By Pini Jason
Imagine a theater with multiple cinema halls all showing top thrillers simultaneously! That is what Nigeria has become since April. Check: post presidential election violence, Boko Haram, Police Headquarters bombing, Islamic banking, Jumbo salary for National Assembly members, Lagos flood, Kerosene crisis, Al Mustapha comedy thriller, BPE probe, Minimum wage war, Salami and NJC, Single term imbroglio, IBB-Obasanjo beef, the return of Jos killings, Mikel Obi’s fathers kidnapping, UN Building bombing, Ibadan flood, Ondo Road carnage and Ocean surge in Lagos! To try and catch up with all of these is enough to make even a thriller addict dizzy.

Unfortunately the above are not entertainment, but serious signs that if nothing is done fast, our fragile nation is likely to careen into the gutter and we may all begin to evacuate from various parts of the country with our chop cupboards on our heads! Nigeria’s crises are fuelled by a culture of escalating audacity.

If a woman starts cooking in the middle of the highway and she is not stopped, in a few hours you are going to have a whole village settlement in the middle of the road. Our security agencies, I’m afraid, have never done well in nipping a problem in the bud! Many times they tell us that they “are monitoring the situation”! A mere excuse for inactivity!

After the bombing of the military barracks in Apo and the daring bombing of the Police Headquarters in Abuja, the bombing of the UN Building on Friday 26 August 2011 or similar important buildings ought to have been anticipated.

And if we carry on business as usual, as we seem to be doing, then the terrorists will be encouraged to escalate their audacity, and there is no knowing where else they will strike. Yes, terrorism is a global threat, as President Jonathan rightly said.

That should not be the end of the story. We should also do what the international community does in response to terrorism. Last week, I emphasised the need for law and order. That need is more crucial now. We can no longer carry on as if nothing is at stake. Our collective safety is at stake and the integrity of Nigeria is seriously being questioned.

Today we do not know how many of us are Nigerians, where we live and what we do. I don’t know how well people who cross our borders are documented! Everything in our land is subjected to crude politics. So, we have a census that simply legitimised our political self deceit but does not provide us a demographic mapping of our people. We have the famous e-passport.

We had a biometric registration during the election. Many Nigerians carry ATM cards. We are currently registering our SIM cards. Do all of these disparate information provide a data base that can aid investigation? As I write, two victims of the UN House bombing have not been identified because the hospital “does not have a data base” they can refer to.

I don’t know if we really appreciate the dire situation we are in. Many Nigerians want the President to take firm actions to stamp out the menace of terrorists. I believe he should. But then, we can only pray that there are no fifth columnists in the security agencies he is supposed to use!

With all due respect to the loyal and patriotic members of the security agencies, let us not forget that some soldiers attached to the Joint Task Force, whose responsibility was to protect life and property in Jos, were arrested in connection with the kidnapping of Mr. Michael Obi. Just imagine that we could have relied on such soldiers to rescue him!

The conduct of our Police no longer annoys me. It frightens me! Can any body tell me what has changed in the Police from Tafa Balogun to Ringim?

If the noise level gets to a crescendo, the President may embark on another cosmetic reorganisation in the Police; the Inspector General of Police and Deputy Inspectors General get retired and the most senior Assistant Inspector General is promoted IG. The truth is that the Police that can guarantee our safety require more than that.

The people we promote to IG from within are products of the same rotten system and some may even say they are the beneficiaries of the rot we confront on the roads everyday. If we don’t do something today about the rot in the Police, we are all going to be “internally displaced” people very soon!

There has been so much talk about intelligence gathering, and I’m sure there are experts on that. But simply paying attention to how the world works will help.

We must not continue to live in denial of the fact that there are some Nigerians among us who value their attachment to other countries more than their Nigerian citizenship. Truth is that many of the radical Islamic sects in the North are funded by Iran, Iraq and Libya. And so, when something happens in Ramallah, Lebanon or Syria they take up arms here, whether it concerns Nigeria or not.

Therefore, our intelligence community should have anticipated vengeful terror activities in all Al Qaeda cells worldwide after the killing of Osama Bin Laden on 1 May 2011.

Our intelligence gurus probably believed that Farouk Mutallab, the swimwear bomber did not have any associates here! Now the Security Agents are admitting that the terrorists who bombed the UN building have links with Al Qaeda. It will be interesting to know when they discovered that.

And when Nigeria hastily recognised the rebel National Transition Council in Libya, what was the reaction of our intelligence community to that?

We can no longer afford not to pay closer attention to how our neighbours stroll in and out of our country. There is hardly any immigration and custom control going on at our borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroon. Attention has been called to cross border raids in the North East of the country by Talibans from neighbouring countries as far back as 2001. But as usual, it was treated with levity.

I just hope that what we now call Boko Haram is not a smokes screen for some more sinister political agenda. Those who may be contriving that must remember that the omen of disintegration forecast for Nigeria is quite possible and also avoidable.

The guns that politicians gave to their thugs came back to haunt us all. Our borders we threw open to aliens are now flooding our country with terrorists. The survival of Nigeria as a country, safe and prosperous for us all, is a function of our collective decision to love our country and protect it. Things must not be allowed to spiral out of hands.

After the 9/11 terror attacks, America altered the way we live and travel. It insisted on finger printing and stripping visitors naked at airports, and we protested. They simply left the choice to the visitor to comply or stay in his little corner of the world.

Tracking citizens is now everyday life in many countries today. But Nigeria is an I-don’t-care country where we do not even know our neighbour. We just cannot go on this way, especially as we aim at becoming one of the 20 largest economies in the world by the year 2020.