Suffice
it to summarise his subsequent activities with these quotes from Wikipedia: “In
1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in
Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in
an attempt to become self-sufficient.” And: “Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski
engaged in a nationwide bombing campaign against people involved with modern
technology, planting or mailing numerous homemade bombs, ultimately killing a
total of three people and injuring 23 others. He is also known for his
wide-ranging social critiques, which opposed industrialisation and modern
technology while advancing a nature-cantered form of anarchism.”
His bombs were dispatched specifically to universities and airports across the
United States, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to use the
coinage “UNABOM” (which stands for University and Airline Bomber) to identify
his case before his identity was known. The press later modified the coinage to
Unabomber.
However,
what makes Kaczynski’s case most relevant to what I refer to as an American
example in the title of this piece is how he was eventually identified before
his trial and imprisonment for life, which saved his country from the threat he
posed as a domestic terrorist. It was his brother, David Kaczynski, who
revealed his identity to the FBI with his wife’s encouragement, having identified
his writing style in a 35,000-word essay entitled “Industrial Society and Its
Future,” which the FBI abbreviated to “Unabomber Manifesto,” whose publication
in a major newspaper of journal, preferably the New York Times, he gave as a
condition for him to “desist from terrorism.”
By
that extraordinary gesture, the brother placed the love of country and the
safety of other human beings above the bond of blood, and saved America from a
terrorist threat to its security, economy and educational system, and to its
values as a country that believes in modern technology, whose embrace and
cultivation partly accounts for its greatness as a nation.
Now,
there is a parallel – which I note here in passing – between the motivation of
Kaczynski’s terrorist acts and that of Nigeria’s Boko Haram. For Kaczynski it
is hatred for modern technology while it is hatred for western education for
Boko Haram, which makes both anti-knowledge and explains why their terrorist
acts partly targeted educational institutions like schools and universities.
Also
– and more relevant to this piece – there is a parallel between the impact of
Kaczynski’s terrorist attacks and the type of attacks being executed by vandals
who bomb gas and oil pipelines in Nigeria. For while Kaczynski’s attacks on
airports undermined America’s aviation business and by implication its economy,
those by the Nigerian vandals achieve the same purpose in Nigeria by
undermining power generation and the production of oil which are critical to
the economy.
However,
there is a notable difference in the attitude of the average American and his
Nigerian counterpart to fighting terror as reflected in the gesture by
Kaczynski’s brother and his wife and the response of some Nigerians to the
recent remark by Mr. Femi Adesina, the Special Adviser (Media and Publicity) to
President Muhammadu Buhari, that Nigerians complaining about poor electricity
should hold the vandals responsible. Some Nigerians criticised him for the
remark, insisting that it is government’s responsibility to fish out and deal
with the vandals and not the citizens’. Indeed, the Unabomber might have
remained elusive like the Nigerian vandals if some American patriots did not
choose to fulfil their moral obligation to protect their country and his
potential victims by revealing his identity to the authorities.
Mr.
Adesina’s remark may have been tactless, the result of his frustration with the
citizens’ apathy in what should be a joint effort with the government in
tackling the vandals whose activities threaten the entire nation. But it made
sense as a disguised clarion call – which I consider it to be – to Nigerians to
assist the government by revealing the identity of the vandals who apparently
are not unknown to them.
Incidentally,
what we have witnessed in Nigeria in the last decade or so is the unwitting
implementation of a self-destructive credo: “If there is no crisis, create
one.” And so the citizens of the country have during that period created – and
generated crisis through – the O’odua People Congress (OPC), the Arewa
Congress, the Movement for the Actualisation of the Sovereign State of Biafra
(MASSOB), and the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND); and
through their other creations like the Niger Delta Militants, Boko Haram, the
Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), Shiite Muslims, Fulani Herdsmen, and the
Niger Delta Avengers. And due to the activities of these groups, it has failed
to lift the boulder of stagnation off its shoulders, like a country doomed to
engage in Sisyphean toil.
In the
said period, for instance, the violent activities of the Niger Delta Militants,
especially kidnappings of expatriates for ransom and vandalisation of oil
installations, so severely threatened the country’s oil-dependent economy that
the then President Umaru Yar’Adua established the Ministry of Niger Delta
Affairs with an amnesty programme to pacify and rehabilitate the militants.
Later,
Boko Haram destroyed large swathes of the country’s north-eastern states,
killing thousands and precipitating a huge humanitarian crisis in the form of
Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Subsequently, a bill for the establishment
of a Northeast Development Commission is being debated at the National
Assembly, as the Buhari government is said to be considering granting amnesty
to the repentant culprits, together with a rehabilitation programme as in the
case of the Niger Delta Militants.
From
the south-east, IPOB is threatening secession, raising tension through
encounters with security forces that have reportedly left scores of their
members dead, with President Buhari vowing in the face of such threat to do
“everything possible” to keep Nigeria united. And as the country battles this
crisis, people suspected to be Fulani herdsmen – who the government has
described as foreigners, even without making an arrest – launched attacks in
Benue and Enugu states, killing hundreds and instigating ethnic tension.
This
crisis-generating process seems to have turned full cycle with the recent
bombing of gas pipelines by the Niger Delta Avengers, threatening the country’s
economy and power supply. And Nigerians should realise from the example of
Kaczynski’s brother – and need I mention the courier who revealed Osama bin
Laden’s hideout to the American authorities? – that governments usually combat
such threats posed by the vandals most effectively with the help of citizens
willing to volunteer information regarding the culprits.
Source: ThisDay Live
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