RANSOM PAYMENT: WE HAVE LOST THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM ... only the Church can rescue Nigeria We cannot continue to fuel terrorism with ransom
RANSOM PAYMENT:
WE HAVE LOST THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM
… only the Church can rescue Nigeria
We cannot continue to fuel terrorism with ransom money because the entire nation will eventually be engulfed in darkness. Sooner or later, we will realise that there is no choice but for the Church to stand up for Jesus Christ as Leah Sharibu has done. Perhaps we should blame the Nigerian Church because we allowed the nation to forget that something similar happened in the days of human slavery when we were hunted down and sold in exchange for beads and gunpowder. Nigeria could never have become a nation freed from slavery, barbarism and colonialism if not for the martyrs of the Christian faith although the contributions of men like Mallam Ibrahim beheaded in late eighteen hundred’s at the Kano market by the Emir for his tolerant belief in Jesus Christ must be remembered.
In this discourse, Ladi Thompson, adviser on Security to the president of Christian Association of Nigeria, takes a deep look at the security of the Nation, the origin, sequence and manifestation of the challenges vis-a-vis our individual and cognate handling of them. He takes a look at the Church handling of the current malaise of kidnapping and paying of ransom to the criminals. The Leah Sharibu option of martyrdom, damning personal liberty for eternal rest resonates with him. Rushing to pay ransom can only postponing the evil days, if the very evil days are not here already. This is a deep intellectual and spiritual treatise by Ladi Thompson. Read on…
“Trials make us look up to God for help. At times when challenges of life come, we press all the buttons we can press as humans and they are not able to bail us out of the trouble. From my life experiences, I have discovered that during the times of challenges, I have got the cause to seek the face of God more in prayer. This is not personal prayer alone but requesting others to join me in the prayer to overcome trial.” – Rev’d Samson Olasupo Adeniyi Ayokunle.
Even with a modest estimate, the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria is superintendent over 90 million Christians in a nation that is quoted to have 200.96 million citizens. As expected, Ayokunle does not have faith in any other but the Almighty God and has held on to the promise of God in Jeremiah 33:3 tightly since he became the point man for the Christian faith in Nigeria. Nobody needs to be persuaded that these are very trying times in the history of Nigeria.
Former president Olusegun Obasanjo wrote President Mohammed Buhari on the 15th of July 2019 on the security situation and the likelihood of a full-scale war erupting in the days ahead. Given the right platform, the Nigerian Church would have informed the retired army general that his warning was belated because Nigeria is already at war. It has gone unrecognised because it is a new form of warfare that has been named and documented in the advanced nations across the world. This new globalised war form is asymmetric; hydra headed and deploys hybrid threats.
It has provoked a total redesign in the defense structures of the nations of the world. It is a supremacist war head cloaked with a religious disguise. The official government edition on the 9/11 Commission Report says
“We learned about an enemy who is sophisticated, patient, disciplined and lethal. The enemy rallies broad support in the Arab and Muslim world by demanding redress of political grievances, but its hostility toward us and our values is limitless. Its purpose is to rid the world of religious and political pluralism, the plebiscite, and equal rights for women. It makes no distinction between military and civilian targets. Collateral damage is not in its lexicon.
We learned that the institutions charged with protecting our borders, civil aviation, and national security did not understand how grave this threat could be, and did not adjust their policies, plans, and practices to deter or defeat it. We learned of fault lines within our government – between foreign and domestic intelligence, and between and within agencies. We learned of the pervasive problems of managing and sharing information across a large and unwieldy government that had been built in a different era to confront different dangers.”
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ike the proverbial ostrich, Nigeria has refused to come to terms with the fact that the war form initiated its displacement sequence on our shores long before it launched the American 9/11, the British 7/7 and the Madrid 3/11 terrorist attacks. We know this because the Church was the first in its firing line! As noted by the 9/11 Report, this opportunistic hydra exploits all fault lines available to collapse nations from within and it is very difficult to detect in the early stages. It has exploited the religious cracks in the Nigerian narrative. The elusive diagnosis of this war form is no different from the foreign medical trips made by our dignitaries in admission that our health care system lacks the sophistication to detect and treat certain complications.
The refusal to recognise the fact that we are a nation at war has triggered a gross devaluation in human worth across the nation. The Church was designed by God to be a spiritual thermostat rather than a thermometer for the well being of our nation but it has been an uphill task alerting the Federal Government.
What started as trickles about four decades ago has now become a crimson river of blood. We must admit that the Nigerian mosque is at a disadvantage and has been put under great pressure because of the religious disguise of the supremacist agenda such that the burden now rests squarely on the shoulders of the Church and this is not an easy time to be the president of the Christian Association of Nigeria. The blood spills of our local face of the global hydra started swelling during the tenure of Dr. Sunday Mbang but the menace had a tactical advantage because of the distraction raised by the 1999 declaration of the total sharia in certain northern states. Dr. Sunday Mbang did his best to alert the Church on the dangers head but his warnings did not gain much traction because the hydra was invisible to the naked eye.
After his tenure the baton of leadership passed on to the energetic Arch Bishop Akinola whose resolute stand on biblical standards attracted global attention. The Anglican Primate recognized the threat but wisely, he restricted information on the approaching tsunami to Church leaders to avoid creating panic. He was succeeded by Bishop Onaiyekan whose strategy of cooperation and reasoning on the platform of religious dialogue could have yielded much fruit but for the infiltration, deception (tacquiya) and cruelty of the terror moles seated at the table of accord. Emboldened by the olive branch offered, the Boko Haram terrorists expanded their terrorism until Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor and his unorthodox Pentecostal style of leadership was ushered in to take the bull by the horns. Undeterred by red tape and protocols he ordered the faithful to defend their lives in the face of terror attacks. The hydra responded with ferocity and tried to lure the Church unto a battle field where the weapons of warfare are carnal.
The global menace reared its ugly heads and changed tactics to confuse the nation and we are now dealing with a dastardly mix of the Boko Haram, Fulani militia and the Islamic Province of West Africa (ISWAP) terrorist backed by moles in high places. As a special adviser on these matters to several CAN presidents I can testify that Rev’d Supo Ayokunle has been saddled with complexities that are craftier, and more sophisticated that what obtained in the past. First there are certain inherited flaws of the divide-and-rule legacy, including a northernisation policy that is festering like an untreated sore. The opportunistic hydra is tearing at every crack in our national foundation to set brother against brother and tribe against tribe. At the same time, he has to deal with a flawed architecture of governance that is propped on political distrust. Then there is an ever suspicious, battered and poverty stricken general public groaning under several yokes not to mention the antiquated and underfunded security services in desperate need of an upgrade.
The International community has been working to freeze the financial supply of the terrorists in Nigeria and the kidnap ransom is their own way of generating internal revenue. We know that every ransom paid is used for the purchase of more arms and the sponsorship of more kidnaps!”
To complicate matters, ritual murders have returned, kidnapping is rife and the youths are fleeing in droves since life holds little hope. Corruption is beating its barrel chest like a Goliath with no David while poverty is beating the citizens comatose. The family structure has broken down to accommodate prostitution and fraud as acceptable norms. Irredentists and other centrifugal forces are raging but the predatory political class are too fixated on the national cake to hear their cry. We seem to be prisoners of our past locked up in a boat that the terrorists are pushing towards the precipice and Rev’d Supo Ayokunle has been called by divine appointment to a herculean task that would cow the best of men. He has to be a reformer, a stateman, and an inspired leader rolled into one and needs to be armed with the delicate scalpel of the surgeon as well as the butchers rough cut because of the complexities involved. He has been called to be both spiritual yet realistic, rich and yet poor, stoic yet emotional because of the state and makeup of the nation.
Without any shred of doubt, it is the duty of our CAN president to educate the Nigerian Government that the total meltdown of our nation will be inevitable should the Government continue to pursue the trajectory of the present policy of denial. Should the Church fail to stand up with fearless resolve, the entire country will be plunged into complete darkness.
Let us take a look at what is happening in the Kaduna state where the Governor hardly covers his bias on the issues of Fulani militancy and terrorism.
By Ladi Thompson, Special adviser to the CAN president on Security.
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