Home OPINION COLUMNISTS Nigeria: Between The Devil And Deep Blue Sea By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Nigeria: Between The Devil And Deep Blue Sea By Yusuf Ozi-Usman

Yusuf Ozi-Usman
Yusuf Ozi-Usman

For Nigeria, this certainly is not the best of time. Whatever anybody would say, the security situation has come to a point that whether we like it or not, external security assistance, if you like, “invation” is needed. Inviting external and more superior security systems from the advanced countries, as we are currently doing, may look dangerous to our internal security system, but there is no running away from the fact that so far, that is the only next option available.
As a matter of fact, if the reign of terror by members of the daring Boko Haram has remained a kind of hush hush affair across the country in the last three years, the abduction of female students of the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Borno state by them, cannot be in quietude. While the abduction has brought Boko Haram in clear head-on with the leaders of the world, it has also exposed Nigeria’s arrant inadequacy in terms of security preparedness.
The fact that Nigeria’s leader would now have to go cap-in-hand, like an unfortunate orphan, begging America, Britain, France, Israel and other advanced nations to deploy their advance security personnel and gadgets to rescue the girls, speaks volume about how lowly Nigeria has been in the world reckoning and how vulnerable too it has been.
Of course, President Goodluck Jonathan did acknowledge this lack of preparedness and vulnerability of Nigeria to serious security challenges in his last media chat, blaming it on the past governments. And to a lot of analysts, the position of the President was begging the issue; it was the usual buck-passing by leaders to cover their inadequacies.
Whatever it amounts to, the main fact that cannot be swept under the carpet is that the super powers we are now asking to come to rescue our daughters from the hand of Boko Haram are being made to get a clear message that Nigeria is empty.
There is the danger in one or two of the super powers now being positioned to do what we, by our size, intelligence and leadership in Africa should have done, to tinker with an idea of invading Nigeria sooner or later.
Optimists may brush this postulation as the reasoning of an idle thinker, but we must not forget so soon, about what happened in Iraq, Libya and what is happening between Israel and Palestine: these are even the countries that have some kind of security muscles to flex.
There is a simple fact in the air that Nigeria, unable to provide simple or even sophisticated security protection for its citizens cannot attempt to rise above the line or level of development which the super powers would want it to attain. In other words, since the world has understood Nigeria to be highly inadequate in feeding its citizenry; since it is fully aware that corruption is reaching an all-time high and now, since it knows that Nigeria cannot adequately secure its citizens without a recourse to them, tendency is for them (the advanced nations) to treat us at the level of master-servant.
There is no gainsaying the fact that a country that cannot feed itself, provide security for itself and is budged down by corruption has no platform on which it would rub shoulders with the countries that have come to assist it in putting out the raging fire.
And, between rescuing our daughters from the strangle hold of Boko Haram through the help of those countries that have the technologies to do so and keeping our pride by bragging about being an independent nation, we have no choice, as a nation, to choose the latter: accept that we are down-and-out, in humility!
As the late Chief MKO Abiola would say, the hand that gives is always on top of the one that receives. That, in simple word means subservience.

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