A DEADLY SUBTERFUGE
Terrorists deserve only the dock and the noose, reckons Ike Willie-Nwobu
Justice must precede peace if peace is to have immediate power or hold lasting promise. Peace is the usual goal of conflict resolution, whether it is arbitration, mediation or conciliation. Because of its acrimonious nature, litigation is not always considered the pathway to peace, even if it’s more forceful ways of seeking justice guarantees peace eventually.
As a country, Nigeria has grappled with many solutions to terrorism since 2009 when Boko Haram’s campaign became bolder and bloodier. One of the solutions was to rehabilitate and reintegrate into the society terrorists willing to ‘repent’ and lay down their arms. This proved immediately divisive along two polemical planks. On one side were the communities reduced to rubble who felt that reintegrating their attackers will be salt to their wounds. On the other side were those who argued that this solution experimented in other terror-marred places had yielded undeniable fruits. There was also a case to be made closer home: the amnesty granted the Niger Delta militants, which largely quelled the restiveness in the area when oil pipelines and expatriate workers became bargaining chips in socio-political war.
If the argument that justice isn’t justice until it extends some allowance, no matter how limited to the accused favored the repentant terrorists, it seemed to abandon those railing against any soft landing for terrorists, especially as there were allegations politics was put before people.
Despite protestations, the Nigerian Army went along with its De-radicalisation, Rehabilitation and Re-integration plans. Indeed, when the laughter of the supposedly repentant terrorists sailing over the fence of the de-radicalisation, rehabilitation and reintegration camp at the Kwami Local Government Area of Gombe State as they played football reverberated in the news some years ago, images of laughing hyenas rose unbidden in many minds.
For those who believe that the repentance of the terrorists was a ruse all along despite its minimal gains, painful vindication came by fire on 1st May 2024 when ‘repentant’ Boko Haram members burnt down checkpoints belonging to the Nigeria Customs Service and National Drugs Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) in Kasuwan Fara, Borno State.
In a country sorely lacking in justice, a beaker of brutal jokes is always threatening to overflow. It was always a smokescreen, wasn’t it? The swell of the entire scheme was always to dispense slaps on wrists and stitch together a soft landing for those who showed ruthless hardness as they rampaged through communities raping women, ripping limbs apart in an orgy of bloody violence.. The signs were there from the beginning that the leopard would struggle to change its spots yet the federal government and the security forces perhaps exhausted by their exertions against a formidable force chose the cheaper but far costlier option of cajoling and befriending terrorists. In January, the Chief of Defence Staff had gleefully announced that about 3,478 terrorists had been successfully reintegrated into different communities in seven years. The success implied by the CDS is best interpreted as relative, and it is not in the place of the Nigerian Army to refine the contours of this relativity.
Can pathological killers suddenly become pacifists? Even the Divine would struggle to fashion peace into those whose inherent nature is violence. In animals, gustatory geography gives that once blood is tasted, it becomes impossible to delete blood from mouths, especially from memory, and those who trample communities to dust are worse than animals for even animals sometimes show restraint.
The smoke billowing from the burnt checkpoints is a sign of a scuttled strategy. When the government should have built cages to hold men who had become more rabid and ravenous than rabies-infected animals, it compelled the taxpayer to build cozy camps for them. When a lash of scorpions would have been a generous guerdon, laughter and footballs were given them so they could troll countless children whose childhood they had stolen while razing their schools and turning their playgrounds in a graveyard of memories.
The problem with Nigeria Is that there is no justice. Colonialism was a grave injustice. The mirage of justice offered by independence in 1960 was swiftly lost to the way the country has been (mis) managed since then, occasionally by the military, which provided the scaffolding for the presently unfolding chaos.
At every occasion, the country shows itself incapable of doing justice. As well as the macabre corruption endemic to the judiciary, there are many who are complicit in shielding criminals from justice.
Building a country where dignity endures demands that a human face is worn even while treating the worst offenders. But just as true is the fact that destruction is perhaps the most delicate task in creation. Presently, Nigeria is showing little promise in navigating this nuance. While it commits billions to fighting terrorism, terrorists, wearing fake masks of remorse, slip behinds its guard to unrepentantly incinerate the pyres of a broken country.
Trauma often assumes a life of its own and outlives generations. Many things never recover from being broken, no matter how much effort is fed into finding repair or forcing reparation. To assume to rehabilitate terrorists when commensurate efforts have not been made to help broken communities pick up the pieces of their broken lives presents the narrative as needled with pathetic flaws. Those behind it are either insensitive at best or just desperately callous.
It Is always a mistake to detain what can only be defeated by destruction. To wear a human face when the set is for a ghost story and the costumiers are ghost-like is to court grave folly.
To catch killers, Nigeria must return to the trail of the past to discover the path to the future. It must read the past and the present and attempt to decipher the invisible to discover and destroy the seedbed of weeds threatening to suffocate the country.
Those who have called themselves to be confessors to terrorists must remember that cold-blooded killers don’t change, that the past here pulses with blood, and that victims of terrorism deserve dignity which can only come from justice visited on their attackers.
The Nigerian Army is not in a position to preach a gospel of forgiveness to Nigerians. The undoubted victims of the egregious atrocity that terrorism is will decide if and when to forgive the terrorists. The decision is that they have not decided. Until they do, terrorists deserve only the dock and the noose. To coddle them with taxes or comfort them with the promises of a new life in communities they ripped apart without mercy is an unspeakable betrayal.
Temporary shortcuts may be scratched to the sheds of history, but the shortchanged must never forget that history always heaves with vindication and retribution.
Ikewilly9@gmail.com
