Homo homini lupus

When in 195 BC, Plautus, the famous Roman Playwright declared in his play Asinaria that` man was wolf to man,’ he must have presciently had the some complicit men of Nigerian security Agencies in mind for, indeed, the harrowing reports of sexual violence against women and girls by security personnel supposedly protecting them, speak of a section of the society rapidly losing the last vestiges of its humanity.

In 2009, the militant Islamic sect, Boko Haram, grew more audacious and ruthless in its attacks on Nigeria`s ill-equipped security apparatus and hapless citizens. It converted the North East into its killing fields and began its odious campaign of slaughtering thousands and reducing villages to rubble. An inexorable corollary of these mindless and sacrilegious attacks on the Nigerian state was the many normal lives altered irreversibly and prematurely crammed into refugee camps. It was not at all unexpected.

Historically all over the world, displacement of people has always been an accompaniment of war and conflicts. Whenever war rages, its customary upheavals force thousands to flee their homes and normal lives to live in camps within their own country or in other countries as refugees. If the emotional and psychological difficulties of surviving and fleeing war and conflict fail to take their toll, the conditions of life as refugees accentuate most powerfully the tragedy of wars and conflicts. The tidal waves of refugees pushing their way into Europe from the theatres of war abounding in the middle-east and in Africa paint the profoundly ugly picture.

The Refugee crises in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of the world today, confronts the entire world with a most a most challenging spectre. One that eerily frays the threads of its humanity and morality.

Wherever refugees have journeyed atrocities have trailed them and wherever they have set up camps, mounds of atrocities have sprang all around them always laying bare the wolfish tendencies abundant in deep fissures of human frailty. The footprints and fingerprints of those entrusted with their protection and rehabilitation find ample representation in these atrocities, making them as guilty as those originally responsible for the ignoble status of refugees. Indeed in the arena of yawning cracks, impoverished professionalism and lax vigilance, the protector forebodingly morphs into the hunter.

When the effortful and courageously daring work of Human Rights Watch, the Internationally acclaimed human rights body fatefully exposed the iniquitous sexual abuse meted out on some refugee women and girls by some ruthlessly randy men of the Nigerian security agencies who were supposed to be their protectors, a shrill cry of alarm and horror sounded through out the land. When it resonated the front office of the country, President Muhammadu Buhari ordered that the perpetrators be caught, shamed and punished.

In the face of the shamefully scandalous revelations, a question that approximates on the lips of most Nigerians is `when did we come to this?’

There would seem to be a precedent carrying a subtext to it wherever ill professional security personnel have been entrusted with vulnerable refugees. From Asia to Europe, to the Central African Republic, to Dr Congo, to Haiti and in many other countries, those cracks which have shown no obeisance for history, time or clime have trailed supposed protectors of refugees. Today they have appeared hauntingly in Nigeria and if we have been caught flat-footed as we obviously have been, we should be ashamed for indeed we should have known. We should have anticipated and stridently precluded the wars that wolves disguised in the apparels of security personnel have surreptitiously waged on the bodies and psyches of our women and girls.

Indeed the bitter fruits taste sourly and would continue to darken indelibly the teeth and the horizon of a society that has failed to adequately protect and empower its women and girls, leaving them at the mercy of medieval mindsets and archaic cultures and stereotypes.

Nigeria has not been spared the statistics, which make for grim reading and now in naming the elephant in the room in refugee camps, its records in protecting women and girls have fittingly been called into question. Many a promise has been extracted from government after government to make women more participative in national affairs and nurture and protect the girl child, yet it has more often than not been empty gimmicks.

Countries around the world are opening up more public spaces for the participation and protection of women. Sweden is a shinning exemplar of this. Very close to home, Rwanda fittingly heals the wounds of an atrocious genocide by engaging its women who suffered unspeakable abuses during those dark days.

While we must hurry to ensure that the national outrage, which has greeted the reports by HRW is given teeth by the identification, prosecution and incarceration of the culprits, the hammer must be taken to the glass ceiling which has suffocatingly consigned women to the fringes of national affairs and left them prey to ravenous wolves.