This institution is broken

In Nigeria, the list of the unthinkable grows shorter with every passing day. The unthinkable happens with such regularity and frequency that we must now, as a lexical imperative, establish a gradation or hierarchy of such things. On that scale, the merely unthinkable event would occur routinely. The highly unthinkable would occur more sparingly. The prohibitively unthinkable would occur more sparingly still, and the most unthinkable would be one for the ages. Going by that metric, the most unthinkable happened last week at Nigeria’s premier military institution, the Nigeria Defence Academy, near Kaduna, in Kaduna State. “The security architecture of the Nigerian Defence Academy was compromised early this morning by unknown gunmen,” said Major Bashir Muhammad Jajira, a spokesman for the institution.We lost two personnel and one was abducted.” By “security architecture,” Jajira was referring to the Academy’s brick-and-mortar perimeter fence, topped with razor wire and doing so without fear, in the age of surveillance cameras and drones and satellites. Some security! Some architecture! The language compounds the disaster – a disaster not just for the military but, more tellingly, for the nation. It reveals a mindset that is not fully seized of the peril confronting the country from the combined assault of armed bandits, terrorists and fanatics, and of the fundamental imperatives of national security.If the military cannot secure its own premier institution and personnel, how can it secure the nation against clear and present danger? Days before the brazen assault, President Muhammadu Buhari appeared to have lost patience with the military in the war on the insurgents and warned that its high command might have to be re-organised again. Previous efforts in that regard produced no significant results, he needs to be reminded.