TONY ERHA
When Donald Trump, the gangling president of the United States of America, insisted he was going to smoke out the jihadists and terror mongers out of Nigeria’s north, many had called it nothing, but empty boast as similar to the hot cooked egg that soon cools down. A trumpeting Trump had walked his talk, serving them torrents of airstrike as a menu and deterrence on year 2025 Christmas night. Then, many Nigerian men were feasting and womanizing. It was like the brimstones on the terrorists’ north-west state of Sokoto, said to be a hatchery for their camps where attacks were inundated at that region and beyond.
Like in an Armageddon, relics of the US warplanes, which were fed to the world as video footages, by the social media, displayed crimson lightening and heavy bangs. Nobody messes with a war chest and number-one world sheriff, that in a World War II of 1945 it fought eighty distant years ago, in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the first and only time in human history, were turned into ashes.
My recent article was entitled ‘Donald Trump’s fire for the bad men’. It’s a doom-day narrative which presaged that an inflammable Trump wouldn’t mind the blasts, as could be deduced from his resolve to wipe out the same religious extremists and joy-killers that kill and maim innocent souls of worshippers and villagers. ‘Served them right’, is an American slang, in depiction of the bomb-showering on the anarchists, during a sacred Christmas feast, which Trump, with the usual America’s razor-edge humor, tagged ”wishing the dead terrorists happy Christmas”.
Yet, Stephen Osemwengie, a US-based youngster and innovative humanist, in a press statement by the Save Nigeria Group-USA, a not-for-profit in which he is president, eulogized Trump and his America for making good the promises to disarm the various armed bandit groups that endanger Nigerians. Osemwengie, a potent voice in the efforts that led to President Trump’s intervention and categorization of Nigeria as a ‘Country of Particular Concern (CPC)’, ditto the bombings, urging for more attacks on the rebels.
In the different quarters of witnesses to the Nigeria’s incessant killings by the unrepentant militants, most of whom are foreigners, there were also different reactions to the bombings. Aminu Tambuwal, a former federal lawmaker and ex-governor of Sokoto State, the launchpad of Lakurawa, ISIS and other deadly terrorist and jihad groups, knows the pains insecurity had caused his Sokoto populace, since he immediately hailed Trump and Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, for the decisive military force against them. Tambuwal reacted through his ‘X’ account, quoted by the Leadership newspaper, thus canvassing public’s backing for the joint counterterrorism efforts.
Across the country, there were more ‘thumps up’ than hecklings to presidents Trump and Tinubu, who share the coincidence of surnames opening with a letter ‘T’. Afenifere, the persnickety cultural organization of the Yoruba people of the country, commended the bombings. But in Offa, a historical town that the Yorubas lay claim to as of its aboriginality, news reports by the Arise Television, proclaimed the detonation of a dual-bomb in two different locations, which destroyed buildings, and left two carcasses of explosives.
Joining the conflictual global discourse on the ‘Christian genocide’ assertion by Trump and others, against the alleged jihadists, a fiery Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netayahu, threw his hat into the ring, warning that Nigeria must be rid of religion extremism.
From the Nigeria’s northern flank, where the terrorists’ attacks are more intense, there seemed to be a complicity of silence from most of its elitist traditional leaders, clergies and politicians. Whereas, it belies a backing for the insecurity that decimates its population, and instead militates against the opponents that confront it head-long. Certainly, the horrific pogroms are backed and ignored by those no-good northern elites. It also goes further unmasking more of those characters that feed fat and fly the kites of religion and ethnicity to cause miseries on their own people.
Controversial Islamic cleric, Ahmad Gumi, with his usual resentment to attackers of the bandits and extreme jihadists, had criticized the Nigerian government to halt its joint military synergy with United States, on the aftermath of the Sokoto bombing. Without hiding his insistence for skewed dialogue with the terrorists that he allegedly mastermind, he boasted that the country’s insecurity would worsened and sublet its autonomy, as the US waded in. But the Kaduna-based extremist and a former army officer, has the Sultan of Sokoto, and leader of the elitist Suni Muslims in West Africa, also a retired soldier, as those who blow hot and cool on the insecurity blights.
But Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB), a former head of State, perhaps now influenced by his ripening age, had insisted that all bandits must be dealt with decisively before considering negotiation with them. On the heels of the Sokoto bombing, nothing seems to have come from Abdulsalami Abubarka, a former military leader, who also hails from Babangida’s Niger State. Abubakar’s style is tended to support the bandit’s attacks on a country that had benefitted him, that caused deaths and mayhems to his Niger State backyard, that is worst hit.
What were the scope and casualty figures of the bombing which sceptics initially derogated as devoid of human casualty and had failed the expectations of the Americans and the Nigerian government, but only to reappear with the crocodile tears that ten innocent civilians were killed in Sokoto villages? This was confirmed by a BBC report that;
“A warplane attack, suspected to be of the Nigerian military, killed 10 people and injured six others in some villages in Silame Local Government of Sokoto State…”. But a statement credited to the Press Secretary to the Sokoto State Governor, Abubakar Bawa, as reported by the Channels Television, said; “The military says the targets struck have been positively identified as associated with the Lakurawa (terrorist) group”.
“We consider this as a mistake because the same military had on several occasions successfully raided so many criminal hideouts in the state”. The Sokoto State governor had added.
For many of the northerners, particularly the youth, that chose to hobnob with armed-bearing bandits, as a new status symbol, taking selfie with bandits and showing them in the social media, the contextual of the alleged ten innocent bomb’s victims, may have been best explained. How a people turn around to glorify their assailants could be baffling, like it is an interesting lesson of a ‘Swedish syndrome’. Even then, the media is replete with serving soldiers, adult northerners and some other Nigerians, who sabotage efforts to overcome the insurgents.
Whilst the Nigerian military was not forthcoming on the casualty figure of the bandit targets, in an operation it said it partook in, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) had announced that it killed “multiple” terrorists. Riley M. Moore, the lawmaker representing Virginia’s Second District in the US Congress, and a frontline in the military intervention plan by President Trump, confirmed to Fox News that “No fewer than 12 Tomahawk missiles were launched…”
“What goes around, comes around”, as the American Yankees would say. There are numerous highly placed men and women, who dine and wine with the terrorists and jihadists, who accuse Trump of cashing in on the ‘Christmas symbolism’ to bomb out their friends, the bandits, when the world was celebrating the birth of Christ Jesus. Are they not aware of the daylight bombing of a mosque in Bornu State, obviously by the jihadists, with huge casualties, on the same day? What about the year 2011 Christmas-day bombing of Mandala, Abuja, and others, with high human tolls?
In the same Sokoto, Nemesis seems to be at play, where the ghost of the innocent souls, Deborah Samuel Yakubu, a female student in a Sokoto school, that was killed by students, in n the name of religion and blasphemy. Deborah Yakubu’s ghost now haunts her killers, and prods the heavenly brimstones, rained upon them by Donald Trump! And someone had reminded all that; “When the bush is on fire, the chameleons abandon the slow walking style of their ancestors”.
