I haven't said anything about it. And I am not going to now.
I often say on this blog that it is difficult to know what it actually happening, anywhere in the world. You can't trust politicians, and you can't really trust the news media, be it "mainstream" or "alternative" (especially on issues of real importance). There are a lot of people in the world who talk as though they are "experts" on what is going on, and other people who differ from and criticize the "experts" based on their belief that they are more correctly informed about what is going on than the "experts". Strangely, an ever-growing proportion of younger people get their "news" from comedians who are not necessarily funny or particularly insightful. The comedian-as-expert concept reached a new high at the last Italian elections, when a political party founded by a comedian did exceptionally well.
At the end of the day, even if you read/watched/listened/studied everything said by everyone from every conceivable bias and pretension to "expertise", if you were fully honest with yourself, you would admit that you don't actually know what exactly happened, who exactly did what, how exactly they did it, and why they did it ... even if the results of whatever happened directly affect you.
You may ask whether I am being a hypocrite, since I write a blog and offer opinions on the issues.
Perhaps. But what can you do?
I will say this: My intent with this blog is not necessarily to comment on specific items of "news", but to talk about the issues generally. In other words, my response to a news article about a specific thing the Inspector-General of Police reportedly/allegedly did would be to engage in a broader discussion of why the Nigerian Police Force functions the way it does, why there has not been (and will not be in the near- or mid-term future) any reform of the Nigerian Police Force, and why nothing substantive about the operations of the Police will change until such and such reform is instituted.
Such commentary, be it sensible or silly in your opinion, is not necessarily tied to whether or not the report on the Inspector-General of Police is factual, counter-factual, partly-factual, or polemical.
The problem with commenting on the State of Emergency in the Northeast is .... people are dying. Soldiers are dying. Civilians are dying. Suspects are dying. Criminals are dying.
I am not comfortable forming opinions, much less commenting, on this type of thing when I do not actually know what is going on.
Eventually, things will calm down, the dust will settle, and we will all be able in theory to get a better handle on what happened (past-tense). Emphasis on "in theory", because to be quite honest, we the people of Nigeria have little or no certainty of information on what happened in the three ECOMOG wars, the Somalia mission in the early 1990s, the various coups, or the Civil War. What information as is out there is quantitatively insufficient, and qualitatively dubious.
It doesn't help that our fractured politics distorts analyses to begin with.
Speaking of politics, one of these days, someone will do a credible, mathematical analysis that will show that the Fourth Republic has been the most corrupt period of our history, and the second-most violent (behind only the 2.5 years of the Civil War). By and large, the politicians are responsible for the various violent crises that have hit the Federal Republic, one-after-another, since 1999, sometimes by deliberate commission and other times by equally-deliberate omission.
So you will not see any commentary from me on the State of Emergency.
What I can say is I wish nothing but the best for the people of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa.
And I wish there was something in my power to do to help out.
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