Clearly, this bombings have been designed to make Jonathan look weak. But it has failed.
Okay, listen people.
There was violence in Nigeria before anyone knew Goodluck Jonathan even existed. Heck, there was violence in Nigeria before Jonathan was old enough to go to primary school. And at this rate (unfortunately), there will probably be violence in Nigeria long after Jonathan, Atiku, Babangida, Buhari, Ribadu and the rest have disappeared into political irrelevance. Violence is a seeming constant, as much a recurrent part of our existence as the Harmattan winds.
No country is totally free of violence. No country on Earth is free from crime, and crime can be (and often is) violent. No country on Earth is free from the scourge of cold-blooded murder.
The thing is, Nigeria has the "usual" sort of criminal violence that exists everywhere in the world and has always existed (for example armed robbery) but has been plagued by additional "political" violence. This political violence comes in many forms and goes by many names, be it "communal" or "religious" or "assassination" or "militancy" or "coup" or "extremism" or "land case" or "indigene versus settler" or "ethnic clash" or "militia violence" or "farmers and herdsmen" or whatever. It can be between people of differing ethnicity or religion, or it can be between people who are essentially the same (like this sequence of clashes between two tiny Ogoni communities that are separated from each other literally by nothing more than a narrow road).
We have lost more citizens' lives to political violence than we have to "regular" criminal violence. You might say it is unfair to include the lives lost to the Civil War, because it was an out-and-out war, but the fact is even if you subtract the lives lost to the Civil War from the total, we have still lost more lives to political violence than to criminal violence. Heck, subtract all of the lives lost in the violent decade-and-half from 1954 to 1970, and count only the ones lost since 1970 .... and we have still lost more citizens to political violence than to criminal violence.
Criminal violence is unavoidable because human society is what it is and what it has always been.
Political violence on the other hand is NOT unavoidable. There is nothing inevitable about it. And even if it had to happen, surely the frequency and magnitude of its occurrence in Nigeria is monumentally ABNORMAL. We must have one of the highest rates of political violence for a country that is not actively or openly at war. It is ridiculous .... and deadly .... and so counter-productive.
This phenomenon is not about underwhelming President Goodluck Jonathan. Nor is it about the rest of the plague of unimpressive herd who constitute our political class. Frankly, there is no difference between any of them. They are all policy-illiterates with nothing to offer.
Neither Jonathan nor any of the other candidates or would-be candidates has said anything or done anything to suggest they have a plan of action to create a Nigeria where we will finally be free of the scourge of rampant, unchecked political violence. All I am hearing out of the federal government (and the political class at large) is the same empty rhetoric they have been spewing for decades.
I think there must be some kind of textbook or thesaurus from which they get their empty, meaningless words, because it is not just the politicians but the police force and all the security agencies that spew out the same standardized tripe. And don't get me started on the media reports; all the usual cliches, from top to bottom. I wonder if they (politicians, security agencies, journalists) have a template saved on their computers, which they just copy-and-paste to the public once there has been another outbreak.
No one pays any attention to these empty vessels and their empty noise. We have all heard it before, and we do not believe them. We do not believe their assurances, we do not believe their promises. They will not do anything new, different or better, and we will not be any more secure (or insecure) than we are now.
It is just the same thing over and over again. In 2008 there was violence between Egba youths and Awori youths in Sango-Ota (not far from Lagos) over a chieftaincy issue. The politicians, the police and all the other security agencies made the usual empty noises. Two years later, in 2010, guess what? Another outbreak of violence in Sango-Ota, this time over a land case.
Half the time I think they like it this way. Their actions spawn and sustain political violence; for the most part they (the political class) are the beneficiaries of the violence (it certainly helps them mobilize ethnic, regional and religious blocs which they can then trade to each other in the backrooms chess that really decides Nigerian politics); and they would be the losers should Nigeria ever become a country where constitutionalism and rule of law prevailed. All things considered, maybe they are not too keen on changing the state of affairs.
The other half the time I suspect the real reason they are ineffectual is they don't have a mental, philosophical, ideological or practical clue as to what to do about the issue. They are as clueless as a newborn baby subjected to a calculus exam.
We should be able, Christians, Moslems and Traditionalists alike, to call upon our faith, our spirituality, our traditions and customs to guide us collectively to build a land that substantively reflects our beliefs. But we can't do that, can we? Somehow these most precious cultural and spiritual strengths have become tools for politicians keen on dividing us, on keeping us disunited and suspicious of each other. This too spawns violence.
Indeed, our political class has so successfully intertwined issues of identity with the violence that they (the political class) have put themselves in a position where renouncing and crushing the violence is akin to renouncing and crushing themselves. Nowhere was this more obvious than Goodluck Jonathan's confused response to bombings where MEND was the chief suspect. Other politicians have been similarly tongue-tied over the OPC, Bakassi Boys and over groups that wreak violence on those of differing religion. When clashes erupt between youths from Zangon and Kataf, or between youths from the Benue River valley peoples (Tiv, Jukun, Chamba), it soon becomes clear that the "national" political figures from the area, the men who you would expect to calm things down, are actually falling over themselves to support the youths from their communities covertly while overtly shielding the youths from blame in the court of public opinion.
It just annoys me that this is being portrayed as an issue about President Goodluck Jonathan. With all due respect, the man might be "President" but he isn't even an important figure within the confraternity of the political class ... and even if he was, this is not an issue in which we should take the side of one member of that class over another.
It makes no difference which member of the political class emerges victorious in 2011. All of them, the entire political class, are individually and collectively useless to anyone who is serious about building a Nigeria of constitutionalism, peace, order and the rule of law.
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