7th January, 2016
Eromosele Ebhomele
The Egbe Omo Oduduwa, a pan-Yoruba group, said Thursday it has endorsed the recent call by hunters in Borno to assist Nigeria’s military prosecute the war against Boko Haram terrorists.
The group further called for a review of Nigeria’s security and defence architecture. “Acceding to the hunters’ request will no doubt be of a fundamental significance, not only in terms of intelligence and reconnaissance, two vital elements of military operations but also underscores the regional imperatives of security and defence in a multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-national nation state,” the duo of Shenge Rahman Akanbi and Femi Odedeyi said on behalf of the organisation in a statement made available to our correspondent.
“It is instructive to note that part of the reasons adduced by the hunters for making this request was precisely to avoid what they called ‘idleness’ on their part as Boko Haram’s activities had rendered them helpless in pursuit of their hunting profession, a situation the hunters say can be mitigated by their knowledge of the terrain.
“Furthermore, by seeking to be absorbed into the military, the hunters’ idleness will be taken care of by their becoming gainfully employed as part of the military, two specific areas of primary interest to the Buhari administration: employment and security, while also enabling the military’s professionalism and competence through embedding the hunters knowledge or experience into training, policy and doctrine of the military itself,” the group added.
Hunters in the troubled north-eastern Nigeria state of Borno had recently expressed their readiness to assist the country’s troops raid Sambisa Forest, the acclaimed hide-out of the Boko Haram terrorists that have killed thousands of Nigerians since 2009.
The Egbe Omo Oduduwa advised that absorbing the hunters into the military in fighting Boko Haram must also be viewed by the authority within the context of the current revving up of the Sunni/Shia contradiction, especially when the conflict has now formally reared its head in Nigeria with the recent confrontation between Nigeria’s military and the Shia movement.
“Africa’s anti-terror wars are being waged principally by weak nation-states, almost all exclusively internally unstable, even if engendered by global power plays resulting in the ineffectiveness or collapse of the nation-state, where recent ‘Dasukigate’ confessions in Nigeria point to how easily the state can be turned into a plaything of whoever is in power or the complete dependence of the nation-state on ‘international’ forces, as shown in Chad, Niger and Mali.
“Libya’s experiences are too recent to be forgotten, with the proliferation of arms from the Gaddafi regime fueling all sorts of Islamic fundamentalist insurgencies across Africa with Libya itself in political turmoil, with two governments pretending to run one country enabled by, as well as enabling of, all categories of armed militias.
“To all intents and purposes therefore, the African nation-state as it currently is cannot withstand the pressures imposed by terrorism in addition to its complete economic dependence on the former colonial powers, unless it is redesigned to suit its own historical purposes and carve out its own destiny in human affairs.
“Nigeria will be able to avoid this scenario only if her security architecture becomes less dependent on ‘traditional’ post-colonial security formation where such security is based on the abstraction of the nation-state whose reality is manifested only through the denial of the ‘peoples as prime movers of their destinies,” the group said.