LAST week, I observed that the insecurity situation in the country is very bad. And it will remain that way as far as we can see into the future. This is because those whose duty it is to solve the problem are hardly doing anything worth talking about, beyond meetings, photo-ops and the regular platitudes that we are fed with. I am not surprised.

This is because the architects of the problem may have no solutions to proffer. That is also why, whenever a political strategy is devised, those who formulated the strategy more often than not do not pause to ponder the variables that will spin out of control. The insecurity we are bedevilled with at present is the fallout of a political strategy with variables that have gone out of control, as they would.

Our people have a saying to the effect that when siblings enter a room to confer, and come out smiling and back-slapping after, they have not told each other the truth. But if they come out of their conclave frowning, with unpleasant mien, our people say they must have told each other the bitter truth. It is time now to tell each other the bitter truth: the ruling party, APC, put us in this hell hole of insecurity.

For those who missed it, or might have forgotten, I will quote part of the Easter message to Christian faithful by the Catholic Bishop of Sokoto Diocese, Rev. Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, titled, Mr. President, Please Bring Us Down From This Cross:

“Some years back, some of our public officers confessed that they brought our current killers into our country as a strategy for upstaging the government of the day and to gain power. Strange as it may sound, today we have watched as the cancer of insecurity and violence have metastasized. Now, this cancer threatens the very foundation of our common humanity.

The bandits have not only become embedded in every sphere of our lives, they threaten to destroy all that holds our communities together. This self-destructive cancer has invaded our communities and kidnapping is now a dog whistle for undermining the very structure and foundation of our country. We now hang on the cross at the mercy of these forces of darkness. Mr. President, please, bring us down from this cross of insecurity.”

There it is. In 2014, the APC, then a newly-formed special purpose political vehicle, determined to wrest power from the ruling PDP devised this odious strategy of bringing in nomadic, stateless, faithless, ruthless persons who drive cattle throughout their lifetimes in search of pasture to scare the PDP out of power. It worked: Jonathan panicked, and before the final tally of election results, conceded defeat.

That was how the APC, led by Buhari and Asiwaju Tinubu happened on us. But the architects of this strategy did not provide for the return of these mindless souls. They did not have an exit strategy by which, after helping deliver the goods, they could go back to their ways of life and whence they came.

These people, whose minds were forged in the Luciferous furnaces in the hottest parts of hell stayed with us, in our country, started eating our food, and drinking our God-given water. After receiving payment from those that hired them, they used the proceeds to buy assault rifles. Seeing how good our lands are, they decided the next best thing to happen is for them to kill us all off our lands and settle on them as if it is their own.

In furtherance of this objective, they declared war on us, including their ethnic kith and kin, and started killing, raping, kidnapping, in a coordinated land-grabbing effort since our people, especially farmers have been scared off their lands by these people.

Instead of seeing the situation as problematic, the APC, particularly under Buhari, decided to treat it with kid’s gloves by calling it herder-farmers clashes. Worse, these felons became known as bandits. Bandits raid and make away with their plunder, and do not engage in land-grabbing as we are seeing.

To solve this problem, the APC must first publicly own it, and admit its error. It must also apologise to Nigerians. The party must also sit down and fashion out a strategy by which it can extract their killer-clients from our lands. Then, as incumbent custodians of state power, deploy the full might of the state against their clients and rout them completely — with unmitigated fury — out of our country.

For now, it is proving ineffective to deploy security agencies against them, for a simple reason: it is asymetric warfare. A situation in which a formal army, with rules of engagement is deployed against groups of marauding killers and bandits is a writ for failure; the strategy must change.

We simply cannot continue like this. President Tinubu must certainly know that most of his policies, which should positively impact the citizenry in a regular economy, seem not to be working here because of insecurity. If farmers can’t go to the farms for fear of being kidnapped or killed by these felons, what will the rest of us eat? Those of us in the towns and cities are at risk of starving to death if these felons gain full control of the countryside. Some people are talking of state failure because the state has failed miserably to protect life and property.

Right now, the minds of all politicians are fixated on the 2027 elections and how to get elected or re-elected. I remind them that there must be a country first, before there can be voters. Let the President and his men get to brass tacks and secure our country; we have no other, and all of us cannot japa. TGIF.