By Kayode Emola
Next month it will be 10 years since the mass kidnap of 276 girls, mostly Christian, from their school in Chibok, Maiduguri. One would have thought that Nigeria as a country will rise up and address these issues of home-grown insurgencies and terrorism, but it appears that the situation is instead getting worse.
Just this week, a group of terrorists invaded a primary school in Kaduna shortly after the morning assembly, kidnapping over 200 people, most of whom were children and their teachers. To date not even one of the kidnapped victims has been rescued. Worse still, the government appears to have no concrete plan to address this growing menace.
In many states of northwestern Nigeria, farmers are now forced to pay tributes to these terrorists, up to hundreds of thousands of Naira, merely to access to their own farmlands. Such a thing should not happen in a country like Nigeria that boasts of having highly sophisticated security apparatus. Maybe the security forces Nigeria has are just for show, rather than protecting lives and properties.
Yet when we discuss this with our Yoruba youths who will be the greatest victims of this country’s misrule, they argue that one day things will improve. I wish that countries were built on miracles, then Nigeria would be one of the greatest countries in the world. However, since this is not the case, Yoruba youths need to learn that hard work and dedication are the necessary tools needed to build a strong and flourishing nation, not just mere hope.
Many people want to give President Tinubu a chance to reform Nigeria, but nobody knows what form this would take. Even 30 years after Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Program of the 1990s promised to transform Nigeria, we still don’t know what a reformed Nigeria would look like.
It is foolishness to think that this present-day Nigeria can be reformed in a way that can transform the fortunes of ordinary people. Nigeria was not built to cater for the needs of its citizens, rather it was deliberately created to be a dysfunctional state to allow exploitation of its natural resources by Britain and its allies. The sooner our Yoruba youths realise this, and support dissolution the better our chances of survival in our own independent nation. Otherwise, this political contraption in which we find ourselves will consume all of us.
It would be foolhardy to continue to pour our strength, energy and God-given talent into a conglomeration that is a country in name only. Nigeria has no unification of nationality or nationhood. It is a forced amalgamation of a huge variety of differing nations; and this disunion is what allows these menaces of kidnapping to continue unchallenged.
If our youths are hoping their Governors or local representatives will protect them from these insurgencies, they will be in for a rude shock. Our governors have no powers to protect any of us; they are also at the mercy of these non-state actors, so are helpless to protect even their own lives and property.
This is even more reason why the Yoruba people must act to clean up our forests from these invaders as a matter of urgency. For, if we fail to act now, we may end up being slaves in our own land, the land that is our birthright, gifted to our forefathers.
Every Yoruba person must view these terrorists’ attacks on the northern farmlands and farmers not as a distant affair but to be aware that it is already happening in our own lands. We, too, are victims of these insurgencies. Unless we unite to come out of this contraption together, all our hopes for a brighter future will be in vain, and that future will never become reality.