TERRORISTS AS PRODIGAL SONS
Nick Dazang
Generals formulate operational/battle plans. They articulate strategy. They enunciate military doctrines. And they issue weighty statements which zing into history and etch themselves in our memories.
Dwight David Eisenhower (“Ike”), who commanded the Allied Expeditionary Force successfully led OPERATION TORCH(1942-43), and OPERATION OVERLORD(JAN-August 1944). These operations were crucial to Allied victory in World War II.
Field Marshal Georgy K. Zhukov, who won four HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION medals, fought in fourteen fronts. He had the singular distinction of taking over Berlin on behalf of the Allies.
Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery(‘Monty’) famously designed and participated in OPERATIONS MARKET GARDEN and PLUNDER and the BATTLE OF THE BULGE.
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, alias The Desert Fox, had predicted that the war between his country, Germany, and the Allied Forces, during World War II, would climax with a decisive clash at Normandy where his country had dug in.
Rommel had confided in his aide,
Hauptmann Helmuth, on April 22, 1944:”the first 24 hours of this war will be decisive…the fate of Germany depends on the outcome…for the Allies, as well as Germany, it will be the longest day”.
How prescient. So apt was this remark that the War Correspondent, Cornelius Ryan, chronicled the momentous events of that day in a book of the same title:THE LONGEST DAY.
It is on account of their martial training, exposure and the huge impact their offices command that whenever Generals issue pronouncements, such remarks are subjected to more than a casual scrutiny.
At the inaugural lecture of the newly established Joint Doctrine and Warfare Centre in Abuja, the Chief of Defense Staff (CDS), General Olufemi Oluyede, had likened the acts of terror being unleashed in Nigeria to the failings of the biblical prodigal son.
He not only argued that perpetrators of terror deserve rehabilitation because they were Nigerians, he asked:”But even in the Bible, we heard about the prodigal son. If there was not that window for the man to come back, would they have come back?”
General Oluyede proceeded to answer his rhetorical question thus:”So the point is that these are Nigerians, mostly. And it’s important for us to give them that window to repent, if they want, rather than pushing them to the extreme”.
General Oluyede’s remarks have prompted this writer to re-read the book of LUKE Chapter 15Vs11-32 where the parable of the prodigal son is told. This writer notes that:1)the prodigal son had requested for his inheritance in lieu of his father’s death and his request was graciously granted;2)the prodigal son then “journeyed to a far country, and then wasted his possessions” and “devoured” his “livelihood with harlots”;3)after he had squandered his wealth, severe famine arose, where he sojourned and then “he went and joined himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed swine”;4)”But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!’”
It is very instructive that in spite of the prodigal son’s squander mania and sundry excesses, he, unlike our terrorists, who have now found favor with General Oluyede, did not kill. He did not kidnap. He did not maim. He did not abduct thousands of school children and herd them into the bushes or forests.
As at now, not less than forty thousand people have been killed in Borno State alone since the Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009. We are not looking at the entire North East geopolitical zone or others where terrorists are having a field day.
Terror, which has put the entire Northern Region in its thrall, has encumbered farmers from cultivating their lands. This in turn has given birth to food insecurity and the ravages of Severe Acute Malnutrition(SAM), a phenomenon hitherto unknown to us.
Terrorists, especially in the North West, continue to impose and extract taxes and tributes in the harshest and most mendacious fashion. Most of the local governments in Zamfara and Katsina States are under the sway and suzerainty of these bandits/terrorists.
Furthermore, as at early this year, not less than 3.6 million Nigerians were in Internally displaced camps, all thanks to terrorism. With the uptick in the havoc and deaths being wreaked by these terrorists in recent times, one’s surmise is that this number has since increased. This is not to add the trauma of seventeen years of unrelenting terror being unleashed on the psyche of Nigerians.
General Oluyede’s comparison of terrorists with the prodigal son is not only inappropriate, it is both grating and sickening. People who visit death, destruction and mayhem do not deserve to be offered any window of repentance. They should be despatched to the great beyond, effective, immediately! After all, the Bible which General Oluyede referenced effusively warns us that:”…all who take the sword will perish by the sword”. Besides, do the terrorists give their victims the luxury or option of repentance before they kill, abduct or sexually assault them?
What is curious is that while General Oluyede is presenting terrorists in the mould of the prodigal son and offering them a window to show penitence, he is eloquently silent on the fate of their hapless victims.
But less we forget, even the prodigal son’s brother, who kept faith and was steadfast in running his father’s affairs, took umbrage at his father’s generosity. Those who lost relatives or were harmed by these terrorists are likely to be similarly offended by General Oluyede’s grotesque suggestion.
It is true that accomplished and seasoned Generals issue weighty and well considered remarks. General Oluyede’s is behind and below the pale. It is not a credit to our Armed Forces who have paid their dues, with distinction, in many war theaters. He should walk it back. Unless, of course, he is telling us that the government has decided to coddle these vile terrorists who are killing Nigerians in their numbers.
