By Ochereome Nnanna
“I want to use this opportunity to say that we have heard in the news that Mr. President will be visiting Maiduguri in a couple of days. We want to use this opportunity to call on the government, especially Mr. President, to see how he can declare total amnesty to all combatants without thinking twice.

That will make any other person who picks up arms to be termed a criminal” – Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’adu Abubakar III

THE acclaimed leader of the Muslim community in Nigeria, Sultan Abubakar, made the above quoted statement at the Tuesday 5th March 2013 meeting of the Jama’atu Nasril Islam in Kaduna.

Then on Thursday, President Goodluck Jonathan made good his planned official visit to Borno and Yobe states. At a town hall in Damaturu, he said his government would not grant amnesty to a faceless group.

According to him, the terrorists must first of all come out, show themselves to the world and table their “demands” before he would consider “negotiating” with them.

I do not support the Sultan or the President. They are wrong. Let me take it one after the other.

Sultan Abubakar wants the Federal Government to declare ‘total amnesty” to terrorists “without thinking twice”! Where in the world has this ever happened? I will like someone to give an example of where terrorists have been offered unconditional amnesty?

The trend in terror-endemic states such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russian Chechnya, Somalia, Mali and others is to hunt them down and emasculate them.

Even here in Nigeria, that has been the bitter medicine deployed to cure us of the periodic upsurges of Islamic terrorism, both when it manifested as Maitatsine and Boko Haram Phase one. It was Muslim Presidents who wiped them out.

That is the only sure panacea against terror. Is it because the incumbent president of Nigeria is a Christian that the call for amnesty for Islamic terrorists is employed as a tool of blackmail? Therefore we reject it “without thinking twice”.

Secondly, even when amnesty was granted to the militants of the Niger Delta, it was not “unconditional”. It was predicated on the grounds that (a) they must cease hostilities and allow the oil resources of the Niger Delta to continue to feed Nigeria (b) they must surrender and publicly hand over their weapons to the security forces (c) they must renounce violence.

They fulfilled all these conditions. With full resuscitation of oil production, the federal government decided it was in the interest of the economy to plug the ex-militants into a post-amnesty rehabilitation programme.

Glamourising Boko Haram

Thirdly, when you say after amnesty any other person who is still involved in violence should be treated like a criminal, are you inferring that those who are now indiscriminately killing, bombing and destroying are not yet criminals?

A section of the northern opinion leadership has always tried to glamourise Boko Haram terrorists as people fighting against ‘injustice”, all in a vain effort to blackmail the federal government into granting them amnesty and channelling state funds for their “rehabilitation”.

Now, coming to the answer the President gave, it gives us the indication that the federal government is ready to negotiate with terrorists, provided they come out of hiding. That is not acceptable.

The conditionality the President appears to have tabled lacks substance when compared with the conditions his predecessor, the late President Umaru Yar’ Adua, laid out for the Niger Delta militants. All that Jonathan is saying is that the terrorists should come out and voice their “demands”.

In other words, we are preparing a kid’s glove treatment for people who have murdered more than 3,000 Nigerians in three years and rendered the economic and social life in Northern Nigeria comatose.

That is not acceptable. That will not be accepted. The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo, Afenifere, traditional rulers from the Niger Delta and have made it abundantly clear that amnesty for the terrorists will be like stirring the hornet’s nest. It will amount to waking up sleeping dogs.

It is unfortunate that the Sultan, who had openly called Boko Haram terrorists “evildoers” and made bold to say they were not fighting the cause of Islam; a Sultan that admitted, correctly, that the “civil war” in the North (as General Theophilus Danjuma correctly described it) is self-inflicted by the northerners and must be resolved only by them, has suddenly joined those who want to put the moral and financial burden of Al Qaeda’s war on Nigeria at the doorstep of President Jonathan.

It is even more the pity that the President appears ready to carry the burden, rather than stay the course in the task of dealing a death’s blow to a serpent crawling in from the Sahara Desert.

Yes, probe the oil blocs ownership

SINCE Senator Ita Enang from Akwa Ibom alleged that 83 per cent of the oil blocks in the Niger Delta were owned by northerners, the polity has been abuzz, and the uproar over the internet has been remarkable and interesting.

Adding to this was a rather positive contribution from the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) which issued a statement signed by its Scribe, Anthony Sani, calling on the National Assembly to institute an inquiry to verify Senator Enang’s claim.

I want it to be an open inquiry, possibly televised. We will like to know, not just the oil blocks allotees but also what qualifies one to be an oil block owner, as well as the obligations and responsibilities of such owners to the state and the oil producing communities.

We will also like to know whether these blocks are won based on equitable and lawful competitive bidding or they are just part of the dark presidential privileges dished out with impunity to civil war mass murderers and criminals (whom some describe as “heroes”) and their bourgeois acolytes from a privileged part of the country.

The mystery of oil block ownership must be unraveled and justice done to those whom it is due – the owners of the territory where the oil comes from.