National Issues
Onitsha ‘Genocide’, Border Closure, And The Kano Abduction -By Simon Kolawole
ONITSHA ‘GENOCIDE’
Tragedy visited Onitsha on Tuesday night when a tanker exploded, killing
people and razing over 100 shops. Never one to miss an opportunity for
political propaganda, the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) issued a
statement describing the incident as a “terrorist attack” designed to
wipe out “Biafrans”. This is also called “genocide”. Tanker fires have
occurred in Ekiti and Benue this year alone, while Lagos has also
witnessed horrendous incidents. Those ones were probably “designed” to
wipe out Yoruba and Tiv people. In January, the Yan’Katako Market in
Rijayar Lemo area, Kano state, was razed, perhaps to wipe out Arewa
people. Nonsense.
BORDER CLOSURE
Nigeria has taken the abnormal measure of closing its land borders in
order to curb smuggling — with the Nigeria Customs Service announcing
that all imports and exports, “illicit or non-illicit”, are banned
through the route “for now”. Many Nigerians are unhappy over this
development, which they hold responsible for rising food prices. For me,
though, the problem is not whether people are suffering from the border
closure — there will always be winners and losers — but how long we can
sustain this. When we re-open the borders, surely full-scale smuggling
will resume because the security agencies are clearly complicit. So what
problem would we have solved? Intractable.
KANO ABDUCTIONS
If you are a regular reader of Nigerian newspapers, you would be forgiven for not having heard that nine Muslim children were abducted from Kano, taken to Anambra state and forcefully converted to Christianity. It did not make any front page (to the best of my knowledge). No columnist wrote on it. No editorial followed. It was a non-issue. Let’s now reverse the equation and say nine Christian children are abducted in Anambra, taken to Kano and forcefully converted to Islam. How would the Nigerian media treat the “jihadist” story? I sincerely think the time has come for us to have an honest conversation with one another in the Nigerian media. Introspection.
