Opinion: Before they kidnap our children

by Henry Jacob

girls-848x478

I watched in astonishment the first lady accusing the Chibok school person of not providing adequate security for the students, that’s preposterous I exclaimed. How can a school provide adequate security if not by the police or military? 

I heard a staccato of gunshots close to a primary school and on turning around to survey the landscape to see where the shots are coming from; only hazy dusts could be seen from different directions close to the school. However through the haze I suddenly saw some hilux vans with young abled young men behind it shouting some Islamic incantations at very high pitch. The crowd with me suddenly thinned out to my chagrin. I ran into the school to see these obvious boko haram guys trying to capture the children, mostly the males…..i started screaming run children run, run out of the school run far away…i was shot at but not wounded…with my heart pacing and fear in my bowels, I also screamed at them to leave the children alone…and suddenly my wife tapped me…it was a dream….visible shaken I couldn’t sleep till the sun broke though the horizon of the darkness.

I kept exclaiming, before they kidnap our children and make them then children wing of Boko haram…imagine children suicide bombers, how do you shoot a child who is a suicide bomber and the same age as your own children…how can we protect our children who are about to resume school next week? What if one of these kidnapped children is strapped with bombs and made to walk into a class room? We know all they need to activate the bomb is a cellular phone….

I recalled watching blood diamonds and the children kidnapped from the football game and converted to child soldiers. I cringe at the thought of losing my son to book haram, I would rather die than live to see my son kidnapped from school and converted to a Boko Haram fighter by way of drugs and consistent ideology, even the thought on its own raises my blood pressure some notches. I can’t live to see that, I reject the coming of that day when they would revert to children.

I watched in astonishment the first lady accusing the Chibok school person of not providing adequate security for the students, that’s preposterous I exclaimed. How can a school provide adequate security if not by the police or military? Furthermore, the close down of schools in Abuja by the Federal Government for traffic purposes was another blow to my mind, you close down schools for traffic, that cant be [possible, its for security reasons.

We cannot kowtow to fear, we cannot live our lives in fear of book haram, if we do, they have won. This war on terrorism is a war on our way of life; we must resist that with everything we have. LIFE MUST GO ON AS NORMAL. How do you host the World Economic Forum without economic activities going on? We can’t just shut down our economy or education because of poor security; we can do better than this.

Teenagers and school children are being slaughtered and kidnapped from schools, no one has been apprehended. They kill and walk away freely under a state of emergency, what are we protecting then in the North East. I travelled to the south recently, soldiers are everywhere and the question I couldn’t answer was if they are so much here, how would it be in the northeast? How come they move freely without anyone stopping them?

Where do they buy the guns from? Where do they buy the vehicles from? Can we not get informants to penetrate Boko Haram? Can we not get people that believe in Nigeria much more than the fear of Boko Haram? Where are our special forces that can go into these neighboring countries, operate and return successfully, don’t we have such in Nigeria. Why not raze down the simbasa forest completely? Why not raze down every hiding place until they can’t find any anywhere? Why not close the damn borders by digging a big trench around the north Eastern states? Why not get drones in the air and satellites providing minute by minute pictures of movements all over the northeast? Why not use live pictures from Google Earth for security? Don’t we have helicopters and planes that can hover in the cloud covering these areas 24 hours a day? Why not have working security cameras all over Abuja? Why not reform the slums in and around Abuja where these bomb makers obviously reside and make their bombs. Why not rebuild the destroyed schools and provide adequate security instead of closing the schools down?

HEY NIGERIA, WE ARE BETTER THAN THIS. WE CAN DO BETTER

————————

Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail