Shekau’s Many Deaths

Aliyu Musa

For the umpteenth time Abubakar Shekau, Boko Haram’s extremely dreaded leader, is dead. Reports say he was killed late last week during one of the battles over Konduga. This story, if true, calls for celebration, at the very least. Even though it may not mean an outright death of the insurgency it is a decapitation of the violent sect and, therefore, a fatal blow from which it could take a while to recover. But, the snag is the news is marred by inconsistencies, as in the past, dousing its veracity. Besides, for strange reasons Nigeria’s neighbour Cameroun is audaciously trying to take the shine off.

In less than six month’s time Nigeria will be holding a general election that could be decisive for its future. The ruling party Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has already endorsed incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan as its sole candidate. The opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) is heading to a convention to elect its flag bearer in a battle that could determine the level of threat (or otherwise) it poses to President Jonathan’s bid to keep his job. But in the meantime there’s no shortage of happenings in the polity, many of which could be deliberately intended to sweeten the mind.

The story of Shekau’s new death which began trickling in via the social media last Sunday is a part of the unbelievable chain of events in the past week. Suddenly, the change is phenomenal – our soldiers are now better armed and have twice repelled the insurgents’ attempts to annex Konduga and Bazza, top Boko Haram commanders including Shekau have either been killed or captured and, the icing on the cake, rumours are rife most or all of our Chibok girls are headed back home (let it be so, please!).

Nigerians are too easy to please and too easily fall prey to pranks. And that is why in our naïve and blurred memory we don’t remember that Shekau has died several deaths and the one we are now rolling out the drums over could turn out to be like the previously made up ones.

In August last year spokesman of the Joint Task Force (JTF) and a lieutenant colonel in the army, Sagir Musa, claimed that Shekau had been wounded in a battle and that he eventually died somewhere in Cameroun. Neither did he tender any proof to support his claim nor did we ask him for one. No trace of his corpse or even grave has yet been found.

In May this year Marilyn Ogar, the ever garrulous mouthpiece of the Department of State Service (DSS) made yet another claim that Shekau had long been killed. But like Lt Col Musa she wanted us to take her word for it, which without any empirical evidence was and still is untenable.

Musa, Ogar and their colleagues, it seems, are competing over who exercises more power to manipulate our minds. So, they want us to believe the man we saw in the sect’s several recent videos was Shekau’s doppelganger. Yet they do not dispute the fact that he acted him perfectly. But they know us well enough to predict our response. And we have so far not failed to impress them.

A short clip that purportedly holds irrefutable evidence that the man killed was ‘Shekau’ is currently in circulation on social media. I have seen it; on the contrary it has only increased my doubt about the claim.

Shekau, for all I care, could die a million times. Let him be killed again and again and again if that will bring peace back to our land. Let our soldiers crush the insurgents repeatedly and reclaim our land and glory. Let the insurgents be smoked out of the forests and deserts and be sent to the gallows. Let the story of the Chibok girls’ (plus hundreds of others’) release be true – no one deserves to be in such captivity.

In reality these are some of the results-driven goals any government seriously hoping to secure re-election should pursue with all sincerity; after all we are forgiving people. But to seek to turn Nigerians, especially the traumatised people of the northeast, into pawns in an endless game of deception will be the height of wickedness. This, I genuinely hope, is not the game plan.

Postscript:

This article has been published in the Blueprint newspaper of Friday 26 September 2014.