The weekend massacre in Metele, Guzamala Local Government, Borno State, was one of their malicious thoughts towards us. It was a debacle too much.
Femi Adeoti
They insist our collective memory is very weak and acutely short. The keep insulting us that we are easily gullible and credulous; that we can believe anything.
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Not only that, they say we have uncanny capacity to absorb shocks. They lash on the erroneous belief that we can be effortlessly swayed.
They wickedly turn our great advantages and potential against us. They turn things upside down to satisfy the greed in them. They carelessly take us for rude ride all the time.
They do not see any asset in our strengths. All they see are the flaws in our weaknesses. The very reason they deliberately dig deep into our weaknesses to make mess of our strengths. We are quite aware that their thoughts towards us are evil.
The weekend massacre in Metele, Guzamala Local Government, Borno State, was one of their malicious thoughts towards us. It was a debacle too much.
Our soldiers were reduced to mere preys by the Boko Haram. The insurgents came, saw, conquered, killed and looted at will. They leisurely had the day to themselves, practically unchallenged.
Huge casualties were inflicted on the soldiers. The figure is still in serious dispute. It ranges from 70 to 118 and even above. The 157 Task Force Battalion was almost wiped off.
This is how a retired military officer (name withheld) reacted to the Metele bloodbath, almost unedited. He was right on point: “The situation in the Boko Haram (BH) front is back to what we experienced under Jonathan where corruption, incompetence and insensitivity on the part of our military and political leadership are allowing Boko Haram the space to operate with impunity.
“This setback didn’t start with the recent BH attack that inflicted heavy casualties on the Nigerian side. The year 2018 is ‘annus horribilis’ (a year of disaster) for the Nigerian security. Since June this year, there has been a sustained BH offensive seeking to reverse two years of consistent Nigeria’s successes in the war on terror.
“From a military that was mostly on the offensive against BH in 2016 and 2017, we are now on the defensive, struggling to repel BH offensives. There are many factors responsible for this setback. No doubt, BH has benefited immensely from ransom and prisoner release during the Chibok swap deal. It was a huge price whose consequences continue to echo to this day.
“But more importantly, it is a failure of leadership, both at the military and political levels.
“The military leadership has gone away with so many errors, both of omission and commission. Lest I forget, no single senior military official was held accountable for the Dapchi abduction. Reports of corruption, mismanagement and insensitivity are too strong to be denied, leading to a fighting force that’s ill-equipped and poorly motivated. The President’s decision to continue working with his present crop of service chiefs and defence minister in the face of scandalous setbacks is insensitive and irresponsible.
“But more than just military leadership problem, it is also a problem of tactics, of strategy. Our strategy has not been able to keep pace with BH metamorphosis. BH is now turning into a professional guerilla fighting group. It understands the futility and administrative burden of holding large territories.
“It is strategy is a war of attrition. Attack military bases, control strategic roads, withdraw when faced with a Nigerian counter-offensive and attack again when they least expect and repeat the cycle all over again. They understand that the logistics burden (human and material losses) of that approach will force the Nigerian side to give up on those locations, creating a vacuum that they are naturally positioned to fill.
“To fight that kind of enemy, we don’t need too many boots on the ground. We only need superior intelligence, effective airpower and well-trained special force units. Through better intelligence we can learn about BH operational plans; through well-trained special force units we can disrupt those plans before they are hatched and flush BH out of their hiding places, and through effective airpower we can neutralise any active or passive BH threats wherever they appear.
“This is because, we simply cannot afford heavy military deployment in the traditional security sense. Our military is already overstretched, attending to internal challenges from Zamfara to Benue, Birnin Gwari to Plateau. Our defense budget is very low compared to terror-fighting developing country standards, and decades of poor planning and corruption at the military and political leadership makes it even more insufficient.
“Most of the setbacks in Borno State in the past six months largely go under-reported. The military often frowns at such reports, labeling journalists and bloggers BH sympathisers for reporting about BH attacks and gains. Granted that there are those out there seeking to make political capital out of our losses, but we should not allow anybody to cover up their corruption, incompetence and inefficiency under the perverted excuse of national security.
“The President came with a self-declared mandate to defeat BH, fix the economy and fight corruption. At a time, only the first one stood out as clear success. Now, that is also being challenged in a way that no one imagined would be tolerated under his watch. It would be a huge tragedy if he presides over the reversal of the successes recorded in 2016 and 2017.
“President Buhari can respond to this setback by rejigging his security team and completely re examining our counterterrorism strategy given that the present approach is not strategically well grounded, or he can respond by living in denial and dismissing those reports as political propaganda while BH campaign of terror continues to run amok. The buck stops at his table.”
This piece answers all the posers and even more, thrown up by the Metele wholesale slaughter. Nothing more to add.
Hope someone, somewhere is listening. Those who have ears let them hear. There should no longer be buck passing; no more excuses and blame game.
We all know where the buck stops now!