By Monday Japhet Emo
It was like slow motion, hearts missed a beat, breathes stopped for nano seconds, deafening silence then the loud bang of explosion- sharpenels flew in a wide magnetic vortex, mauling and maiming anything within a wide radius, fire and smoke then everything became still.
That instinct of self preservation, pumped adrenaline into lethargic and fear stiffened legs as people began to run away from the blast, some blood soaked, with gashes others with a cut or two yet a few others with no bruise but they had to run anyway. Pause! This scene is not from a movie nor a live footage of events in Afghanistan or Iraq, this was a bomb blast in Nyanya, a settlement in the outskirts of Abuja! Abuja the Federal Capital Territory and the playground of the rich and famous in Nigeria.
The burnt skeleton of the buses, the charred remains of the bodies so callously cut short by bombs, the forlorn and helpless look on the faces of the survivors and eyewitnesses who bravely returned after initially scampering for safety to see what little help they could render the fatally injured and dead. The terrorist who planted the bomb actually slipped through or even helped clear some bodies littering the busy bus stop.
I imagine the police, SSS, DSS and several security apparatchiks with funny acronyms arriving thirty minutes later, cordoning off the crime scene by pushing and shoving the brave Nigerians including the escaping terrorists who were busy helping out and standing with machine guns and sub machine guns cocked and ready for firing or slung lazily across the shoulder.
Unlike western films where security agencies will scour and comb the area for debris of the explosives, trace it to the manufacturer or check if it was a home made bomb, check for finger prints,check various slides of camera to see unusual movements or capture the face of the terrorists, am sure our guys will write something like ” at 0019 hours….”
There is no shame in it, it’s time to call for help. If we can hire foreign coaches and foreign political strategists, it’s time to check out security experts so that we can build the infrastructure needed for intelligence gathering, our security agencies are still far off the mark . Imagine if there was a camera covering major entrance and exit routes. It might not catch the culprits but it will give the agencies a head start.
So when our security agencies say they are on top of it, what does it mean! Are they lying on case files or they are arresting people at random hoping one might confess or they can beat one into confession? Do we have forensic experts among them? The fools I see with full combat fatigues harassing motorists “open ya boot” hardly can identify terrorists even if they show them the bombs. If up till now the IG of police and the director of SSS cannot tell us the leader of bloody sect or show us photos of its wanted members then we should open negotiations, I for one will grow a beard but I won’t give up alcohol. The scary prospect of being ruled by religious zealots or being bombed to smith screen should compel us all to force the president to seek urgent help from outside, our spooks can’t infiltrate those boys, our security agencies are so corrupt it’s not improbable that they sell information on troop formation and other top military secrets.
We have not yet declared war on the terrorists because the ruling party and the opposition still think it’s a major trump card for 2015 elections, in memory of the seventy seven that died (figure adjusted) I will stay off alcohol for seventy seven days but Nigerians should stand up and ask pointed questions: the immigration department has no clue how many illegal border routes are spread across Nigeria, the customs are interested only in seizing and impounding cars and other expensive goods, how come guns and ammunition flow in and out of the country? Just how many of the “abokis” we see hawking on the streets of major cities of Nigeria are actually Nigerians? What records does our police have? Without fingerprints and other forms of forensic identification, it is practically impossible to track even the arrested members of the terrorists sect. Am sure the police stations are littered with long notebooks with blurry and worn passports. Who fights terror like this and expects to win? Where does police work stop? What specifically does the SSS do? What about the DSS and the other strange agencies? How do they interface? Our security system needs a total overhaul to fight modern warfare which seems more to be curtailing dangerous forays of terror networks. These might be drunken thoughts but they are worrying thoughts to fight a digital war with catapult is akin to relying on witchcraft to fight foreign aggressors.
