Kankara abductions, a point blank indictment.
– Steve Ovirih.
Just like it happened , like a thief in the night, on the 14th April, 2014 at Chibok where the Boko Haram insurgents breezed in and carted away the girls of Chibok School, the uncanny history has repeated itself again at Kankara, a town in Katsina state. This time round, it was a legion of bandits who stormed the calm and quite community of Kankara and made away in the first instance with an alleged 600 students, all boys of Government Science Secondary School , Kankara. After further head count, authoritative source from the school has claimed 333 students were abducted by the nocturnal poachers of school children.
This development speaks to the core of the highest level of insecurity ever witnessed on our land.
Their have been demands from different quarters for the arrowheads of the nation’s security architecture to be changed, but all the noise have fallen on deaf ears of the authority in Abuja. Prior to the Kankara abduction, a grim murder of over forty farmers had taken place in a Maiduguri suburb where throats of able bodied men were slit by dare devil bandits and insurgents . The ready made response from the President’s spokesperson was the farmers didn’t get the appropriate clearance to visit their farmlands. Their own farmlands where they hustle to survive!
There have been several other indices of intelligence gathering failure on behalf of our security outfits climaxing with the opinion of the Coordinator of media relations of the Army, Gen. Eneche who said the abductors of the students of Kankara was made possible as they were ferreted away by being put on a motorcycle all night. That means 333 students were transported in the middle of the night by cyclists into God knows where and they did not attract the kind of confrontation expected of such a huge human heist.
To really rub it on our nose, the bandits chose to strike in the core of Kankara at no other time than when the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari was on a private visit to his country home.
This is quite indicative of a threat to national peace. Other parts of the country are embroiled in turmoil that clearly shows that our security as a nation is failing. The major objective of the Operators of our Government is to protect citizens from internal aggression and prevent external insurrection. With this scary development on our hands, one is tempted to say Government is not doing so well in this respect.
If the Chibok girls were kidnapped in 2014 and the whole nation yelled at the Jonathan Presidency for not being proactive enough, the Nigerian citizenry deserve a better programme and agenda of securing our nation under th Buhari Presidency.