 |
| Governor Yero of Kaduna State |
The
topmost proviso of social contracts in a post-Hobsian State of Nature is the protection
of the lives of the citizens of a nation by its government. Due to the importance
attached to this, it is referred to as the Traditional Duty of government. For
a while now, we have seen how this chief duty is becoming too hard for the government
of Kaduna State to perform vis-a-vis the genocide going on in Southern Kaduna. From
the onset, we were tempted to believe that the magnitude and sophistication of
the genocidal strategy currently being executed in Southern Kaduna caught the government
unawares, thus its barren initiative to truncate this diabolical agenda using the
security agencies. But now, we think otherwise. We greatly doubt the sincerity
of the state government in tackling this menace.
For fear of getting overwhelmed in a
catalogue of events and losing sight of facts and curious coincidences, let us
not stretch too far by chronicling events that transpired years ago. A few
weeks ago, Aduwan village in Zangon Kataf LGA was attacked, lives were lost,
and properties destroyed. What was the government’s reaction? It took the
Kaduna State government days to visit the areas ravaged by a marauding militia to
commiserate with the victims. When state officials finally visited, what were their
words and actions? They stated that the survivors of the terrorist attack be
referred to advanced medical facilities in Kaduna metropolis! What did the
government spokesperson tell the world? "We shall hunt down perpetrators
of these acts and punish them". This statement didn't condemn the act but rather
tried to create scapegoats from those accusing government of negligence in the
handling of the security situation in the area.
As the state government’s hunting of
terrorists, killers of the Aduwan people, was going on, Attakar villages in
Kaura LGA were being savagely attacked, with dozens killed (mostly women and
children), and even more uprooted from their ancestral homes and forced to seek
refuge in IDP camps. For days, the whole world was denied the knowledge of this
atrocity by some ‘official cover-up’. The world only got to hear of it when the
Center for Development and Rights Advocacy (CEDRA) went to the ravaged
communities with journalists and relief materials. That bold step by CEDRA
forced government to act by physically visiting and dragging state and national
emergency bodies along. True to type, in the IDP camps, the government sang the,
now familiar, song of, “hunting and punishing the perpetrators”.
Now this genocide scheme has been transferred,
in the form of arm banditry, from villages in the hinterland of Southern Kaduna
to all highways leading to it. Last week, a senior NNPC staff was attacked and
killed on one such highway. After that nasty wasting of a promising engineer,
there are so-called daily robberies that occur in all the routes leading to
Southern Kaduna. In all robbery incidences, lives and properties are lost.
Still, the Kaduna State Government and security agencies sing the same old sad
song: "we will hunt and prosecute perpetrators of these acts".
These incidences clearly show that there
are loose ends in the administrative and physical security arrangement in the
state. There is no clear congruence between the quantum of resources oozing through
the pipeline of security votes and the actual security people are (not) enjoying
in the southern part of the state. It's now difficult to extricate government from
being consciously or unwittingly complacent in this reign of impunity that is akin
to the formative stages of a genocidal scheme. As this reign of impunity persists,
the assaults, killings, and so-called robbery in Southern Kaduna are taking the
pattern of events that may climax with a Rwanda-like genocide.
If there aren't skeletons in government's cupboard,
if they want to set themselves free from the conspiracy theory making the rounds,
they should, with immediate alacrity, form a powerful committee to look into
allegations of a genocide scheme targeting the people of Southern Kaduna. Anything
short of this will proof right the allegation of the state government's
complacency.
No comments:
Post a Comment