By Steve Osuji
Conversation With General X
UPON READING this column last week, an old acquaintance, a retired general of the Nigerian Army reached out to me. Let’s call him General X.
We had known since 2004 when I was editing The NEW AGE newspaper, and he was still in service. My weekly column in that snazzy newspaper caught his attention and we have been friends since then.
After reading last week’s submission on Igboho’s militia, he reached out to me. He was careful not to make known his location, ignoring my tease.
He was at once shocked and bemused. He said he would have laughed his head off if the Igboho Iru-Ekun joke wasn’t a “potentially tragic matter.”
We had a very long conversation about it.
Below are excerpts:
EXPRESSO: General, it’s been a while. You have been very quiet lately quite unlike you. We don’t even get to talk to you again. You must be out of the country apparently, leaving us in this mess?
GEN. X: My dear brother, mess is a very nice word. You’ve got to find me something far worse than mess. To me it seems we are being swept away by a flood … a deluge is threatening to carry all of us away. And it’s gonna be so bad that hardly any of us will come out of it unscathed. It shall be worse than Noah’s flood in which case, some of God’s elect were saved. This time, not even some of us who think we are safe abroad will be spared.
And now this so-called Iru-Ekun by that benighted, unschooled fellow… I hope someone can still advise him that what he’s playing with is Ori-Oka (head of live a cobra), not Iru-Ekun – tiger’s tail. That’s what he is toying with.
You know how we say it in Yoruba … Omode o mo ogun o n pe ni efo (a little child would mistake hemp for vegetables).
EXPRESSO: What exactly do you mean?
GEN. X: I had heard that Sunday Igboho was building a militia called Iru-Ekun and I just laughed it off thinking it was one of those things he had always wanted to do: to be at liberty to have a band of boys around him; assume some magical powers and play Cowboys and Indians in the vast Oyo forest with some Fulani wanderers.
But after your article last week I did a few checks of my own only to discover that the young man is long gone. He has long gone astray, he’s traveling on the road to perdition.
He talks glibly about gathering 50,000 men or is it 800,000 men? He’s got to be kidding!
EXPRESSO: He said his target was fifty thousand men but the number has quickly jumped to eighty and still counting…
GEN. X: Yes, I saw the mammoth crowd of youths he pretended to address in Abeokuta and I shuddered, knowing that my Yoruba people of the southwest are playing with fire.
Look at that crowd of young men who turned out to listen to Igboho! It’s because there’s no job in the country… perhaps over a quarter of them are educated, and even graduates. I will bet that many of them are Yahoo boys, cult members and armed robbers. I also imagine they are smarter than the so-called commander.
Many of them are waiting to be armed and you see the stuff they are made of.
I think the number he’s brandishing is implausible, indeed, impossible.
Igboho cannot manage even 8,000 armed men, not to talk of 80,000. He doesn’t have the capacity to select and train them and where is he going to raise the funds to arm them, kit them, feed them, camp them, pay them and move them about?
But the present danger is that once you manage to kit and arm even 1000 of them, the rest would see themselves as a standby army, they go about with the mentality of a force.
Secondly, those who are armed cannot be properly controlled because there are no barracks to keep them. With the inherent poor selection, poor training and little or no indoctrination, what you have is a time bomb and not a militia.
EXPRESSO: What really are the dangers envisaged?
GEN.X: As I noted, you have criminals of all sorts in that crowd. The moment some of these people get military type rifles and uniforms, you may never see them again. Many will go form their own cells, many will become bandits and highway robbers. Mark my word, the Lagos-Ibadan Highway and further down to Ile-Ife would become terror hotspots if we allow this madness to flower.
These boys would be looking for the big dough, they would storm banks, palaces if they suspect a cash haul; twenty of then can assault and overrun a government house or a governor’s convoy!
My brother, the very thought of the potential dangers of this misadventure is chilling. Unlike the northwest scenario (remember that the bandits are linked to the APC’s election joust in 2015), where the marauders are unsophisticated, this group would be intentional bandits.
These militia of the southwest will be able to organise and plan better with AI precision, if you like. These ones can easily trail, plan and kidnap a wealthy monarch, a business mogul or even a minister. These ones would be targeting billionaires because they want the big bucks.
EXPRESSO: What can be done now, or is it too late already?
GEN. X: I am shocked that President Bola Tinubu would want to destroy Yoruba land in pursuit of his political ambition. As you posited in your piece, this, of course, is in aid of the 2027 election… exactly what happened in 2015. But my question is that you cannot win a credible election by violence. The world has become too advanced and Nigeria is too complex for anyone to upturn an overwhelming ballot loss through the force of arms.
Having said that, one is surprised that the Yoruba elite are looking on and letting Tinubu have his way?
Where is Prof. Wole Soyinka, General Alani Akinrinade and General Ishola Williams, to mention just a few? Why are they silent?
Why is Tinubu intent on tearing down the country. If the SW is allowed to raise an army, you wouldn’t be able to stop other zones from doing the same. Would you? Is that the country we fought for? And let nobody be deluded that any single zone can break away from Nigeria through the force of arms. The other zones will rally themselves and whip such a zone back to the fold. Remember Biafra.
Creating this monster becomes more remarkable if you remember that state police is already a done deal; there’s Amotekun, Forest Guards, Mining Marshals the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), among others.
In the next 2 to 5 years, I see anomy in the southwest in the scale worse than we have it in the northwest today. From experience, I don’t believe that fellow has 50,000 men. He can’t even control 10,000 armed men! But if you teach ten thousand men how to live by the guns without working out the whole gamut of their lives from day one to the last, you’re creating a dysfunctional mass of people.
Look at the scenario: two years down the line, many of these youths will become disillusioned and frustrated because there’s no thoroughfare where they are treading. They can’t get married, they can’t rent a proper house or even feed well.There’s no pension or gratuity to hope on… When they come to this sad realisation, they will have to put their guns to use – to live, to make a living and to get rich. Also, it’s impossible to disband a band of youths you have trained to use firearms. They will always live by the gun.
As for what’s to be done, what is a man who commands the largest military in Africa doing with a rag-tag militia?
This entire charade must be closed before it begins! And the young fellow, Igboho, must be weaned of his Messiah syndrome in Yoruba land. He must be made to understand that he’s just another John Doe out there, he’s not a deity in any guise.
LAST LINE: IT’S LIMITED STAMINA, NOT LIMITED CAMPAIGN
President Bola Tinubu has announced that he would do a limited campaign. He would only visit 12 states out of 36 because he has the country to run, he said.
But Nigerians are not taken in by that blah, blah. The president is tired and unfit for the rigours of the hustings.
Electioneering is the first fitness test for amy man who wants to run a country. If you can’t cover every inch of your space, how can you run it?
If Tinubu had a party, a family or strong associates, they would have prevailed upon him to stand down. He’s tired and seriously ailing!
Every outing, every movement, every word, makes a mockery of the president and makes the country a laughing stock.
Talk about remarketing Nigeria!
—
Share Your Story with us!
Advertise with us!
Publicity for a product, service, or event!
Contact: WhatsApp Only: +2348039560647
Email: jkmediapress@gmail.com
