Saudi Arabia has confessed to the reprehensible murder with disappearance of the body of global journalist Jamal Khashoggi. A Saudi citizen, Khashoggi was murdered in the Saudi consulate in Turkey. His body was reportedly chopped up into little pieces in an unbecoming manner reminiscent of gestapo ancient times.
As the world totally rejected the actions of Saudi Arabia with prominent businesses pulling out of a conference in the kingdom, Nigeria’s president was in the news receiving Saudi envoy, Adnan Bin Mahmoud Bin Muhammad Bostasi, and praising the kingdom for its “support in security and economic issues.” Buhari’s lickspittling at a time like this was no surprise.
Nigeria is the only other nation in the world with similar brazen state-perpetrator terror records in recent times. President Muhammadu Buhari on his year of election is reported to have gruesomely massacred as many as 1000 innocent mostly youth protesters in the city of Zaria and secretly burying them in mass graves with many still alive as they were being buried. [https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2016/04/nigeria-military-cover-up-of-mass-slaughter-at-zaria-exposed/]
The next year, in May-June of 2016, the same president perpetrated a similar act in Onitsha, massacring hundreds of praying Igbo youth protesters and also burying them secretly in a mass graves in a military cemetery, according to reports in PremiumTimes. [https://www.premiumtimesng.com/investigationspecial-reports/205176-special-report-onitsha-massacre-pro-biafra-supporters-coordinated-sss-operative.html]
Apart from ISIS and Boko Haram, no nation or group in our times operates in such manner with despicable murders and secret burial of the victims.
While the Saudi Arabian kingdom has been forced to confess and hold some scapegoats to account, there has been no figment of justice in the Nigerian case. The military head responsible for the savage massacre, Tukur Buratai, rather had his tenure elongated in a positive appraisal by the Nigerian president who indicated that had he still been a military ruler, the massacres would have been more dastardly. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6ncKD4JdKk]
Till date the leader of one of the minority groups that came under Nigerian government aggression and terror, Sheikh Zakzaky and his wife have remained in unconstitutional detention in flout of court orders for their release and compensation. But the Nigerian leader cannot be blamed alone. Nigerians have been criminally silent as has been the larger world. Some heartless Nigerians even campaign for his re-election as unbelievable as it may sound.
But government massacres and secret mass burials of the Saudi Arabian nature under crown prince Mohammed Bin Salman, MBS and Nigeria’s Muhammadu Buhari are not new in Africa’s most populous nation. Contesting for his job, a friend of he current president, Mr Atiku Abubakar was the Vice president when a similar massacre took place in Odi in Nigeria’s south. At least 1000 thousand minority Ijaw people were killed in that incident. Justice has since been denied in that incident.
It is sad that while the world has moved to new grounds of justice if at times pretentious, nation’s like Nigeria and Saudi Arabia still believe in Hitler-style, Gestapo murders, massacres and secret burials in attempt to cover up their heinous crimes.
Just like slavery was formally abolished, the world should use the Jamal Khashoggi case as a marker to the end of radical and fanatical governance and state perpetrated terror.
We must demand an end to state terror.
Dr. Perry Brimah, Whatsapp Tel: +234-903-420-3031; +1-929-427-5305; @CabalMustGo; @EveryNigerian; drbrimah@ends.ng