The Demons of Sambisa Forest

By: Dimgba Igwe

For those who had been there, Sambisa is described as an impenetrable jungle, a potential forest of a thousand demons where vision is impaired literally by poor visibility; insecurity looms and survival is a matter of the fittest. In Sambisa forest, your neighbours are wild animals, serpents or poisonous snakes. It is a hiding place for the daring ones who are more at home in the jungle than in human habitats.

 

In the colonial times, Sambisa was a game reserve, much like the famous Yankari Game Reserve, which used to attract huge traffic. In 1982, Yankari Game Reserve, was the place I wrote my earliest magazine cover story for Dele Giwa’s Sunday Concord, which earned me a lot of kudos from him. I still recall the title Giwa gave the piece: Want To Get Away From It All? Try Yankari.

 If Nigeria had been a serious country where leaders were seriously development-minded rather than roguish and unprepared for the job, Sambisa would have been one of Nigeria’s tourist attractions earning revenue for the governments in the states of Borno, Yobe, Gombe and parts of Bauchi which bordered the forest, depending on how the territory would have been delineated.

 

As Wikipedia captured it, “the Sambisa Game Reserve had leopards, lions, elephants, hyenas and huts built for tourists to stay in. However, the federal/state government allowed the place to fall into a state of disrepair as the animals died, the roofs leaked, weeds covered the roads, water stopped flowing, there was no power and the whole reserve became derelict white elephant.”

 

As nature abhors vacuum, it is the Sambisa forest that has become a haven for Boko Haram, a lesson that if you leave your home untended, it becomes your own Sambisa. But it is not only that. Around the world now, Chibok, a town in Borno State, and Sambisa have become a metaphor for Nigeria’s broken state. A nation trapped in Sambisa!

 

The hundreds of innocent girls abducted from their school in Chibok, are now held hostage in the jungle of Sambisa. A place formerly created as natural habitat for wild animals is now a place of captivity for vulnerable young girls. In place of wild animals you now have wild Homo sapiens without souls.

 

Yesterday, the insurgents showed the world a cruel video shot of the girls in the bush chanting religious mantra.  It is anybody’s guess whether they are still in literal Sambisa, or a figurative Sambisa outside outside our borders. Covered in the Islamic hijab, there is no telling what violence has been visited on their body, on their virginity and the psychological trauma of their souls. Poor girls. Even though about 90 per cent of these girls are Christians, their reciting of Islamic chants is a provocative ploy designed by their heartless captors as a testimony of their forced conversion to Islam.

 

Barring skepticism that those are actually the abducted girls, the video clip is perhaps the first indication that the global pressure to bring back the girls is hitting home, after all. It is also to reassure the world that the girls are still alive. We must thank God for small mercies, even though the girls are now pawns in the hands of the insurgents’ bid to twist Jonathan’s arms. For President Jonathan, to negotiate the release of the girls on the insurgents’ terms of prison swap or not is the classic devil’s alternative. Yield to their demand, and you introduce kidnapping and prisoner swap as the new elements of the war. Stick to the no-negotiation stance mouthed by the emboldened presidency and the President would seem callous and culpable if any harm comes to the girls.

 

Once again, Nigeria is in the global headlines for the wrong reason. The last time we came close to being so negatively advertised around the world was during the Sani Abacha regime when the environmental activists led by Ken Saro-Wiwa were hanged after a kangaroo trial. Today, Nigeria is on the cross again, at least, for dereliction of leadership.

 

It is no use wondering how we came to this sorry pass. Sambisa is obviously the bitter fruit of decades of wasted opportunities and exceedingly bad leadership.

 

It did not start from Jonathan’s regime. The gross dereliction of political and economic leadership in parts of our country, especially in many parts of the North, has been there through the years of military regimes which only created wealthy few at the expense of the masses. Those who wave the poverty argument to current regimes to rationalize the Boko Haram atrocities must reflect on what foundation the previous regimes left behind.

 

In Sambisa, Nigeria’s political, military and economic failures are advertised before the whole world. Look carefully at Sambisa and you will see the tragedy of Nigeria in bold relief. In Sambisa, you see corruption, leadership incompetence, insensitivity, travesty, decay, neglect, political gimmickry, everything wrong with Nigeria.

Start with the basic. One of my pastors, Blessing Ochingwah, asked me, “Sir, why is it that the girls who are supposed to be writing West African School Certificate Examination cannot answer a question in English? Why should somebody be interpreting questions in English for them?”

 

The answer is in Sambisa. Many of the abducted girls are actually the few that wanted to escape the trap of illiteracy prevalent in Nigeria’s North-east. The abducted girls, therefore, represent the best of their peers. In a very educationally disadvantaged North-east states, the girls now held hostage in Sambisa represent the future in their environment. But what manner of future? In the inability of many of them to articulate themselves in English despite being in the final year of their secondary school education, the degeneration of the nation’s educational system is now globally advertised. Compared with the poise, articulation and brilliance of the 16-year-old Pakistani’s school girl, Malala Yousafzai, who survived assassination attack of the Talibans on account of her campaign for girl education—the very thing Boko Haram is against—the products of our educational system leave a sour taste in the mouth.

 

Look carefully in Sambisa and you’ll see our military power brought so low. Isn’t it such a great irony that the Nigerian military that used to shine in international peace-keeping operations seems so tamed by the Boko Haram insurgents, so much so that we are now grasping for foreign military help to rescue our girls from harm? Inadvertently, the Boko Harams have showcased our grossly inadequate capacity in intelligence gathering, surveillance and speedy response.

 

At the end of the day, the military cannot operate in isolation from our retarded macro setting. Modern military power is more electronic and high-tech driven rather than sheer demonstration of brawn. In the circumstances, asking our military to do exploits against a determined and fluid enemy without the benefit of precise technological information gathering system is akin to flying blind.

 

Thanks to Sambisa, we now know that despite the billions we budget annually on space science, our so-called satellite systems are merely obsolete technological toys which provide our political authorities and their bureaucratic accomplices with the necessary cover to appropriate and misappropriate public fund—another Sambisa syndrome. At the time we needed the services of the National Space Research and Development Agency, (NASRDA) which recently celebrated the launch of Nigeria SatX and Sat 2, to track the location of our girls, the Director General Professor Seidu Mohammed, doused such hope by telling us that our satellite only had 2.5 meters resolutions and therefore lacked the capacity to track individual movements. So, why are we wasting so many billions annually to sustain such scientific charade when we might just as well rely on outsourcing from the global community as in the present case? Why buy an attack dog if it had no teeth?

 

Of course, our military failures cannot also be divorced from what the world media and personalities have described as Jonathan’s incompetence and poor leadership. That it took him over two weeks merely to officially react to the abduction is bad enough; that the presidency could not even make up its mind whether there was kidnap or not after more than two weeks of the abduction is not exactly what it takes to galvanise a troop. In effect, the field commanders would have been justifiably faced with conflicting signals from the political authorities. Not the least of such absurdities is the theatrical histrionics of the First Lady, trivializing the abduction saga.

 

In a world running at the speed of sound, it took Sambisa to remind us that our president doesn’t easily give a damn about anything! He takes his time, even if the world is on fire. Thanks to Sambisa, Nigeria’s image is taking a toll and the leadership question is back on the front burner. As Sunny Okoson’s lyrics would ask, which way Nigeria?

THE SUN