Why Ordinary Nigerian Soldiers Deserve Our Praises
As insurgency rages across the North, and kidnapping and farmers/herdsmen conflicts take hold of the South, the noise continues to mount up to a crescendo where no one seems to hear no one and the people who should be praised are being overlooked.
These are not those in the presidency, because oftentimes their words have further polarised than unite Nigerians.
These are not the state governors, many of whom appear to be playing politics of next election and survival with the misfortunes of Nigerians.
They are not the lawmakers who seem to do nothing beyond the shouts on the floors of the Red and the Green chambers.
The people who are being overlooked in all the noise are not the service chiefs or the generals with protruding bellies. They know how to survive the politics.
Those who deserve all the accolades they could get are not the intelligence agencies and units who appear to be providing no actionable intelligence.
Our heroes who should be praised are the long-suffering, daily-killed ordinary Nigerian soldiers. They lie drenched in cold in dug trenches to forestall surprise attacks on the battlefields and sometimes wake up to no food and no water.
They are the ones who fight Boko Haram and bandits with enthusiasm and then realize that their fire-power cannot match those of criminals and then die in the process, not because they are not good enough, but because their nation has failed them.
They are in Bama in Borno, out in the cold chewing on tree branches as their own toothpaste. Sometimes you find them near Goneri village in northern Borno. On some other days, they would be fighting bandits in Kidandan, Maidaro and Sabon Fili villages in Kaduna State. What about days troops of Operation Hadarin Daji suffered casualties in the hands of bandits in Zurmi in Zamfara State?
Sometimes on their way to night combats, they gather round in prayer, Moslems and Christians alike, begging God to spare their lives from the hands of the criminals that amnesty is being canvassed for. There, there is no religious or ethnic divide among them. They are all ordinary Nigerian soldiers serving and defending their fatherland. And that does not save them from being charged with mutiny if the powers-that-be believe the manner they have spoken for their rights does not suit them.
These soldiers are like all of us. They are brothers to someone, husbands to some women and fathers to some children. They are children to some parents and sometimes they are wives to some men. They are not just statistics. They are flesh and blood who often abandon their families to weather the biting cold of the North in defence of fatherland.
Some would say it is their paid job, but what if no one chooses to do the so-called paid job? Would bandits not have overrun Nigeria? Would Boko Haram not now be raping our women as far as the South while the helpless husbands are either beheaded or told to watch helplessly? Perhaps some of us, without a choice, would have been carrying guns by now in the ranks of Boko Haram?
As the politicians do their politicking and the analysts continue with their predictions and prognosis, let no one deny the ordinary Nigerian soldier his accolades for he totally deserves it.
Written by Oladimeji Daniels
