“I’m Nigerian, not a terrorist. I don’t kill people that’re not from another part of my country” from old post.
It’s getting old – the idea that government is now somehow able to provide adequate security for the citizens without being able to sufficiently understand the extent of the problem itself. Now, one day at a time, the country is disintegrating into the abyss and the citizenry is left at the mercy of a better equipped, better funded and certainly more resolute gang of zealots. In the south is MEND – the group that started ostensibly to protest the environmental pollution of the Niger Delta whose tactics now include setting up explosives in public places. In the north is Boko Haram – an equally psychopathic distant cousin of Al-Qaeda, opposed to civilization and westernization (but still use cars and bombs, go figure). Yesterday, Nigeria’s first suicide bomber detonated a car bomb at the national police headquarters in Abuja killing himself and a traffic warden, and wounding a bunch of others. Crazy times we live in.
It’s hard to analyze this any other way other than as a failure of government that made proliferation of explosives something of a possibility (because of poor security systems) in a place where some people still can’t afford to feed a family. But then, these days violence seems to always find an outlet. Ethnic clashes seem to have lost their allure, we’re back to making bombs and blowing each other up. Crazy times we live in.