By Darlington Ehondor 

Armies typically behave in a deranged manner. So it was no  surprise that the Nigerian Army, armed to the teeth, went berserk in the east recently. That singular act of brazen barbarism squandered what was left of the army’s public goodwill. Its absence of civilized behavior came to the fore in an instant.  The Nigerian military is both frivolous and illiterate. Its mind is hazy and autistic because of its lack of both military intelligence and the astute cerebral content that distinguishes mental vigor from mental retardation. After smashing its way, with indiscriminate military brutality, through phalanges of excitable Biafra agitators across Eastern Nigeria, the army is multiplying its idiocy by pretending to be remorseful and hence reparative. 

So it is feigning charity by offering injections of  “vaccines” to children from Anambra to Imo. Its “Operation Python Dance” – a military invasion intended to obliterate all human and ideological representations of Biafra – wreaked horror and villainous savagery, killing, maiming and mutilating unarmed Igbo youths, degrading scores to the demeaning indignity of being dragged through muddy waters. Never have we witnessed, to our collective horror, such a thoughtless display of imperious state power. But to minimize the depravity of its barbarous conduct and mollify the Igbo’s substantially injured prestige, the army  embarked on the pointless “gesture” of dispensing “medicine” to resurrect the dead. It’s been invading school after school with its arsenal of “vaccines,” ostensibly, to immunize children against one virus or another. Imagine the diabolical affront! After putting the wrong foot forward first and ruining a perfectly good chance to appease a long-suffering region, the federal government is being ambitious and delusional. It is demonstrating scant intellect by assuming that its “free vaccines” will heal the hemorrhaging wounds its soldiers inflicted on the bodies and spirits of those victimized by its power psychosis.

To  the army’s consternation, however, its “kind gesture” has only ignited rumors of a clandestine plan of exterminations reminiscent of the pogroms of the civil war. Unsurprisingly, a spreading uproar of panic and anxiety has taken vigorous hold all over Eastern Nigeria. Parents, alarmed by the rumors, have been retrieving their children from schools, to save them from being “infected” with, allegedly, the monkey pox virus, the new bug now savaging thousands all over Nigeria. But here is the army’s dilemma: its act of “magnanimity” is wrongly timed, wrongly targeted, wrongly conceived.

It is irrelevant whether or not those rumors have a slice of truth to them. It is even less important whether the army’s “generosity in altruism” is genuine. Never mind. The summation of all calculations regarding the army’s – actually, the federal government’s – miscalculation of its strengths and popularity is that, more than ever, it has exposed itself to entertaining ridicule and chastisement. It considered even the contemplation of the contemplation of secession a treasonable felony, summoned the troops to quell the heresy by any means, and any type of barbarism, “necessary,” and then, suddenly, experienced a dollop of conscience and compunction and reason. So the army beat its own blood-dripping swords into plowshares and “offered” to resurrect the dead with “vaccines.” Amusingly, the “dead” fled from all appearances of the “federal might’s” penitence, thereby spilling barrel-fuls of embarrassment on the battlefield. Who is in the ICU (intensive care unit) now? Obviously!