Let me guess: Now that the over 300 teenage boys abducted from their boarding school in Kankara, Katsina State, have regained their freedom, Nigerians will jump for joy, slap each other’s backs, and go back to business as usual. Government, security and military officials will congratulate each other “for a job well done” and return to their accustomed lives of state-sponsored ineffectualness.
It’s the worst possible reaction to yet another affront on the Nigerian state. It shows we are a people with no collective intelligence and resolve. But it’s one reaction we are very much used to. And it’s not about to change anytime soon.
There is now a pattern by which common criminals abduct vast numbers of Nigerian citizens at will. The captives are held for as long as their captors want. Sometimes ransoms are demanded and paid. At other times the captives are killed, maimed, enslaved, held indefinitely or released at the pleasure of the criminals – and nothing happens.
In fact, the offenders are allowed to melt away. The security agencies say nothing about their fate or whereabouts, preferring to hide their shame behind the veil of official secrecy. Some of the criminals even become folk heroes and untouchables within their communities.
There are no longer consequences for unlawfully holding Nigerian citizens against their will, dehumanizing them and traumatizing their families and country as a whole. The life of the average Nigerian is now worth nothing. Similarly, the value of the Nigerian state in the eyes of both criminals and citizens must be hovering around zero.
Kankara is yet another proof that brazen criminality is now a legitimate and profitable occupation in Nigeria. It is carried out with the tacit approval, collaboration or acquiescence of the Nigerian state acting through its top political, military and intelligence officials.
If not, the abductors of the Kankara boys, the Dapchi girls and the Chibok girls (among many others that went unreported) would have been caught, killed or firmly punished for their heinous crimes. If not, there could have been faces, trials and consequences attached to the so-called bandits, gunmen and herdsmen terrorizing communities in vast swathes of Nigerian territory.
It is only by severely punishing offenders and criminals that people are deterred from the path of crime and society is kept in relative equilibrium.
But in Nigeria, authorities now tolerate, negotiate with and even reward criminals. Then they turn around to appropriate vast sums of public funds “to fight insurgents, bandits and kidnappers” in an obvious cycle of official fraud, deception.
To all intents and purposes, the Nigerian state has been captured either by criminal elements or by members of a secret military-political establishment. Either or both of these groups are bent on milking the country to death.
Nigeria no longer has the capacity to defend herself or protect her citizens from internal and external aggressors. This is the primary role of a modern state. We’re in deep, deep trouble.
Victor Anazonwu, a journalist and author, is a member of the Renaissance Editorial Board. He writes from Lagos
