Of ethnic cleansing and bad leaders

Sir: No matter how much we want to twist and spin this, the truth staring us in the face is the senseless bloodletting by the herdsmen in Southern Kaduna and all over Nigeria seems to have the blessings of almost all the security chiefs in the country.. And in the case of the Southern Kaduna killings, the complicity of the state Governor, Nasir El-Rufai is beyond argument.

Isn’t it criminally funny that few hours after the attack, El-Rufai publicly mocked the victims by vowing to bring the perpetrators to book? The same perpetrators he recently admitted paying large sums of money as “compensation”? What has happened in Southern Kaduna has a name. It is called genocide.

That attack has happened in a town filled with hundreds of security agents who were enforcing a 24-hour curfew is all the proof that our security guys are complicit in the bloodletting. That a retired army general president who promised to lead from the front is yet to say anything about this Southern Kaduna bloodbath lends credence to the insinuation that he is very comfortable with this bloodletting being perpetrated. There is something fundamentally wrong with a president who rushes to condole with foreign countries whenever any calamity befalls them but loses his voice when a terrorist group kills hundreds of the same people he swore an oath to protect!

A DSS that is only good at breaking the doors to the houses of judges and abducting them in the middle of the night but never good at arresting a group of devilish beasts whose murderous activities constitute the greatest threat to national security, is a shame unto itself!

A people who would just shake their heads and move on even in the face of proven cases of criminal complicity of their elected officials and security agencies in the mindless slaughtering of hundreds of their fellow citizens, is certainly undeserving of any form of recognition in the comity of reasonable men and women.

A country where humans are brazenly killed and their homes taken from them so that cattle could live and have grazing fields, is a curse and an insult to the term ‘country’.

Shame on our so-called intellectuals who place their friendship with insensitive political leaders over and above the need to speak out in favour of the oppressed by condemning this systematic genocide going on in Southern Kaduna!
Shame on our so-called human rights activists who have suddenly Iost their tongues!
A very big shame on the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and ‘big big’ churches in the country for folding their arms while the predominantly Christian people of Southern Kaduna are about to be wiped out from the surface of the earth by a terrorist group operating with the full backing of religious bigot.

What is happening in Southern Kaduna is a moral tragedy of epic proportions at par with the ethnic cleansing by the Janjaweeds in Darfur and the Nubian Region in Sudan. Our seeming conspiracy of silence over this is as evil as the actual act itself! It is indeed a sad day when human lives mean absolutely nothing.
Shame!

Ogbu, a social analyst, wrote from Port Harcourt.