-Blank NEWS Online (NIGERIA) –By Austen AKHAGBEME:
For those who were familiar with Nigeria journalism in the late eighties and early nineties, ” Afghanistanism ” was a term used to describe the act of writing glowingly about the troubles abroad, while ignoring the anguish of the myriads of troubles back home.
It was Journalism of the Ostriches; shying away from the latching pests on the groin to chase the flying vectors in the sky. Generally speaking, it seems those seasons are back; at least, not with the loudest of silence with which the killing fields of Southern Kaduna is given attention by those whose primary responsibility it is, to protect this same people in the first place.
Living for a day of 24 hours in Southern Kaduna has gradually become a feat, no thanks to the ravaging banditry orchestrated by God knows who, in the land. The hitherto bubbling agrarian population has been turned into a famished enclave, laden with booby traps and snares of death.
At the slightest ” provocation”, communities are attacked, ravaged by gun trotting daredevil killers, leaving on their trail, sorrow, tears and blood. Bread winners are beheaded, women raped while children are left to wonder around in the bushes and lonely roads pervading the land. And this is bad, terrifying and terribly traumatic.
Those who seems to cry out against this injustice like Abubakar Idris, popularly known on social media as Abu Hanifa Dadiyata, the 34 year old English and Linguistic Lecturer at the Federal University Dutsinma in Katsina state, are summarily whisked away from the comfort of their homes to unknown destinations, never to hear anything about them again. This is terrible!
A story was told by Guardian Nigeria about a blind woman of 93 years, Mrs Azumi Boka, who lost 11 of her children to this madness in Southern Kaduna. A family, close to this writer, have practically relocated aged Parents and children from their Kajuru local government country home to another neighbouring state for fear of a further attack.
The reason been peddled for this mayhem ranges from the known and the familiar, to the political and the controversial.
While some believes that it is a deliberate ploy by the hedonistic northern political elites within the state to decimate the growing, and therefore, threatening numerically superior population of the southern Kaduna people within the state for political advantage; others think it’s an age long historical battle by a conquering Fulani tribe to establish their authority by consolidating their conquest by taking over the land.
These maybe winding and unending conspiracy theories that do not take away the fact that people are dying helplessly every day unnoticed and unsung. The State Government, even though it was once fingered in the complicity that led to the controversial death of the nonconformist traditional ruler of the Kadara people, is overwhelmed and cannot be trusted to stem the tide.
But the fact that the federal government seems to be disinterested about this terrible situation and refuses to address it up until now, is suspect and baffling. Advancing and advocating for peace abroad when your very roof is on fire, is what used to be referred to as “Afghanistanism”.as earlier explained. This is not a plus for a government that rode on the strong and reassuring promise of ensuring the security of life and property, to political power.
- Austen AKHAGBEME is a Columnist with Blank NEWS Online
