Evidence has continued to emerge by the day that insecurity in the country has gone haywire, which the gruesome massacre of 17 soldiers by hoodlums in Okuama community in Delta State on 14 March is an irrefutable corroboration. The deceased were not only killed; 14 of them were beheaded and had their internal organs, such as hearts, and private parts gouged out. This is a heinous, inhuman and most wicked act of savagery.
Nevertheless, such criminality anywhere, in our view, is always carried out by a limited conspiratorial cohort. As a result, the army should be painstaking in its intelligence gathering and operations, so as to nab only the culprits and spare the innocent, in tandem with the DHQ's assurance that the military would not be led by emotions, but must be guided by the laws of armed conflict.
It still has no answer to the proliferation of armies of non-state actors and their tools of violence - arms and ammunition they brazenly wield to assault, kill and question the integrity of the nation. With Nigeria's loss of the monopoly of the use of coercive force or violence, in Max Weber's conceptual framework of a state, or control of it, as others add, the country in this context can rightly be said to have failed as a state.