Every living soul in this sinful world knows that it is the height of sacrilege to attack worshippers in their places of worship. Such an act, as it is said in our local parlance, is tantamount to defecating in the altar of God and using the Holy Book to clean one’s bottom! When we were growing up as kindergarten school children in the late sixties when the pangs of the civil war were upon the Nigerian nation, even in the midst of the locust years of military dictatorship; who would have imagined that a time such as this will ever come when over 100, 200, 300 innocent school children would be ferried away into the bush by bandits and terrorists and thousands slaughtered right under the nose of the biggest black nation in the world with over 230,000-strong active military personnel, 70 warships, over 370 tanks, 2,000 armoured vehicles, over 133 vessels, 140 aircraft in the Air Force inventory and a population of over 200 million people!

How these agents of darkness manage to carry out these massacres or cart away such huge numbers of children and innocent citizens without any qualms or resistance remains an unfathomable puzzle to all. And to think that some of these atrocities are committed in the hallowed grounds of the very house of God and in schools where children who are the future hope of this country are tutored!

When it was reported on BBC that some states in Nigeria and school owners had ordered the closure of schoolsfollowing the recent orgy of kidnapping and attacks on schools, a certain acquaintance in a local drinking joint threw an unfortunate banter that “the fear of bandits is the beginning of wisdom”! “Abi dem swear for us?” That was the question from one of the drunkards. Though the gentlemen might have had their fair share of overnight palm wine, their expensive jokes bespeak the very sad reality on ground.

What horror has the good people of this country not witnessed in the hands of these marauding armed men? It is the audacity of their operations that boggles the mind. Such dare-devilry and defiance, such direct affront on both constituted and divine authority, and provocation of this magnitude, can only as well attract nothing less than eternal damnation and penury from both the forces in heaven and the ones on earth. No other habitation can be more fitting for the perpetrators of these heinous crimes than the hottest part of hell where they belong. It will take a bloody ink for present-day historians to document these atrocious events for future generations of Nigerians to comprehend what happened to their forebears.

Meanwhile, like a foredooming paradox, while these oddities are unfolding before our very eyes, what we hear from some quarters is that solutions would come from the rehabilitation of “repentant bandits and unknown gunmen”. Who are these fellows called repentant bandits and unknown gunmen and how on earth can we rehabilitate the gunmen we don’t know without getting shot? Even if we know them, how can we be so sure that they are repentant to the extent of even contemplating recruiting them into the military to work with the same soldiers and civilians they have been shooting all these years? In any case, what about their alleged sponsors in high places? Are we also going to rehabilitate them? It defeats all known logic. Again, what happens to hundreds and thousands of innocent Nigerians whose lives have been cut short by these so-called repentant chaps? Why do we like to turn superior argument upside down in this country? If there’s any such thing as repentant bandits and terrorists, how did those strange nomenclatures even creep into the Nigerian lexicon for crying out loud? It is funny how we play with fire in this country and expect not to get burnt. Marcus T. Cicero, one of early Roman philosophers and a scholar and orator, said, “The greatest incitement to crime is the hope of escaping punishment.”

Coming back home here in Aniocha axis of Delta State, there is an adage which says, “The domestic cat in the house and his big brother in the bush called the lion cannot live together under the same roof even if both of them are kinsmen from the same family of cats; both must live far apart from each other in order to avoid homicide from one against the other.”

If Christians cannot find refuge in the church and Muslims cannot do same in the mosque, and school children and teachers can no longer feel safe in their classrooms and hostels; if schools can be shut down with academic calendar truncated for fear of attack; if security agents and their families cannot be protected by the heavy artillery at their disposal even right inside their own barracks; if farmers can no longer cultivate their ancestral farmlands and harvest their crops without paying tax to bandits; if transporters and passengers can no longer ply the roads without fear of being attacked and kidnapped; if market women in the villages cannot display their goods in the marketplace; if political leaders can now only travel by air and can no longer visit their constituencies and loved ones in the village because of bandits, then the very soul and the existence of the country is under serious threat from these people that we are so eager to rehabilitate.

It has often been fancifully argued that most of the killings are committed by non-Christians; but come to think of it, is there really any religious doctrine that advocates the killing of innocent children because of the sins of their fathers? After all, some Christians have Muslim friends and some Muslims also have Christian friends, and both even intermarry. So why evoke primordial enmity if the search for lasting peace between both faiths is sincere? The point here is that the argument is not whether one faith is superior to the other. Rather the argument is how both faiths can live together in peace and harmony in an atmosphere of fairness, justice and equity among all. The problem therefore is that of lack of mutual trust and insincerity among tribes and religious faiths, not superiority and domination of one over the other, which some people are busy chasing after. This is the crux of the matter which all peace-loving citizens of Nigeria should pursue instead of the wishful thinking that one day the country will become a Christian nation or a Muslim nation where only one of the two will dominate and lord it over the other. Proceeding on such a trajectory is a fatal endeavour that must be avoided at all costs; otherwise all religious faiths would be fighting against one another forever and at the end the entire country will perish. This cannot be the wish of anybody for such a beautiful country as Nigeria. Knowing that creating fear is a weapon of the aggressor, and being a Christian myself though not yet “born again”, and without holding brief for Muslims or Christians and non-Christians, it must be emphasized here that it is not all Muslims and non-Christians that support this madness and disintegration of the country even if the popular narrative tilts towards the contrary.

With the country now wrongly perceived as a sort of tourist attraction for bandits, where kidnappers are alleged to be hobnobbing with the elite, a fertile ground for land grabbing and sharing of proceeds of ransom payments from kidnapping, the influx of more bandits and militia groups from God-knows-where has quadrupled in recent months leading to unprecedented upsurge in the spate of violent attacks across the country. Even when the country’s national football team recently failed to qualify for the World Cup, it was blamed on banditry and the leaders, yet it remains to be proven that a bandit or a political leader is in the team! This, among many other things, is how insecurity destroys a nation.

In addition to loss of lives and property, the implications of these attacks are far-reaching and indeed frightening. The prices of goods and services, particularly foodstuff, will skyrocket beyond the reach of the citizenry. The economic and reform policies of government would produce unintended outcomes not necessarily because the policies are not good but because the air is saturated with the innocent blood of Nigerians murdered for no reason; the environment, quite sadly, has become anti-establishment and hostile to all positive energies that this nation is known for, all because of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man. Because impunity has been elevated to an art, and because nobody is held accountable for anything, nobody gives a hoot about anything anymore. In other words, the new norm is that anything can happen and “notin go happen”! Little children upon whom God has bestowed part ownership of his own kingdom can be snatched from their classrooms and hostels just like that, in the same way that hawks snatch chickens, and everyone would be going about their normal business as if nothing happened! Isn’t it wonderful? Needless to add the incalculable damage all these negative narratives will do to the global image of the country among the comity of nations.

Often, it is convenient to blame the situation on failure of government as if there is a magic wand in Aso Rock. Assuming some of us are given licences to carry firearms to defend ourselves against bandits, what is the guarantee that we would not turn around to use the firearms to kill our wives, husbands and perceived political opponents and label them as bandits? Instead of peddling archetypes and all kinds of Karl Popper’s theories, much deeper interrogation is required to confront this monster sitting pretty in the country’s bedroom.

As sure as death, let no one be deceived, the handwriting on the wall is legible enough for everyone to see: “Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin”. The twin evils of banditry and terrorism constitute an imminent danger to the existence of this country. But the good news is that, with a little bit of honesty, a little bit of determination, and just a little bit of patriotic spirit, and perhaps a little bit of prayer, Nigeria may yet be able to avert the danger that is now upon us.

*Anthony-Spinks writes from Asaba, Delta State.