By Obi Nwakanma
In a week of highwire events, there often is for the columnist, the feeling of standing lingeringly before a salad bar or a buffet of assorted cuisines. There’s much to be had, but alas, only so much can fit into the neat frame of our bodies in spite of our desires.

Our eyes often grow larger than our stomachs, certainly, and we find ourselves burrowing through the pile, and we are no better, in that moment, than the city scavenger who perches on the Olympian heights of city refuse in search of errant gold. I felt this way – that I was before a salad bar of national news – this past week, each tempting me to comment and register an opinion or perspective.

This past week Alex Ibru died. The death of the publisher of the Guardian has drawn numerous, adulatory, and appropriately mournful condolences. Death in Nigeria does bring out the best in men. Their lives may just have been hollow. But in death, they attract not infrequent hyperbolic sentiments. Alex Ibru, I never met, although I started out in the Guardian –but a public and even cursory scrutiny of his life does testify to an exemplary life; imperfect as all men are imperfect; but genuinely striving towards some grace. It seemed to have been a simple and questing life. His spiritual investment in the Ecclesiastical Center at Agbarha-Otor is one public act of such a quest that seemed to have risen above the crude and exhibitionist materialism of Nigeria’s subaltern elite.

The trauma of his near-execution following his brief tenure as the late Sani Abacha’s Minister for the Interior drove him towards the quest for higher spiritual truth and into more private, more soul-searching alternatives, beyond the public discourse of power. Yet, as publisher of the Guardian, Ibru kept his fingers at the very pulse of the heartbeat of nation. His conservative values in many ways reflected on the right-of-center character of the Guardian, which had moved decidedly from the more liberal, centrist location of its earlier foundation when it was led by the equally now late Stanley Macebuh in the 1980s, yet Ibru seemed always in the background; a benign investor unwilling to exert the enormous leverage of a press baron for personal, other than the public good, at least by his own convictions. It was his unwillingness to play that kind of ball that nearly got him killed as a member of Sani Abacha’s first cabinet, and it is doubtful that he fully recovered from the physical trauma of that assassination bid on him. Now, his time hath come whom the divine calls to him.

This past week also, Vanguard reported that lots of the Igbo are evacuating and relocating to the East from the North as a result of the violence that continues to upend life in parts of the north, and target their livelihood in places like Jos, Maiduguri, and other flashpoints in the north.

This Igbo back-and-forth is nothing new, and certainly,may pass by. But again, the insecurity of the life and property of the citizen is the central challenge for this administration. If the federal government continues to ignore the national security implication of these kinds of displacements and deep feelings of insecurity in Nigeria, this country will implode sooner than the forecasts into a distortion worse than Somalia and the Congo.

We point to these facts continually but security policy wonks in government also continue to ignore these concerns, unable to see the larger picture and the situation at stake with the rapid dismantling of the legitimacy of the nation by brazen, even if inchoate actions of non-state actors. The federal government, meaning the three arms of that government, must work together more assiduously, to rebuild and invigorate Nigeria’s national security action platforms and stem the loss of the sovereign will of the nation.

It is in this light that the arrest, by the State Security Service, of Senator of Ali Ndume in connection with his subterranean funding of the terrorist “Boko Haram” group seems to be an important development. Security analysts have long suggested that these subversive groups are organized and funded by powerful political and business leaders from a section of the country. Let me also propose a more suggestive possibility. Nigerians have not heard the whole truth about Boko Haram.

It may be a far bigger project than its more localized face. As a Nigerian scholar and security analyst of the Central Sahel region said to me last week in Washington DC, “Boko Haram is a classic transnational security destabilization operation. Its roots are not in Northern Nigeria. It is Western.” This is an angle of possibility that should be surveiled, and it’d take a highly organized national security capacity to stem the external and domestic dangers to which Nigeria is currently exposed and which puts its citizens, whether from the north or the South to equal danger.

The greatest security threat to Nigeria in that regard is not external: it is by far the internal fissures that have more than ever, since the civil war in 1967, divided the soul of this nation along geopolitical affiliations and along its profound ethnic lines and fragments.

President Jonathan was elected in April to heal these fissures, and perhaps now is that opportune time to call that National Conference before the sky drops on all our heads. Another important development this past week is the sacking of Mrs. Victoria Farida Waziri as the powerful Head of the EFCC. This commission was established by an act of parliament in 2006 to deal with all manners of financial fraud in the public domain.

First, I was an early critic of the EFCC law, on the grounds that it cedes too much power to the office of the president who is liable to use it to witch hunt. Second, the enormous power of the EFCC separates it from the necessary police function of crime control, which is vital to the constitutional necessities of the commission. In short, the EFCC is bedeviled in my estimation by a structural problem; a command and control problem, and an in-built mechanism that undermines its independence by attaching it to the apron-strings of the presidency.

Indeed, the EFCC should under clearer circumstances be under the Nigerian Police which itself should be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Justice. But in its current situation, the Chair of the EFCC has almost deitic powers, and Mrs. Farida Waziri was accused by his critiques – the more recent being a Nigerian-American Lawyer, Emeka Ugwuoye, currently in horrendous detention by EFCC – of terrible misuse of power and incompetence. Two issues are necessary here: the National Assembly must revisit the EFCC laws, and the commission needs to be reorganized.

Hopefully, the new Chair, Mr. Ibrahim Lamorde will bring new and greater credibility to the EFCC and change the skepticism of Nigerians about a national institution which rather than fight fraud seems itself to be too deeply mired in fraud.