The insecurity crisis Osinbajo called “exaggeration”

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Stephen Adewale



On Sunday evening, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo was questioned about the safety scenario in Nigeria at a city hall conference with Nigerians in New York. He replied that although there were real occurrences, the tales of viciousness and insecurity were wildly overstated. He blamed social media for its proclivity to electrify online vuvuzelas that infuse comparatively mild circumstances with enough hysterics to amplify it into an important social crisis.


According to Osinbajo, some of the most spectacular kidnapping tales are untrue and simply fueled by politics. He added that they attempt to check every report of an abduction tale and eventually discover that at the end of the day, individuals just tell all kinds of tales.


Like any good democrat, Osinbajo should have just agreed that their government has not done enough to address violence and insecurity across the nation. He should have clarified all the attempts his government is making to arrest the disturbing situation. He should have just reminded those besieged him with questions about the security situation in Nigeria that if the evaluation performance is to be done, his government has taken some measures that have led to the reduction of the insecurity crisis throughout the country, with the promise to introduce further realistic measures in their second term.


But no, the Vice President joined in the demonization of the opposition whose politics are not align with his. On the one hand, he blames politics and politicians for his government’s failure. On the other hand, he presents many victims of kidnapping and other social vices as fibbers and fabricators, some poor folk in everything but integrity.


For a man who may not remember the last time he travelled unguided on dreadful Nigerian highways, Osinbajo assumed the role of an armchair researcher to present himself as an authority on the issue he was unfamiliar with. He imbues his false claim with credibility and by taking such a standpoint, he deserves a response.


Otherwise, the tale of the downtrodden who chose to stage their kidnapping would become a classic case of a single story becoming the only story. For a government that has survived on the huff and wisp of propaganda, it is hazardous not to refute the populist pander that underlines its rationale for how and why violence and insecurity in Nigeria remain at such an alarming stage.


We are not fooled, while the ruling class may have spent five years blaming non-existent enemies for Nigeria’s insecurity situation, they can not beat the accessible facts on the ground. Recently, even those belonging to the President’s camp have not been spared by the kidnappers and it remains to be seen how the report of the kidnapping of a district head from the city of President Buhari from May 1, 2019 to date is politically motivated. What the kidnapping of the son of the immediate past Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, has to do with politics is yet to be explained and what politics was underway when the Governor of Ondo State, Arakunrin Akeredolu, recently announced that his convoy was ambushed by kidnappers is yet to be explained.


His denial of the alarming level of violence and other vices in Nigeria follows a linear pattern of the APC’s practice of vilifying anyone who does not support Buhari. By vilifying the opposition, their goal is to make us ignore the failure of successive and current government policies to ensure safety for all.


There is another reason why this declaration from Osinbajo in New York is jarring: it is a pointer to how unreflective this government will be now that it has begun a second term. Such issues as questioned in New York would have made a more thoughtful government humbled enough to ask hard-hitting questions about how they are unable to resolve insecurity quagmire after five years in the saddle, but no, they are heaping the blame of their ineptitude on the politicians who were driven by “bitterness,” and “ethnicity.”


Those stories are hazardous and unproductive. Anyone who has been at the receiving end of the policy that underlines the propaganda of the APC will know the necessity of opposing these attitudes before they aggravate. It’s virtually impossible to criticize the actions of government these days without someone putting you down as merely aggrieved because you don’t get free cash anymore as you did under 16 years of the PDP. Whichever profession you are, and irrespective of your pedigree, your reluctance to sit on the same table with APC will be marked as resentment. All arguments and opinions, no matter how complex they are, will be downsized in this way to fit into the smallness of their minds.


The fact that professional writers are active participants in this project of disinformation is a sad irony. Ideally, the media is where the antics of a politician desperate to rewrite history as a man of integrity should have met the stiffest resistance. Instead, the intelligentsia is a collaborator, its firewall having long been breached by rampaging politicians desperate to inscribe themselves in the societal consciousness. Our politicians are daily taking their fascination with armchair judgment up a notch. They are building false narratives that cut from the fabrics of reality and fantasy to sow fictitious accounts that glorify their administration, and then tries to pass off the hagiographic creation as just “fiction.”


The safety condition in Nigeria is alarming with the instances of mass murders by bandits in locations like Zamfara, Kaduna, and Benue States. Then the sporadic frequency of kidnappings in countries like Katsina, Kaduna, Abuja, and Ondo should be sobering. We are not yet at the stage where those responsible for ensuring collective security should engage in a self-glorifying undertaking to raise themselves to an undeserved level of apotheosis.


The underworld men are brutalising and dehumanising the citizens of the country that Osinbajo and his principal lead daily. Those who have fallen victims have dispensed with courtesies to narrate how much they suffer from the kidnappers’ den while many die daily due to lack of provision of basic sustenance amenities. Government keeps living in denial as they do not want to puncture their official narratives of performance that have been padded with lies.


As we move into the times where Buhari himself has told us will be tough, government should do well not to add salt to our injuries by allowing the false narratives that cut from the fabrics of reality and fantasy be the next level of Nigerian madness.  

































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