By Obi Nwakanma

The political campaign season is upon us. That four-year cycle that pumps up adrenaline, and is the bull-pulpit equivalent of the thriller in Manila allows us to see not only much political theatre but also real blood on the sand. In this republic, as we strive to make it, to borrow the terms of another clime, a kinder and gentler society, the powerful animus of self-interested and deeply entrenched private hatreds will come to fore and indeed clash with the public interest.

There will be blood on the grass. It seems that the blood that waters Nigerian democracy is the blood of innocents, not of tyrants, or the heavily invested “big man” of Nigerian politics. At the core of our greatest concern for Nigeria today is the high sense of insecurity. The regular Nigerian feels unsafe. Two weeks ago, a judge was kidnapped in Imo state. His abductors killed his driver and his police orderly.

This is a new dimension to the situation of insecurity. The kidnappers have basically made a powerful statement: not even the symbol of the law – the judge – is safe. It is a daring proclamation of the republic of normlessness. Catch us if you can. But of course we know that in its current situation, the Nigerian security services cannot prevent a couple of barn rats planning a small act of bank robbery.

The increasing complexity of the national security environment has not been matched with the increased sophistication of national security infrastructure. The failure of national security has also led to a sense of national instability. Nigeria is at the crossroads. Nigerians have become insensate and unshockable from images and conditions of extreme violence.

There are signs of delayed trauma all around; the taut and alert bodies without spirits whose souls have been hollowed out on the street; the extreme levels of fatalism of the Nigerian mind; the profound skepticism about the nation and its prospects of survival. You see a powerful emptiness – a deadness in the Nigerian eye. This is the frightening thing: in the many eyes I looked into in my recent visit to Nigeria, there was no feeling. No fear. No Hatred. No love. Just a powerful emptiness – the “God dey” eyes.

Eyes incapable of the inward gaze.  It is the sign of a shell-shocked people. The shock doctrine works: subject a people to a heavy dose of disasters and upheavals and you create a string of effect akin to the shock therapy applied to psychiatric patients. You torture their souls and you change their personality, and transform their material and spiritual condition.

They become ineffectual participants in a drama larger than they. You replace the national personality with reagents that corrode the boundaries of the moral verity. There are many who suspect that Nigeria’s national security situation is manipulated to create a condition of rapid disaster and instability aimed at blackmailing the incumbent and frightening the Nigerian electorate into voting either with their feet or with their ballots.

But what do we say about a crowd of hired party faithful who go to Port-Harcourt to the Jonathan presidential campaign to die? Like most Nigerian things the logistics of crowd control in a highly determined space was not fully taken into consideration. People began to choke from overcrowding. A stampede ensues. The stampede leads to a disaster – the trampling of mostly women bussed down from various places to the campaign site. They have no insurance, so their deaths are not covered. Their lives are a waste. Their families are in trouble. Yet, the PDP governor of Delta State says, with bold but terribly insensitive insouciance, “They did not die in vain. They died for democracy.”

Yeah, right! They died in vain. They died because someone could not manage a campaign. They died because the Nigerian Police and Emergency services still think crowd management is all about “whips and lashes” rather than space design and movement control that allows fluid traffic. But a party that is incapable of managing such a simple thing as its own political campaign, can it seems, not be trusted to manage a complex thing such as nation and national security. Late last week, another bomb was detonated at a PDP campaign in Suleija. We take it that the makers of that blast which killed about ten people, from newspaper reports, have made their ultimate statement: catch us if you can.

This is the second time bombs would go off at the nation’s capital under President Jonathan’s watch. Yet it seems that the administration has no useful answer to the rapid deterioration of public safety. National public safety – what we call national security – is a central campaign issue. Other candidates, particularly the Buhari camp, have pointed to the national security situation and the inability of Dr. Jonathan’s administration to provide adequate models for sustaining national security. Nigerians live in fear.

Visitors to Nigeria are frequently warned that Nigeria is slipping into a Somali-like disaster. Much certainly is exaggerated, but so much is true about the failures of this administration to stem the sense of national insecurity. The Jonathan campaign has not offered a clear picture of what the president’s national security plan will be in his next administration, or why Nigerians should vote for him, since, it seems, he has failed utterly to stem, using his executive power, the conditions of our insecurity.

The president’s reorganization of the National Security organogram has not worked. The task force on anti-terrorism has not prevented the kidnap of judges in Imo state, nor has the Nigerian State Security Services been able to anticipate, infiltrate, and degrade the new terror and crime cells north and south of the Niger, or the external factors fuelling Nigeria’s national security concerns: how for instance, we must now ask, is the depth and presence of the international crime syndicates which have found new grounds in Nigeria: the Italian Mafia, the Russian Mafia (Russkaya Mafiya); the Bratva,  rogue elements and former members of the South African Special Forces, American private military contractors, and many such who find affiliation with corrupt Nigerian businessmen and politicians?

The Nigerian police system is antiquated. Its constabulary character has not been civilized to render service to a civil population.

It has very little contemporary infrastructure – yet, at the core of the survival of the nation should be an awareness of the sacred duty inherent to any political mandate to secure the lives, property, and dignity of the citizens of a nation. The state of Nigeria’s national security apparati – military infrastructure, police system, National Intelligence, Education and Research infrastructure, Health Services – does not seem to be in a fit condition to contain any disaster and guarantee national food security, border security, health systems security, port security, national Engineering infrastructure security, Energy security, political security, economic security,  civil security, indeed, all the public safety mandates at the heart of the formation of nation.