BY REV. FR. GERALD NWAFOR
I do not believe in karma but as a Christian, I believe that they who live by the sword will die by the sword. Common sense also suggests that what you ordered is what you will get at the delivery (ife onye choo ka oga afu). You cannot order oranges because it is cheaper and be waiting for apples. In 2014 it was clearly orchestrated by the political class to kidnap the Chibok girls for whatever reasons.
I do not want to engage in speculations about what happened, but we read in the news that the government of the day, by that I mean the security forces, were given information about what was about to happen, but they did nothing. Evil is not wished away when they are invited.
I was watching international breaking news. It was used against the government of the day as being weak and dumb. I was sitting on the fence because I knew that appearance and reality are not the same. I remember President Jonathan saying that John Kerry (USA foreign secretary) told nhim to hand it over.
And he humbly asked him who since there was no election. Jonathan also mentioned John Kerry’s surreptitious visit to the opposition then without saying a word to him. Why was John Kerry interested in the government of Nigeria? Why are we not hearing about bringing back our boys and girls again when the government of Jonathan lost the election? The Chibok girls were sacrificed for whatever reason there was, and the spirits of those girls are hovering over northern Nigeria.
The people of northern Nigeria did not bargain for this carnage happening now, where the terrorists and bandits run amok and kidnap school kids in hundreds. When the Chibok girls were kidnapped, the present government was in opposition, the present VP was the governor of Borno state, and the president was the leader of the political party.
I just stated the facts, and you need to make the discovery and conclusion yourself.The amount of money assigned to the military and security in Nigeria in the last 9 years to stop the bandits, the terrorists, the insurgents, and the herdsmen is said to be greater than the amount of money budgeted for the whole military from 1960 to 2015. But there is no success in sight and the sickness and insecurity are getting worse.
A look at what transpired this week in the Senate chamber was a joke taken too far. The senate president suspended a senator who questioned the budget allocation to his state. A simple question is, why his state would get an 18-billion-Naira agricultural incentive and some other states get zero? Or a situation where some senators have 120 billion constituent fee budgets, and others will get 2 billion.
And the big question states that some ranking senators got 500 million Naira, and some got nil. Look at how the senators are sharing our commonwealth as if to say they are not sensitive to the plight of the common man in today’s Nigeria. While the ordinary Nigerian is struggling to know where the next meal will come from, some groups of adults are in a room behaving like thieves! Sorry, I mean to say, kids. The APC government took over in 2015 and promised heaven on earth; now I think it is better to say we got hell on earth.
I do not want to engage in the long statistic of saying one dollar was this in 2014 to in 2024 it is that a bag of rice used to be 7000 and now it is 65000. That will be unnecessary in this work, but my worry should be that the public has decided to ignore the daylight rape on democracy and its tenets.
I watched Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe defending what happened in the senate after the whistleblower senator was suspended for three months. I said to myself that even the good in the senate has been corrupted. Who could have imagined Enyinnaya siding with Akpabio of all people? Nobody is in the Nigerian Senate anymore.Back to the real story and the little solution I have to offer the people at the helm of the government of Nigeria.
First, blood is thicker than water and we know the consequences of shedding blood in African tradition. Even the bible enumerated that when Cain killed Abel the just, that the blood of Abel started crying to heaven for vengeance. Now more than 100 blood(s) or more of Chibok girls are crying to heaven for vengeance and the Nigerian government thinks that God will not listen. They are being deceived.
Anybody whose hands were involved in the disappearance of the Chibok girls will not rest until he or she does the needful.
The northern governors should gather and ask questions because Shekarau, who was the mastermind of the Boko Haram group that was said to have kidnapped the Chibok girls is dead, but the kidnapping hasn’t stopped: rather it has metastasized into banditry and insurgence and more terror groups created.
If all the schools in the north should be re-located into the city, it will not stop the school kidnappings. Remember the Chibok girls were mostly girls and Christians ten years ago. Today in Kaduna it was an Islamic seminary and mostly males. Those who think that it would happen only to Christians or that it would not happen to Muslims should re-think.
Evil is always infinite and deceptive while good is simple and definite. You cannot put a band-aid over a festering wound. Nigerians need answers as regards what happened to the Chibok girls on the night of April 14-15, 2014. The government of Nigeria should not deceive us by peeing on our backs and telling us that it was raining.