BOKO HARAM REGIME OF REPAINTED TERRORISTS

The treatment meted the so-called ‘repentant’ terrorists is an admission that crime pays, writes Uzor Maxim Uzoatu

The powers-that-be of Boko Haram have never had it so good. It’s as though they are in power.

Who has not heard that 601 so-called repentant, sorry, I meant to write repainted, Boko Haram terrorists have been re-integrated into communities after graduating in Gombe?

And the Boko Haram blokes were each paid N20,000 to boot! There is also the concurrent news that at the last count Boko Haram has succeeded in killing 1,433 children in Nigeria.

Crime and punishment can only be witnessed in the fiction of the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and not among the Boko Haram powers of Nigeria.

I have since thrown away all the books stating that crime does not pay. Crime pays well, that is, if you belong to the Boko Haram regime of Nigeria.

Welcome to the age of change, an era of democracy by magic.

The clear and present reality for the beloved country is that some characters are arranging by fire, by force that the Boko Haram regime must be here to stay.

The Boko Haram regime must not be bound by the niceties of Western education such as certificates and debates or rules and laws.

The Boko Haram regime can chew up like kola nuts the paper on which the Nigerian Constitution is written, and the heavens will not fall, as they say.

I do know that a critic or two may already be asking to know by what measure I came to decode that a regime has been forged in the hot smithy of Boko Haram.

Let’s just take a short trip on recent Nigerian history to find the needed answers.

According to some cynical pundits, in the light of the fact that post-1966 Nigeria has proven to be a pathetic study in unmitigated disaster and unspeakable absurdities, power grabbing in the country has become a violently volatile matter.

To the pundits, the supremacist Northern victors of the civil war operate Nigeria like the “Akpuruka” version of the so-called “Luxurious” buses in which they occupy the main seats and let out the “attachment” seats of “obere onye, obere oche”, that is, “small person, small seat”, to their Southern allies depending on how much noise each can make in the raucous motor-park called Nigeria.

In the recent scheme of things, the pundits stress, following the annulment of the June 12, 1993 election, the Odua People’s Congress (OPC) raised hell until Olusegun Aremu Obasanjo was arranged as the Nigerian president by the Northern potentates.

Forget all that jazz and claims that his people did not vote for Obasanjo: once the Owu man was anointed president by the powers-that-be there came about an “Aremunisation” programme, and his people pronto re-discovered and embraced the man’s local name and recondite tribal marks!

The pundits go further to cite the case of the people of the Niger Delta who went ballistic through the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND), putting pipelines in flames, kidnapping white and black personages with relentless alacrity such that Nigeria’s oil exports nearly dried up.

The ill-fated President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua had to perforce plead amnesty to stem the unrelenting onslaught.

Yar’Adua could not however outlive the charge; he died in office, and his Niger Delta deputy had to take over in very murky circumstances.

As a president who came to power based on the novel “Doctrine of Necessity”, Goodluck Jonathan beheld unprecedented Boko Haram bombing and was direly warned that an “attack on Boko Haram is an attack on the North!”

Poor Jonathan had to go as he did not want any blood spilt on his head.

The Joint Task Force (JTF) that used to be domiciled in the Niger Delta has been transferred to the Maiduguri axis of the Northeast where Boko Haram holds sway.

The soldiers of our dear country are firing guns while the Boko Haram goons are throwing bombs.

The militant Islamist group cannot be stopped mid-course in the task of fulfilling a lifelong ideology: the imposition of Sharia law throughout all 36 states of Nigeria and Abuja.

The Boko Haram group, founded in 2002 in Maiduguri by Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, stands in pole position of giving Nigeria a regime that breaks all the world records such as repainting and rewarding terrorists.

The old knowledge that the world is round has to be deleted from history, as the sect founder Yusuf said in a 2009 BBC interview that such knowledge was not Islamic.

The Boko Haram regime represents the ultimate change in the march of civilization, or lack thereof.

I have already gathered up all my certificates to make a huge bonfire of them in keeping with the order of the Boko Haram regime of Nigeria.

All the characters wanting to debate with the Boko Haram regime in the name of democracy or restructuring or whatever may end up facing the firing squad – retroactively!

Welcome, fellow Nigerians, to the age of mufti change featuring the Boko Haram regime of repainted terrorists and their cabal in power.