This State Has Failed Us

It`s about time we admitted it: Nigeria has become a failed state. For the past 10 years, the signs of collapse have been visible but the picture has been progressively clearer since 2011. About a third of the country`s land mass has been under emergency rule for the past one year for reasons that are glaring also in at least another third of the country including the Federal Capital Territory: mass murders, kidnapping for ransom, daylight armed robberies, breakdown of law and order, and unrestrained stealing of public funds. Several authorities identify a failed state as one that can no longer perform its basic duties in such areas as security, power, eradication of poverty, education and job creation. Even the Nigerian constitution recognises that the reason for government`s existence is protection of life and property as well as maintenance of law and order. Events of the past few years indicate that Nigeria has since exceeded the minimum requirements for classification as a failed state. Currently, the nation is still in grief following the massacre of over 100 people and injuring of more than 200 others by a bomb planted by terrorists in an overcrowded motor park in the nation`s capital city on Monday. On the night of the same Monday, Boko Haram, which has been working together with international terrorist groups al-Shabab and al-Qaeda, seized about 100 female students from a school in Chibok, near the Sambisa Forest in Borno State, after shooting dead a soldier and a policeman guarding them. Meanwhile, scores of young women abducted in the state since February are yet to be found. A few weeks ago, all schools in Borno State were closed; the latest kidnap victims had been recalled to take their senior secondary exams.