DSS opts for propaganda against Igboho, Kanu

Unsatisfied with invading the home of Sunday Adeyemo, alias Sunday Igboho, and finding little of substance to substantiate their apocalyptic theory of his secessionist plot, and unfulfilled at ‘intercepting’ Nnamdi Kanu of IPOB fame and running into a needless diplomatic storm that is still brewing, the Department of State Service (DSS) has begun a welter of propaganda to damage the reputation and standing of both ethnic champions.

Mr Igboho is famously hyperbolic about the Yoruba freedom cause, particularly as it relates to the rampage of herdsmen in the Southwest, but there is no record of violent enforcement of his self-appointed cause, nor evidence that he had inspired or directed the killing of any herdsman, the object of the Buhari administration’s umbrage.

The coarser Mr Kanu has spoken violence but, despite the rampage of the so-called unknown gunmen in parts of the Southeast, has been largely theatrical, propagandistic, and unwisely eager to claim credit for violence of unknown origin, without understanding the legal pitfalls.

Neither Mr Igboho nor Mazi Kanu had undertaken the genocidal assault Fulani herdsmen and Northwest bandits subscribe to, but the Buhari administration and the DSS have expended huge resources to interdict their fairly popular causes.

The administration is unfazed by public allegations, particularly from the south, that its methods and objectives betray an ethnic agenda, considering how it obsesses over Messrs Igboho and Kanu without a corresponding high-tech effort to ‘intercept’ and destroy the bases and funding of bandits and herdsmen.

But no matter what anyone says, the administration will persist in its goals and obsessions.

This obsession may reflect the limitation of their understanding of how a pluralistic society should be governed, but they really don’t care. Not only has the administration needlessly turned fringe ethnic players in the south to mainstream players, they have also incredibly drawn an opaque and unfair definitional line in the sand between secessionists in the south on the one hand and bandits and herdsmen in the north on the other hand.

The latter may be infinitely more violent, but the administration and the DSS have decided to assign more definitional and criminal weight to the former. This skewed propaganda will continue apace.

Hundreds of schoolboys and girls are being kidnapped regularly, especially in the north, and brutalized or murdered, but the DSS has declared its intention to seek out backers and funders of Mr Igboho and Mr Kanu’s IPOB. The backers have already being criminalized.

The administration’s selectiveness is so acute now that no one in the south and perhaps the Middle Belt believes their impartiality anymore. Bandits have extorted hundreds of millions from their victims, and asked for motorcycles and food items, but, as if they are spirits, they have not being located, exposed and humiliated.

The bandits have sometimes come out into the open to half-heartedly accept amnesty, and their identities are well known, but still nothing has happened to them.

Perhaps the administration is passing on the message that self-determination is evil but killing and maiming and kidnapping are nothing but inconsequential misdemeanour.

Had medieval kingdoms been governed like this, historians would have no example of past developments and greatness to write about.