Boko Haram Story According To Steve Nwosu Of The Sun Newspaper Tagged Parable Of The Stranger’s Corpse

For the second time since the Boko Haram abduction of over 200 school girls from their dormitories in Chibok, Borno State, about eight weeks ago, I have been compelled to reflect on the hit track Who feels it knows it, by that musical phoenix, Jimmy Cliff.
Of course, this has been necessitated by both the spoken and unspoken words (body language) of those whose responsibility it is to ensure our collective security in this country. 

Even when it took them so long to convince themselves that there, indeed, was an abduction, the response from the state apparatus has been rather cocky. Even after Boko Haram released videos of the girls in captivity and demanded a prisoner-swap as condition for freeing the schoolgirls, the position of government has remained the same: ‘we can’t negotiate with terrorists’. 
                    
I am told that this is the standard position of all countries battling terrorism. Standard position my foot!

                               
What our government has failed to tell us is that, in spite of all the public grandstanding, nearly all of these other countries (whether US, Israel, Britain, China or whatever) go behind the scene to negotiate, and secure the release of their citizens.

Only last week, the same US which has been encouraging us to stand our ground and not budge to the blackmail of accepting any prisoner-swap deal with Boko Haram, did exactly that, with terrorists in Afghanistan.

To secure the release of one US soldier held by the Afghans since five years ago, Barrak Obama’s government released five of the world’s deadliest Taliban terrorists held at the notorious Guantanamo Bay. Yet the US insists we must not negotiate with terrorists?
If my memory serves me right, a few years ago, Israel also had to release tens of Palestinian prisoners in order to secure the release of the bodies (corpses!) of slain Israeli soldiers. 
Now, this is the same Israel of the “Raid on Entebe” fame. An Israel that is co-incidentally being governed by a certain Benjamin Netanyahu, whose hero-brother, Doni, led the commando action in Uganda and got killed in that rather successful rescue of passengers of the hijacked Israeli (El-Al) airliner. 

Why did Israel have to go into this swap deal, instead of falling back on its commandos? The answer is simply: time and circumstances are not always the same. And that is why I feel we should not blindly swallow this no-negotiation posturing they’re trying to force on us. for by the time the chips are down, if anything untoward happens to the girls (God forbid), it is Jonathan, and not any of the foreign intervention forces, that Nigerians would hold responsible.

We must explore every avenue – both formal and informal – to get back our children. Maybe, like the US found a middleman in Qatar, we too could look for a go-between from Syria, Iran or just anywhere, to whom we would release our Boko Haram detainees, and secure the release of our children.

That way, we too can still beat our chests and swear to the rest of the world that we did not negotiate with terrorists – and we would not be lying, because it would have been the go-between who did the negotiating, not us. Who’s fooling who!

It reminds one of the saying among the Igbo; that we oftentimes cannot tell the difference between a stranger’s corpse and a log of rotten wood. In other words, it’s only when the corpse is that of our loved one that the import of death and burial sinks home. It is what I would like to describe as the parable of the stranger’s corpse.

For the public, we can emotionlessly set whatever standards we so wish, but when the situation changes and we become involved, it suddenly downs on us that a lot of our public pronouncements (and laws) could actually have been given a little human face. 

When you feel it, you know it. When you’re involved, you suddenly realize that no amount of carefully crafted, well-delivered speeches of the organizers of the #BringBackOurGirls rallies is nearly as moving as the uncoordinated outburst of a mother whose daughter is among the abducted schoolgirls.

 No amount of placards carried by Michelle Obama, David Cameron, Hollywood, Bollywood or Nollywood artistes (whether genuine, or for photo effects) conveys as much emotions as that solitary picture of a teary-eyed mother clutching the photograph of her missing daughter to her chest, holding on to hope and a prayer. The pain, the anguish is written all over her face. She feels it. She knows it.

And as I reflect on these eternal words of Jimmy Cliff, my mind equally wanders off to the lines of another artiste, Wyclef Jean, stringed together in his monstrous hit, Diallo. In one instance, Wyclef asks: ‘Have you ever been shot… 41 times?’ In another, he asks:  ‘Have you ever been held… against your wish? Taken to a place, where not even scientists can reveal you?’ You have to feel it to know it.

Sometimes, it is almost impossible to imagine what others are going through, no matter how hard we try to put ourselves in their shoes. It is just like losing a loved one to the cold hands of death. No matter how much people console, sympathize and empathize with you, they can never feel the pain as much as you do. At the end of the day, the sympathisers would all go back to their respective homes, leaving you alone to grapple with the hollowness, the emptiness. 

There would be no word of comfort to explain the reality that hits you when, in the middle of sleep you lazily flap an arm to the opposite side of the bed, expecting to feel the warmth of a spouse who has slept beside you all these many years, only to see your arm land on empty bed space. Suddenly, you roll from one end of an empty bed to the other,  without bumping into your spouse, peacefully sleeping beside you. You toss up and down restlessly, without stirring up somebody who, in a most affectionate voice (and with genuine concern), would ask: ‘sweetheart, you can’t sleep, what’s the problem?’ That is when you really know it, because you feel it.

it is only when you don’t really know and feel it that you go to some poorly-thought-out rally to play to the cameras, in the pretense of ‘bringing back our girls’. it is also when you don’t feel it that you automatically conclude that every protest march seeking to keep the issue of the missing girls is the handiwork of the political opposition desperate to take over at the centre. it is only those who don’t feel it that would only see 2015 in all of this national calamity. 

It is only those who don’t feel it that would sit in the comfort of their revolving chairs to say government must not negotiate with terrorists. Ask any of the mothers whose children have been abducted, and you’d see that they do not think sacrificing Jonathan (not just his re-election ambition) is too much for the release of their daughters.

But then, if we offer Goodluck Jonathan as human sacrifice needed to free those girls, we’d also be forgetting that, to a certain Dame Patience (and the entire Jonathan family), not all of the about-270 schoolgirls and their families put together are worth the life Goodluck – even if he is just an ordinary family man, and not president of Nigeria. That is the parable of the stranger’s corpse.

It reminds me of the late Gen. Abdulkarim Adisa when he was being mocked for desecrating his rank by weeping and prostrating before a much junior Major Hamza Al-Mustapha during the Abacha coup saga. without apologies, Adisa said that the prostration saved his life and although, he might be the butt of jokes before other Nigerians, he was a hero at home, where his family members were all too happy that he did what he had to do to stay alive for them. Who feels it,  knows it.

So, my advice to the federal government on this matter is simple: we can do all the grandstanding we like over this missing girls issue, but we must not forget to mellow it with the exigencies of our peculiar situation, for no hostage situation is exactly like another. That is why all the combined experiences of the foreign powers that have so far rallied to our assistance might still not be enough to free our girls if we do not apply a little bit of native intelligence.
Courtesy Sun