From: Adeoye Agbabiaka
President Goodluck Jonathan
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THERE are indignation and shock in the land following the brutal killing of 42 pupils of Government Secondary School, Mamudo, about five kilometres from Potiskum, Yobe State, by Boko Haram gunmen in the early hours of July 6. The Boko Haram terror agents descended on the boarding school at around 3am last Saturday with guns and cans of petrol, which they used to set some of the buildings on fire, before proceeding to murder 42 pupils and a teacher. This attack is the height of cruelty and a grave crime against defenceless and innocent children. In a culture increasingly inured to senseless violence, the terrible massacre at Mamudo is nevertheless horrific and distressing beyond our imagination.
Even then, the Boko Haram evil defies understanding. The school attack was part of a fusillade of terror launched by the group since 2009, which has claimed about 5,000 lives. It is bad enough that the group has resorted to violence to pursue an utterly weird crusade. But what could drive any human being to move into a school, a nurturing place, shoot and brutally kill innocent and defenceless children and a teacher? Apart from the dead, some others, like Musa Hassan, were injured. Hassan, 15, whose fingers were blown off by a gunshot, said, "When I woke up, someone was pointing a gun at me. I put up my arm in defence; the bullet blew off four fingers on my right hand."
A rash of condemnation swiftly followed the attack, in which some of the victims were burnt alive. Rightly, President Goodluck Jonathan labelled the attack "barbaric, completely wicked. Anybody who will target innocent children for any kind of grief will go to hell." Manuel Fontain, the West African Director of the United Nations Children's Fund, said the attack "should be condemned absolutely by all communities," adding, "there can be no justification for the deliberate targeting of children and those looking after them."
This is a crime against humanity by any definition. Even in war situations, children and women are always protected. But this is not for Boko Haram, which now sees schools as a soft target, and commits the horrific crimes with impunity in its bloody campaign against the Nigerian state. By sheer number, last Saturday's dastardly killing is the worst since the President declared a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa states on May 14, over the insurgency ravaging parts of the North, and brings to four the number of attacks already carried out successfully by Boko Haram agents.
The cowardly attack is a setback for Yobe, a state already disadvantaged educationally as the poor enrolment figures in schools show. In this year's National Common Entrance Examination, Yobe candidates – 86 in all – were given a cut-off mark of two out of 200. For a bereaved parent, Mallam Abdullahi, who lost two boys aged 12 and 10 in the attack, this comes as an unimaginably painful blow: "That's it. I'm taking my other boys out of school." But the Yobe government must not succumb to the terrorists by closing down schools in the state till next September, as it did on Sunday. Both the government and parents should not succumb to Boko Haram's evil ideology of banishing Western education in the state. The closure should only be temporary for the people's pains to be assuaged. A long closure can only embolden the insurgents to carry out further attacks. However, boarding schools could be closed, while all pupils become day students temporarily, with adequate security arrangements made to forestall envisaged attacks.
The new mode of killings shows that the Boko Haram terror goes beyond how the government defines it. Boko Haram is as vicious as any terror group. Pakistan's Taliban has always been targeting schoolchildren. Malala Yousufzai, a Pakistani girl, drew global attention after being shot in the head by the Taliban for advocating girls' education. In June, a boy of 10 and another aged 16 were beheaded by the Taliban for "spying." The military should, therefore, work out new tactics to contain the insurgents, while the local populace in the North must continue to assist the security agents to fish out the terrorists.
Schools, hospitals, market places and other soft targets in the terror-prone states should be monitored and protected. Those vociferously calling for amnesty for the mass murderers can now see the error in this approach. In spite of the offer of dialogue, Boko Haram has refused to lay down its arms. Even the United Kingdom, which had been vacillating, was forced to label Boko Haram a terrorist organisation after its latest killing spree. The Federal Government should summon the courage to disband the Tanimu Turaki-led Presidential Amnesty Committee on Dialogue. It has no relevance in the face of Boko Haram's intransigence against the Nigerian state.
As the al-Qaeda phenomenon has shown, insurgency can only wane when its leaders and its rank and file are eliminated and their sources of funding blocked.
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