The Politics of Kidnapping

Crusaderhotnews

By George Onmonya Daniel

For the past one decade and more, we have been trying to define and analyze Boko Haram. Are they Muslims or not?

When Boko Haram and their likes do not represent majority of Muslims in Nigeria and beyond, the voice of Boko Haram is louder than that of the majority.

All they need to do for everyone hear them is to bomb crowded marketplace, bomb a church or a mosque, or enter any girl’s school and kidnap them.

Then you have the whole world talking about

The bone of contention has been if they are Muslims or not. Of course they are.

 Are they fighting for Islam? They say they are and think they are.

Who would explain this whole thing to non-Muslims better? Of course Muslims.

What were most of them doing one time on social media? They are either defending Boko Haram, trying to justify the whole thing by blaming the Nigerian Police for killing their founder Muhammad Yusuf and some just kept quiet.

What people like me asked in the heydays of Boko Haram was that Muslims should condemn their atrocities.

Instead the North was focused on blaming the PDP and Goodluck Jonathan for Boko Haram. It was a conspiracy.

It was America’s plot to divide Nigeria and take the oil.

In fact there are those who said it was Christian Association of Nigeria’s plot to reduce Muslim population.

Then suddenly we are faced by a new problem. The Fulani herdsmen.

The mass killings started during the time of Goodluck Jonathan. When some of us complained, we were told to shut up.

 It was revenge killing over the stealing of their cows by the people they kill, victims who were women, old and young, and children, cut down in villages. Some called them “warriors who never forget.” They bragged about it.

Are the herdsmen not everyone’s problems today? Are they not terrorizing everyone today? We should never have encouraged the politicizing of terrorism and criminality in the North. We did.

Instead of write to fix our region, the entire North. Some people have stored all the debate and vituperation in their medulla oblongata, sorry, hippocampus, and are waiting for revenge.

And the revenge arrived with the abduction of 9 children in Kano by criminal gangs for sale in Onitsha. These social media juvenile delinquents suddenly saw opportunity to strike the South and Christianity. It’s revenge time.

The problem is that they have got no case. Unlike our North, the South are not defending the kidnappers, they are not trying make propaganda out of it, they want the kidnappers dealt with severely.

 In fact if it’s in the South these kidnappers would have since been lynched and roasted by their own people.

The Southern press are not quiet over the abducted 9 children from Kano who have been found, they are not just reporting it as kidnap for Christ as rabble rousers want it to be.

They are reporting it as it is. Simply Kidnap. Abduction.