Kwara Church Attack: A Proposal For Marksmen And Snipers In Worship Centres

I hated the sight of blood as I hated swallowing medicine. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t become a doctor despite my love for the title. As a child and a teenager, seeing an injured person or a person in pain was enough to provoke tears in me. If I didn’t cry openly, I would hide to do it. Therefore, after I attended a career counselling session and did some introspection, I realized it was vain nursing the idea to be a medical doctor.

If I so much hated the sight of blood, that also means I couldn’t have wanted to be a soldier. It didn’t even crossed my mind that I could be one. How could a person who hated the sight of blood ever contemplate carrying a gun? Guns are not for decoration. They are meant to spill blood if the occasion demands it. I am probably a pacifist.

Perhaps that was before. Watching the recent Kwara church attack has prompted me to ask some basic questions. What if there had been a man in a hidden position in or around the church with a superior gunpower on the day of the attack? Could the invaders have escaped that church alive? Then, the question turned personal. What if I had been the one in a position to shoot those invaders; would I have had a qualm eliminating them? No, not at all, the answer came swiftly. Even if I wouldn’t shoot to save myself in the face of danger, it would be a moral sin to watch the gory of gunmen invade a house, a sanctuary for that matter, and do nothing if I had a gun.
It would be wrong for a shepherd to go into hiding while his flock is slaughtered. It is the heartless shepherd, a hireling, or the one without a shield or an arrow that would fold their arms and watch an intruder invade and waste their flock. Even an unarmed shepherd might have been forced to say, ‘if I perish, I perish’.

King David once thought he was an ordinary shepherd until a lion invaded his flock and took a lamb. That was when the lion in him also woke up. He went after the lion, rescued the lamb and slew the lion.

Another time, a bear decided to try his luck but also ended up waking up the bear in David. Both the lion and the bear woke up the beasts in David and paid dearly for it.

It is disheartening to watch our dear nation descending into the Hobbesian state of nature where life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’. Hobbes had argued that it was to avoid the fear and conflict that resulted from such a state that rational individuals and institutions surrender their natural rights to a sovereign in exchange for security, peace, and order.
In modern times, the state is the sovereign in contrast to the remote past when individuals and royal families had acted as absolute sovereigns.

In the past few weeks, individuals and government officials had been arguing about the sovereignty of Nigeria, positing that it should be inviolable by the President of United States of America, Donald Trump, who had threatened to help the Nigerian state to wake up to its responsibilities.
However, what these arguments ignore is the fact that the integrity of a sovereignty is not in the multitude of words but in its demonstration of power and might. If people have surrendered their glory and their might to you and you show that you don’t have the capability to exercise it on their behalf, then they look for whatever they think are viable alternatives.

When a sovereignty is a subject of debate, the likelihood is that it has already been compromised or tampered with. For many years, Islamist terrorists have been questioning the sovereignty of the Nigerian state. Because the state could not answer them in the manner of sovereigns, other groups including killer herdsmen, bandits, criminal gangs and unknown gunmen had joined them at some points to query the sovereignty of the Nigerian state. Some had gone to the extent of carving out territories where they exercise sovereignty and seek from there to expand their influence. In a manner that shows the state’s acquiescence of some of these groups, it had sent emissaries to them and even opened negotiations with them.
In answer to those calling for the arrest of one of the emissaries, Sheikh Gumi didn’t mince words, “I had approval for the things I did.”

When criminal groups are testing the might of a state, the state must speak like a sovereign. It must also act as a sovereign – to show that it has the legal monopoly of violence and the capacity to stop every other contender to that right. This is how to be respected by other sovereigns.

However, to ensure we don’t dwell on the theoretical while the majority of the people bear the indiscretion of the wicked and the criminal as well as weakness of the state, it has become expedient to rethink the nation’s security architecture. Perhaps one of the areas we should be looking at is adopting a collective and community approach to the security challenges bedevilling the nation. This will involve training members of the community and religious organisations in marksmanship. It will also involve licensing snipers among worshippers and community people who would always be alert in case their skills are called to test before the arrival of security operatives. Interlacing worship centres and communities with marksmen and snipers will send the signal to bandits and their cohorts that the game has changed. Should they persist in their folly and wickedness, they would learn the hard way that lives in Nigeria are no longer poor and cheap.

These are unusual times calling for unusual thinking and action. When pacifists are ready to bear instruments of violence, the state should know that the water level has reached the throat. At such a time, it is evil to sit on the fence and play ‘siddon look’. After all, the work of righteousness and even the work of development is done in peace.

—–Everest Amaefule, PhD, is the author of the book Technology & Development: An African Perspective

Disclaimer: This article is entirely the opinion of the writer and does not represent the views of The Whistler.