By Ochereome Nnanna
Last week Friday, I was at the international wing of the Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport, Abuja with two other columnists. As we waited for a friend to arrive in a different flight, an item on the front page of THE Sun newspaper caught our attention: Former President Olusegun Obasanjo had paid a visit to the family of Babakura Fugu, the brother-in-law of the leader of Mohammed Yusuf, the slain Boko Haram leader.

All three of us agreed on one point: Obasanjo’s description of the visit as a “private” one was true only to the extent that the meeting was not staged in the Maiduguri Township Stadium, with the seats thronged by thousands of spectators. If it was meant to portray him not as a messenger of the President, he might succeed in deceiving himself and his hosts but not us and the general Nigerian public.

But on another point I was in the minority. I expressed my sadness that the Federal Government had started knuckling under the pressure to grant Boko Haram the status of legitimacy, after having failed to crush it. I told my colleagues that nothing good would come of that strange visitation.

But my colleagues thought otherwise. And to my surprise, the visit appeared well received in a good number of quarters. In other words, the idea of opening up negotiations with this Al Qaeda-related murderous sect had started to be seen in good light more and more so by the day. The attitude of many Nigerians has now become that of: If dialogue (and maybe amnesty) will make them to stop the killings, then so be it.

With the big applause trailing the Obasanjo ambassadorial odyssey, I tucked myself into a posture of resignation for the next stages to unfold: Amnesty offer and juicy post-amnesty packages, whereby consultants would be selected from the army of pro-Boko Haram terrorist opinion moulders.

Large amounts of money would be voted for the repentant terrorists to enrol for the “de-radicalisation” process already announced by the Directorate of State Security Services, SSS. Those who have bombs, AK 47s and other dangerous weapons of terror and mass elimination would be asked to sell them to the Federal Government if they would not surrender them peacefully.

After all, these are the days when we bend to outlaws. Then, many of them would be sent to Saudi Arabia , Iran , Pakistan , Somalia and Afghanistan , just as their “fellow” malcontents, the Niger Delta ex-militants, who are now all over America, Europe and Asia studying.

Nigeria is a country where not much thinking goes on in high and low places. Criminals go more by copycatting. Whatever A does to hit it big B would do exactly the same thing hoping to achieve the same level of success without much bothering to add some value or innovation. The leaders also go by emulating precedents whether they fit or not, yet hoping to succeed.

Since the deployment of troops to Borno State with very little achieved in the effort to rein in the activities of Boko Haram, there has been a tendency by the Federal Government to toe the line of least resistance.

The way in which the killers of the Boko Haram leader were suddenly rounded up and put on trial, followed by this grovelling visit by Obasanjo showed that the Federal Government may have run out of authoritative options to stamp out the murderous revolt and bring the perpetrators to justice.

By opting for dialogue when Boko Haram has not shown the slightest inclination to it, the government is playing into the hands of those who charge them with executive incapacity.

The killing of Babakura Fugu by Boko Haram assassins justified my belief that the unilateral offer of dialogue occasioned by Obasanjo’s surreptitious visit was of no beneficial effect. That visit was not just wrongly timed as Prof Wole Soyinka rightly observed, the person sent on that errand was the wrong man.

There are some who believe that Fugu was killed by robbers who went there in the belief that Obasanjo must have brought bags of Ghana-Must-Go naira to buy over the Fugu family.  Criminals read the papers, listen to the radio and watch television, even if our leaders don’t.

I have a feeling that if a different person with a different public image had been sent on that mission Fugu might still be alive. At least, the angle of criminals coming to steal alleged bribe money would not have crept into this sad story.

“Boko Haram” has grown many heads. Criminals looking for a credible cover to cloak their activities will pass their crimes as those of Boko Haram. I understand that bank robbers in Adamawa started shouting the Islamic war song when they sighted law enforcement agents in attempts to portray themselves as Boko Haram.

Some groups want to be seen as the Boko Haram “faction” that can be dialogued with. The spokesman of one such group on Monday morning called the Africa Independent Television, AIT. He described himself as the coordinator of the group in Bauchi, Gombe and Plateau states.

Come that day when Boko Haram would use a GSM handset to call a television station, thus giving away clues with which they can be hunted down!

We need to return to the drawing board and see Boko Haram as a terrorist group allied to Al Qaeda and deal with them the way responsible governments worldwide are handling terrorists. The Federal Government got its fingers burnt in the opening gambit to dialogue with Boko Haram.

Unfortunately, a poor teacher and innocent man whose only sin was that his sister was married to Mohammed Yusuf, paid the price of ill-chewed dialogue with his life.

But don’t say I did not warn you!