Escape From Sambisa Forest

Three

“General” Abubakar Shekau first got wind of bad news at cock crow, just before the first hour of Muslim prayers.

“Alaaaaahuaaakbaaaar! Alaaaaahuaaakbaaaar…”

Abubakar Shekau was an early raiser. However today, he’d awaken a shade earlier, and the gangland kingpin wondered why. The fact that he could not immediately find an explanation to his troubled soul, set his sensitive mental antenna working at peak level.

Although the “General’s” personal abode was the most comfortably furnished hut in the entire settlement, it was perhaps not as luxurious as one would have expected of a man in command of such an awesome arsenal of artillery, and so much territorial control. The man, with his rag-tag army of misguided youths, practically owned the Sambisa Forest, including pockets of areas within the neighboring communities in which they unleashed their soulless evil on innocent people.

His scanty beddings, barely large enough to contain two big adults, was now crammed with four of the abducted Chibok Community Secondary School girls. Two of the girls lay huddled on the bamboo mat next to the matrass on the floor, while the remaining two girls were half-covered in a surprisingly new, bright colored blanket, probably the only object of considerable expense in the large hut. Okay, so there was a pint-sized refrigerator at the far corner, and a one-burner, medium-sized cooking gas stove. A few pots and metal dishes were scattered on the floor near the stove.

For a man who stood for everything against “Western”, particularly “Western Education”, it was a wonder he had any use for Western Technology, not to talk of sophisticated firearms, the very product of “Western Education” engineering, the very cause against which Shekau preached his brand of Islam, for which he deployed his militiamen to wreak havoc on innocent local communities, and touching on major towns and cities within the north eastern part of Nigeria.

When the so-called “Anti-Western Education” campaign was first launched, their targets were primarily Police Stations. The Police, they claimed, was the “face of Western Capitalism” and therefore became the biggest public symbol of the “hypocrisy” that established western “Institutions” within the society represented. Irrational, dogmatic and senseless as this “philosophical ideology” seemed to the civilized world, Shekau and his arm of bandits took their blind faith to the death, and many along with them, unfortunately.

However, when their kill-police-phobia had eventually cleared, with nothing to show for it, other than burnt down police stations and a few casualties, they lost their steam. Like an anti-climax, with nothing else better to do, and desirous of more attention, the Boko Haram turned their attention to Churches. They penciled down churches, and marked them for a one-way terrorist strike, carried out by youths who were brain-washed with spurious doctrine, such as the promise of automatic ticket to blissful heaven in the hereafter. These youths wrapped themselves with explosives, either rode a motorbike or drove a car into the premises and bombed churches, and also blasted themselves to hell among the debris.

Emboldened by scurrying away Nigerian soldiers and expanding territories, the Boko Haram included a sprinkle of Mosques here and there on their bombing list, and went ahead to throw explosives at those mosques. These were mosques perceived to be hostile to the Boko Haram ideology. News filtered back to Shekau that some Imams had publicly voiced their condemnation of the sect’s brand of Islam. So they just went ahead and threw bombs at those mosques as well.

But the attacks began to gradually lose pattern, and with seemingly nothing better to offer the people other than what the people already had.  The man who was sacked from his home and farmland, and sent running with his family on exile to IDP camps, did not believe he’d been driven away on account of resistance of a “superior faith” to the religion he already professed, and which served him well without infringing on the rights of other religions.  Rather, the man who’d been chased from his home knows that he’d been scared away and looted, because of failure of the system to protect him from such an attack.