Tunde Fagbenle: Boko Haram – How to catch a monkey

by Tunde Fagbenle

Tunde Fagbenle

Still no matter how much or how often I say to myself that I would no longer dignify death by shedding any tear upon anyone’s death, I find myself every now and then with watery eyes and numbed body being mocked by death.

Have you heard the good news, ol’ boy? President Jonathan has agreed to granting Boko Haram amnesty. And he’s even gone ahead to set up a committee to work out the modalities.

“So what’s good about that? Committee again! I laugh, ‘committee to work out the modalities.’ Modalities for what? Modalities for discovering ghosts or modalities for fresh chopping? O, abi you be member of the committee? Knowing you, that’s what could make you happy with it – chop don come!”

“Get serious, man. Everyone has commended it, Christians, Muslims, and even those of your kind who are neither. I even hear America too has. The fact is that it opens a new window of possibility. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”

“Please don’t spoil my day. So all of a sudden, Boko Haram are not ghosts anymore? The whole thing is fishy. And please don’t give me the America nonsense, they will never agree to such. In any case, what do I care if the whole world is happy with it, this amnesty thing is either a big ruse or a big swindle. What is there to negotiate, tell me? The first rule is that you don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

“But you did with Niger Delta terrorists, didn’t you?”

“That’s silly, comparing oranges with apples doesn’t make sense. The Niger Delta folk are not ‘terrorists,’ they are fighters, freedom and equity fighters, militants if you like.”

“Hehehe, grammar. Terrorists, fighters, militants, the same ten-pence-apeney if you ask me. Just semantics. People who carry arms to arm-twist government and terrorise their country are terrorists, simple.”

“But the Niger Delta folk had a grouse against Nigeria. Their land was being despoiled to oil the wheel of the country while the owners of the land had nothing to show for it. That’s understandable.”

“And you think Boko Haram has no grouse against Nigeria, right? Wrong! They do have and they’ve stated it many times.”

“Like what and what? Oh, I remember: They want Sharia rule all over Nigeria; they don’t like Western education that’s corrupted their womenfolk and they live in abject poverty compared to other parts of the country. And I forgot, they want a separate country of their own, right?”

“You are making light of it, right? Forget all the discordant tunes. They do have a grouse, and only by engaging them would the truth be known.”

“And what happens to the thousands of innocent lives they’ve taken and peoples’ properties ruined? And is there any part of the country without its own grouse against this Nigeria?”

“One at a time, my brother, one at a time.”

“Niger Delta militants didn’t go about killing and destroying people indiscriminately.”

“Not true. They were bombing places outside of their area; they even bombed Eagle Square, Abuja, didn’t they? And created a scare in Lagos. And what does it matter, does Boko Haram have to follow Niger Delta or any other’s template?”

“All this comparison makes me sick by its fraudulence.”

“What’s fraudulent about it any more than the country itself is? Abeg go siddon. All I know is we’ve had no peace, these so-called ghosts have wantonly killed and caused destruction in several places of the North, thousands of lives and billions of properties have been destroyed, and since that has not made the country to hearken to their cries, they’re now threatening to take the fight to other parts of the country.”

“Let them try it. That’s when we will know that they that truly want an end to Nigeria.”

“So what would you do, tell me? Go and bomb ‘ghosts’ and ‘ghosts-land’ any more than they are doing themselves? Get sensible. You have on your hands people who already think little about their own lives, people who go ahead and self-immolate and sacrifice their own lives as suicide-bombers.Tell me how does the threat of coming to kill them make more meaning to them? That is why I feel sorry to hear about some so-called reprisals against their perceived kind in the South. It’s senseless. How do killing poor maigadis, and poor suyamen, and poor cattle-herders equate the quality of lives of southerners being wasted in the north?”

“Well, you are wrong. When everything go scatter-scatter, as Fela would say, we know those to go for and their paymasters. By the time we go for all their billionaires and leaders here and there, it will then be clear nobody has monopoly of violence.”

“So if you know that what’s taken you so long?”

“Have you heard of the parable of how to catch a monkey?”

“No, tell me.”

“You put peanuts in a cookie-jar tied to a tree. The monkey dips his hand into the jar through the narrow neck to go for the peanut. The hand gets stuck and you get your monkey.”

“I don’t get it.”

“No, you wouldn’t, ‘cause you are also a monkey. We all are!”

Requiem for Odegbami and Olayinka

Death and its undying lessons. At the age one has reached, one has come to learn that life is a continuation of death, and death of life. Or, to put it differently, life needs death to put ‘life’ into death.

Still no matter how much or how often I say to myself that I would no longer dignify death by shedding any tear upon anyone’s death, I find myself every now and then with watery eyes and numbed body being mocked by death.

When tributes flow and testimonies are waxed in attestation to the quality of life a dear departed has lived and how many lives he or she has positively impacted upon, we cry not for the dead but for ourselves whose lives have been made poorer.

Such was the case as my brother (only a year older than I) Dele Odegbami, aka One Life (how true) was being “sent forth” last Thursday, as the officiating pastor at the wake keep aptly put it. I wept. Dele, bosom elder brother to Segun Odegbami, was truly a loving and kind man; a human being!

So also did the death of Mrs. Funmi Olayinka, the deputy governor of Ekiti State, bring grief to many who knew her.

There is no woman who ever held that office that has more charm, more grace, more dignity, and more gentleness than Mrs. Funmi Olayinka. What a loss.

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Read this piece in The Punch Newspapers

 
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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