The giant may be asleep while his enemies go about terrorising his children, but when the giant wakes up, the terrorists may soon realize that the monopoly of violence they presume to have is only a figment of their own imagination. As weak as Nigeria may seem in fighting terrorism, kidnapping and banditry across the country, experience has shown that the Nigerian military can withstand and neutralize any external or internal existential threat if the enablement and the political will is activated by the authorities at the nation’s seat of power. In other words, any enemy of Nigeria that takes advantage of the country’s seeming vulnerability to unleash mayhem on citizens as was blatantly carried out in Plateau State on Christmas Eve, might be doing so at his own peril. Such an attack might turn out a big leap into burning hell for the attackers. As scandalous as the impunity of that attack was; as brutal and bloody as it was; as cowardly as it was for trigger-lucky chaps to go from village to village slaughtering unarmed men, women and children in their sleep; the fact remains that the enemies cannot now start to celebrate victory over the innocent civilians they have murdered, because like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, they have murdered sleep, “the innocent sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care”.
As that massacre was going on in Plateau South on the fateful Christmas Eve, about 2,264 flying time miles away in Gaza, the Israeli Defence Force air strike hit central Gaza’s Maghazi refugee camp killing 70 people. Before then, precisely at 6.30 am on October 7th 2023, Hamas, the Sunni Islamic Resistance Movement governing the Gaza Strip of the Palestinian territories, launched an unprovoked and vicious surprise attack on over 20 communities in Israel killing more than 1,300 Israelis including men, women and children, and capturing over 200 as hostages. The attack was executed just as Israelis were rounding off their seven-day Jewish festival of Sukkot, using rocket-propelled grenades, long-range rockets and mortars, anti-tank missiles, improvised explosive devices, machine guns, knives and machetes.
The primary aim of Hamas, also known as Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya, is to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic State, a mission not too different from that of such groups as Boko Haram and ISWAP in Nigeria and the entire Sahel region of Africa comprising as many as 12 countries with a combined population of over 400 million people. So, the insurgents in this vast region which includes Nigeria know exactly what they are doing and they make no pretences about it. Any serious government within the region that presumes that the insurgents can be wished away without a fight of a Herculean proportion is digging its own grave and that of its citizens.
As expected from a country surrounded by enemies, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas in retaliation for the events of October 7th. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) mobilized its entire military arsenal and waged an all-out war against Hamas, taking the battle straight into the heart of Gaza and beyond. A prudent estimate puts the number of Hamas fighters killed at 3,500, with over 22,000 Palestinians killed as reported by the Palestinian Health Ministry. The death toll has not abated as we speak, as the war is projected to continue throughout year 2024 and possibly beyond.
Apparently, Hamas might not have envisaged an Israeli response of such a catastrophic magnitude enveloping the entire Gaza, West Bank, and even extending to Israel’s northern border with Lebanon. The lesson is that you don’t start a war you cannot win or predict its outcome and consequences.
The point being made here is that it is difficult to determine beforehand how a nation’s military would respond to an act of war or existential threat by an enemy even if the nation had not been responding in any remarkable manner in previous attacks. At different points in history, Nigeria has always been under violent attacks by different armed groups dating back to the civil war era of the sixties through to the regimes of coup d’états to the present-day threats by Boko Haram, ISWAP, ISIS, Ansaru and other insurgent groups. Apart from the resilience and the political will demonstrated by the Gowon-led military government to keep the country together during the civil war, it is sad to note that almost all other regimes, military and civilian, have not shown the same level of political will to deal decisively with these armed groups terrorising the country every day. Drawing a parallel from the Israeli experience, the IDF made it clear from the outset that Oct 7th had never happened to Israel before, and that its war against Gaza will serve as a deterrent to any armed group or enemy country that may so much as contemplate attacking its citizens anywhere inside Israel. When armed groups attack Nigerian villages at will and without any immediate resistance, the attacks will never stop until the entire country is destroyed, which of course is the ultimate aim of the attackers. The immediate past President of Nigeria, incidentally an Army General, vowed to crush the insurgents but apparently he did not, probably because of the same lack of political will. So, wherever the present Tinubu-led administration is going to get that political will to protect citizens from bandits and terrorists; whatever it takes for Aso Rock to chase away the murderers; everything deployable must be deployed by President Tinubu to achieve that goal and he must achieve it or be haunted forever by his inability to do so.
Anthony-Spinks writes from Asaba, Delta State.
