... not to be confused with Procol Harum, Harum Scarum, possibly to be confused with Helter Skelter. The Nigerian version of al-Qaeda and the Taliban rolled together and flavored with a smigeon of distinctly Subsaharan ignorance and brutality...
alive and well? Not quite.
For one, the frontal attacks on big towns and cities, with the anarchists thumping their noses against Nigeria's much-vaunted federal might has fizzled out. So has the lunatic boasts of Abubakar Shekau or his corresponding ghosts, as he bobbed up from yes-he's-dead-no-he's-not-dead sickening tales from the
Goodluck Jonathan... 14th President of Nigeria. He was Governor of Bayelsa State from 9 December 2005 to 28 May 2007, and was sworn in as Vice President on 29 May 2007. Jonathan is a member of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). He is a lover of nifty hats, which makes him easily recognizable unless someone else in the room is wearing a neat chapeau.Other than that he's pretty useless as the Boko Haram debacle shows..
presidency, and its army high command.
But the threat seems to have retreated to the pristine hit-and-run guerrilla tactics, of Boko Haram's battle-entry strategy, before it was allowed to festered by an apologetic and hesitating presidency. That a DPO reportedly lost his life in the Adawama attack echos those dire beginnings, when Boko Haram on Okada would attack police posts, kill luckless coppers in there and set free detainees in the facilities' cells.
Yet, between January 2015 and January 2016, Boko Haram has been so heavily degraded that talks about mass resettlement of the thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) don't sound so fantastic and far-fetched again.
If Hardball were even to be more date-dramatic, he would insist that in seven months, a sure-footed and determined government has all but checkmated a seven-year insurgency, that looked like raging undeterred for no less than another seven years, at the very least!
But if the media remains sceptical at President Buhari's claim that the war against Boko Haram had been substantially won, it is because humans are basically pain-avoiding; a traumatised people, even more so. That would explain the seeming waywardness and obduracy of the Biblical Israelites who, after being saved from Egyptian tyranny, en route to the promised land, would forget the last celestial munificence, no matter how grand, and scream at Jehovah to return them to Egypt, rather kill them all in the desert between Egypt and Canaan.
Of course, the 15 killed in the latest Adamawa attack are humans with flesh and blood, families and loved ones. They are not just mere stats to be compared and discounted. That means the war won't be fully won, until every inch of Nigerian territory is safe from Boko Haram's plague.
Still, Nigerians cannot afford to be as obdurate and stiff-necked as the Israelites of old. We should applaud the government to more success, when it is doing well, just as we reserve the right to excoriate it, when it falters.
On Boko Haram, the Buhari Presidency has done well. But it should not rest until those blood-sucking criminals are totally sacked from our land.