Between Arewa Youths and IPOB
The federal government lost a golden opportunity to de-escalate lawlessness by not immediately clamping down on Nnamdi Kanu and members of Arewa youths who have overtly challenged the corporate organism of Nigeria and use every available instrumentality of the law to keep them in the cooler at least until more urgent national problems are resolved.
The opportunity would have infused balance and injected equity in the aggravation of primordially sensationalised polity. The Arewa quit notice will continue to resonate in its novel template as the most infantile erosion of corporate national value and a new low in overreaching the threshold of decency.
It’s never too late to effect the arrest of the so-called Arewa youths and Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) exhubrant revolters and finally put all secessionist incendiaries in abeyance.
The disciples of Ipob ideology are quick to interpret it as the right to associate and even venerate it with the garb of freedom of speech as if freedom of speech is an entitlement for a licentious infringement on the freedom of others.
History has recorded many ideologies that survived generations not because of the incendiarism and hostility of their founders but because of their viable societal expediencies and ascendancy.
The hallmark of such ideologies is never shrouded in esoterism or equivocations as it is apparent in the cases of Ipob and the Northern youth.
Martin Luther was able to immortalise his dream, part of which culminated in the emergence of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States not by violence or insensate rhetoric but through persuasive intellectual engagement that compelled Abraham Lincoln and generations of white technocrats to buy into the abrogation of slave trade even though this historical denouement is being circumvented by Donald Trump’s supremacist hegemony.
Nigeria is not an exclusive fiefdom of those that want to defend suicidal ideologies and have brainwashed thousands who are herded into confrontation with the state apparatus in their hypnotised gullibility.
The demographics of the patriotic peace loving and the law abiding citizens who also reserve the right to the existential indivisibility of Nigeria are left vulnerable and at the mercy of the Northern youths and the Kanus of this world.
Why would the Ipob overreach itself and threaten those that wanted to exercise their franchise during the last Anambra election? Is one right superior to another?
It is even incomprehensible that this threat has gone unchallenged by the intelligentia conclave of the eastern extraction apart.
Kanu and Arewa youth should face the full wrath of the law and the federal government must not vacillate on it. Nigerians are tired of these repugnant threats to their peace. Bukola Ajisola, bukymany@yahoo.com