Boko Haram, Jonathan and the Road to Hell

I've been trying to get my head around the brutal killing of at least 30 students in a dawn attack at a boarding school in Potiskum, Yobe State, on Saturday. Is this how we are going to continue? Is this what life, the life of a Nigerian child, has become? Where else in the world would a horde of mad men set upon 30 students in their beds at 3am, douse them with petrol, set them alight and shoot at them as they struggled to escape, yet not one of the victims is known by name one week after the mayhem and not one of the murderers arrested?

One week after 30 students were killed, cut down in the place where they had gone in search of the key to a better future, all we are left with are cold stats, crocodile tears and a presidential curse. No faces, no names, no hopes, no dreams. Nothing. It's the funeral of the families concerned; it's their private grief, right?

One of such families is the Daniskis. Fourteen-year-old Mukhtar Abubakar Daniski had been enrolled in Government Secondary School, Mamudo, Potiskum, two years ago. His parents had big dreams for him, but he had even bigger dreams for himself. He was among the brightest in his class - and, who knows, he could have been another Adamu Abdullahi, the Yobe State chap who recently graduated as the best student from the department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering in a Turkish university.

"Mukhtar," I was told on Wednesday, "just wanted to be the best." He was said to have boasted to his friends that he would manufacture a helicopter. His role model was Goni Usman, an electrical engineer and Potiskum indigene that has been involved in strategic ventures with Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, GE Capital and Bain & Co.

Mukhtar had once shared this dream with his father, Abubakar, whose other two children had just completed their NECO exams from this same school. He could not have imagined that Mukhtar's case would be different.

He saw his son two weeks ago, on his way back from Damaturu, the capital. He had stopped over to see Mukhtar who later asked him for transport fare to come home for holiday in two weeks. "Don't worry," Abubakar told his son. "I'll come and take you home myself." How many times have we dropped our children off at school and assumed that, in spite of the madness all around, they'll come running back into our arms again at closing?

That goodbye, two weeks ago, was Mukhtar's last to his father. Neither he nor 29 other students and two teachers who had been looking forward to joining their families survived the deadly dawn attack by deranged murderers now at large. But, let's face it. Do we care any more than do the mad men who attacked Mukhtar's school on Saturday? Haven't we become hardened by the cares of survival, the familiarity with evil, the futility of redress, the guile of creed and religion and the sheer incompetence of government? Madness has become the new normal.

My blood boils. Twenty children were killed in Sandy Hook and the US came to a standstill, mourning beyond comfort and launching the toughest campaign yet for tighter gun control laws. When 16 persons, mostly students, were killed at a German secondary school in March 2009, the German flag was flown at half-mast and, within four months, tough new laws were enacted that completely changed the rules on handgun ownership. The Dunblane school massacre in the UK in which 16 children were killed sparked an outrage that forever changed private handgun ownership laws. And even in a different kind of tragedy, the South Koreans honoured two of its US-bound students who died in the Asiana 214 plane crash in San Francisco last week.

But Nigeria, being Nigeria, has to be different. How can we even begin to talk of a memorial for Mukthar and the Potiskum 29 when we don't know all their names? How can we remember when the dead children are daily being buried under fresh headlines of scandals? I'm not interested in the gratuitous noises by the state government or by President Goodluck Jonathan's bewildering invitation for Boko Haram to go to hell. Why? The hottest part of hell is right inside Aso Rock or wherever it is that leaders are gorging themselves in the trough of the public's misery.

It's all down to this: If in two years over 150 students have been murdered in four states (Kano, Adamawa, Borno and Yobe) by Boko Haram and not a single one of the murderers has been brought to book, then, the president can be sure that Boko Haram will not go to hell unaccompanied.

The Wrong Kind Of Record

When I first saw the headline, I wondered if it was a match played in 90 minutes. Yet, even if Plateau United Feeders and Akurba FC; and Police Machine FC and Babayaro FC had played for 90 X 90 minutes, hammering the ball into the net with their heads, hands and legs without referees and linesmen to restrain them, they would still not have produced the scandalous 79 - 0; and 67 - 0 results they produced.

What that result meant was that in the first game, the "winning" side was scoring nearly four goals every five minutes; while the "winning" side in the second match was scoring roughly four goals every five minutes of the game. And the losing sides were loving the disgrace and humiliation?

I'm particularly disappointed that a police football club is involved in this mess. The guys appear to have sworn never to resist any temptation to give the force a bad name.
BY AZUBUIKE ISHIEKWENE