduction and murder last Monday. A friend was angry that it took the president four days after the tragedy to react. I told my friend to relax. He should not blame the president. What if he was warned or advised not to say anything until he was cleared to speak?
“Who would clear the president?”
“His advisers.”
“Who?”
Only the naïve asks questions whose answers everyone already knows.
Yesterday, I bought a copy of General Yakubu Gowon’s autobiography. The first “secret” I saw divulged there is the role marabouts played in the running of our country. In the very first chapter, and within the first eight pages, the old man writes about how his office as Head of State was “bombarded with messages by several clerics and marabouts from Dakar, Senegal, and an astrologer from Mali” asking him to be wary of the very people who gave his government meaning.
In the 1990s, we heard stories of how spiritualists from these “religious” countries wielded enormous influence over our leaders, particularly key figures in the government of Sani Abacha. Go out today, don’t go out tomorrow. Hire this man, fire that man. We heard stories that they completely caged Abacha inside the Villa so that he would not die. But because he who wants to save his life shall lose it, Abacha died right inside the Villa.
We have always read that clerics wielded enormous powers, but what many probably never knew is that they also did security work. Gowon said the marabouts were “agents of the French Intelligence Service” whose motive was to infiltrate his government and rule or ruin it from within. He said he ignored them and handed over his life and affairs to God.
Not all leaders avoid marabouts; many court and worship them, often to their ruin. It happened to Afonja, another Kakanfo whose attachment to spiritualists brought Sheikh Alimi into the very centre of his power, and to his sorrow.
How much of that cleric content do we have in our own power bottle today? Gowon said the marabouts who sized him up were French agents; so, whose agents are today’s mystics?
Some ten years ago, Nigerians were told that the country spent N2.2 billion hiring clerics for national prayers against insecurity. The money and the prayers went with the wind. Today, what happens behind the curtains of power? We still have marabouts as drivers of our politics and governments. Many African presidents, we are told, do not sleep, travel or even make appointments without consulting unseen “controllers.”
How much influence do these invisible advisers wield today in Abuja? That is a question worth asking whenever power behaves strangely in Nigeria, especially now that government is afraid to call terror and terrorists by their name.
“I can’t stop thinking of the abducted pupils and their teachers. Many will be traumatised for life. If they were forced to watch the beheading of their mathematics teacher, many will suffer mental health issues. All of them will never be the same again.” An old schoolmate and health practitioner in the United States sent me those words. You should have no difficulty agreeing with her.
I set out to write that Nigeria is the factual setting of the classic horror film or detective novel: bloody, harsh, cold, intriguing and insane. But there is one difference. No matter how long the night of blood and darkness, detective fiction traditionally ends with order restored. The guilty are exposed, justice is served, and society breathes again. Nigeria’s bad story does not end; it remains trapped in the middle chapters where chaos walks forever freely and innocence bleeds till eternity.
Nigeria suffers urban chaos and rural terror. Stand on the terrace of your home and look at the street. What stretches before you is a horizon of insecurity, untamed terror and collapsed social order. The cloud and its storm are not fleeting, yet we individually comfort ourselves with the hope that our own roofs will escape the rain.
The president last Monday expressed similar optimism. He promised bandits and their collaborators hell in the hands of hunters. He said they would face the law. What law? What justice? He spoke as if we do not know that in Nigeria, terrorism moves swiftly while justice limps behind it.
I cite an example. The trial of a kidnapping suspect commenced in an Oyo State High Court only a few days ago. The abduction happened in March 2019. A farm guard from the North masterminded the abduction of his own employers. A ransom of N25 million was paid, one worker was killed, confessional statements were obtained and arrests made almost immediately. Yet, seven years later, the case has only just started crawling through the courts, with witnesses now recounting their ordeal before a judge.
Because terrorism here rejects the certainty of punishment, terror in the South-West has now moved from farms to schools. In Yorubaland, schools are inviolable symbols of innocence and civilisation. Strange men with strange ideas have now turned them into theatres of horror.
The first school in Nigeria, ‘The Nursery of the Infant Church’, was founded in Badagry in 1843 by Mr. and Mrs. De Graft. For the first time since that epoch, Yoruba parents are now genuinely afraid of sending their children to school. You blame them? “The wise sees danger and hides himself, but the fool proceeds and suffers for it.”
If the Yoruba child can no longer go safely to school, then the enemy has scored a terrifying victory over the land. The classroom was once where Yoruba society hid its future from danger. We took it for granted that it was the safest place in any modern civilisation. Nigeria’s special breed of terror has now turned the school assembly ground into a hunting ground. It used to be said only of the North-East that gunmen invaded schools with the confidence of landlords returning to their property. Now it has happened in the South-West. Pupils are marched into forests; teachers are abducted and beheaded like plantain trees. The blackboard and gravestone have become frightening companions.
When the sacred is violated, what should the guardian priest do? Befriend the violators? Celebrate them as cousins and pardon them as prodigal sons? The body language of today’s politics increasingly suggests that the wages of sin should not be death — all because of the calculations of election and re-election.
Nigeria’s deepest tragedy may therefore not even be terrorism itself, but our growing accommodation of it. The country has become a vast jungle of predators and prey. In that jungle, the hierarchy is fixed: the hunted remain hunted; the spared merely await their appointed hour. No matter the severity of a tragedy, society moves on as if nothing happened. We consume reports of massacres and abductions with weary resignation. We debate horror like football scores. We place lush artificial grass of normalcy over the ugly surface of our nationhood.
In that same Ogbomoso corridor of abduction and beheading, politicians spent last week harvesting primary votes. The ruling APC held governorship and presidential primaries undisturbed. Even in the traumatised Oriire Local Government Area, locals queued while votes were counted. Across the nation, winners sang and danced; the president gave a victory yesterday to a defeated nation. That is how Nigeria rolls. It wears the mask of peace while its people live the reality of war.
Nigeria will eat its corn meal even while the house burns and robbers roam freely: Bí ilé njó, bí olè njà, won á jè’ko. A dark pall now hangs over the country. Hitherto safe territories are slipping beyond state control; schools no longer feel sacred; roads have become ambush corridors and farms are theatres of war. Bandits even invade homes now to harvest preys.
Nigeria was conceived as a covenant against barbarism. Yet barbarism now walks openly across the land.
I see a huge problem coming. Unless those who breed these hounds restrain them, the country may soon convulse. Across the South-West, communities increasingly speak the dangerous language of self-help because the Nigerian State appears weak, hesitant and indecisive. Laws, courts and governments exist to prevent society from collapsing into primal violence. The terrorists who abduct children and behead teachers are not ordinary criminals; they are enemies of civilisation itself. Their attack on individuals is symbolic; their true target is the very idea of sanity.
Now, what next? Will this flood stop its southward sweep? That question can only be answered positively if this other one is answered first: Does the present system possess enough competence and moral will to rescue its classrooms, defend its children and reclaim civilisation from the merchants of fear? A state that cannot defend its classrooms has failed at the first duty of civilisation.
America recently shut its embassy services in Abuja. Like competent weather forecasters, they sensed a coming hurricane and took cover. Our own “seers” see nothing; our “hearers” hear nothing. A friend wonders what our intelligence community does beyond searching for threats to power and its temporary occupants. Why are these roaming terrorists never detected before they strike? Should intelligence work prevent disaster or merely arrive afterwards to count corpses? People answer “detective” without interrogating the meaning of the word itself. ‘Word Stories’ in the Oxford English Dictionary takes a deep and scintillating dive into that history. It should interest those whose profession is the detection of evil before evil acts.
From Arthur Conan Doyle to Agatha Christie, the classic detective novel presents the investigator who restores moral order to chaos and pursues truth even when society fears confronting it. Nigeria today desperately needs such intelligence, competence and moral courage. People are paid every month to see danger before it erupts. Why do they arrive only after disaster?
My teacher taught me that the old detective stories of English literature were built on a simple assumption: civilisation is fragile; beneath every appearance of order lurks chaos waiting to break loose.
That is where the detective comes in. He exists to uncover hidden plots, stop carnage and restore moral balance. But what happens when society itself loses the will, the competence or the courage to confront and punish evil? In such a place and situation, even the watcher becomes helpless. He may see danger clearly, announce it promptly and warn repeatedly, yet because of politics, audacious catastrophe still marches forward unchecked.
I pray Nigeria has not reached that tragic point of no return.