Nigeria Content Online

Last week faraway
in America I was sitting at the dining table staring at my computer,
trying so hard not to logon to Facebook when the headline, Hostage
Situation in Silver Spring, caught my eye.

I was ten minutes
away from the epicentre of the action. A further quick read of the news
made me realise it was live and ongoing.

The reason I was
particularly interested in this news was that, two months ago we had a
hostage situation in Nigeria that involved fellow journalists from the
Nigerian Union of Journalists.

The Nigerian media
followed the news as closely as possible. The fate of the journalists
was unknown. The kidnappers’ actual location, despite their telephone
communications with the police, could not be tracked. News of the
kidnapping filled the airwaves, newspapers and blogosphere on a daily
basis – not because kidnapping was a rare occurrence – but because
those in this hostage situation were journalists.

I quickly tuned to
NBC 4, the local TV channel to watch the event unfold. A lone gunman
had stormed the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in downtown
Silver Spring and held three hostages. Commercials and other regular
programmes were put on hold as information spewed off my television to
help the public understand the full picture of the situation.

Back home we would
be inundated with unverifiable speculations and uncontrollable panic
would take over, but here, though there was panic, the situation was
firmly under control.

The security
apparatus was not ill equipped or ill trained to handle hostage
situations or any emergency situation for that matter.

In few seconds, the
gunman was named – James Lee, a 43-year-old Asian male with a long
history of discontentment with Discovery Channel for not caring enough
about the environment and the planet. To many, he was an environmental
militant; something close to what we have in the Niger Delta, but with
a twist.

A picture of him
soon surfaced. Authorities sealed off the downtown Silver Spring and
all manner of security forces were deployed to rescue innocent people.
County police,

ATF, fire
department, FBI agents- with bomb sniffing dogs, bomb detonating
robots, fire trucks, handguns, rifles, binoculars, bullet proof vests
and masked snipers swarmed the place like bees to a hive.

My hopes for the
lives of those taken hostage was high as soon as I realised the gunman
was talking to a negotiator because I knew there were rescue plans
going on off camera. This was a different security force I was seeing
in operation, tactically ever ready for a day like this. They weren’t
scrambling for a game plan on the day of emergency; they have had
drills and simulations that prepared them for James Lee.

The county police
chief, Thomas Manger, did not go about begging an untrained public to
help him rescue the hostages or engaging in job-saving PR mission like
the Nigerian ex-police chief did.

During the
kidnapping of the journalists in Nigeria it became obvious that our
police force only knew how to threaten, extract bribes from ordinary
citizens and carry out extra judicial killings.

The Police Force
was scrambling around, constantly lying to the public that they were
handling the hostage situation well, whereas they did not know what to
do. Nigeria has lost hundreds of lives to hostage takers yet there
still is no concrete security plan in place to militate against the
least sophisticated kidnap.

I could only
imagine the dollar amounts used in purchasing all the rescue equipment
I was seeing on TV as well as the training most of the officers
handling the situation had received, and I bet no matter how outrageous
that dollar amount was, it did not amount to what a Nigerian police
chief has in his personal account or what his boys and girls extort
from us.

Watching on TV, the
discipline of the officers in this rescue operation was obvious. By 5pm
we were told the drama was over, authorities had taken care of
business. At about 4.48pm. Chief of police, Manger, announced that his
men, were watching James Lee via camera, and they were close enough to
hear what he was saying and see what he was doing. “At one point, the
suspect . . . pulled out the handgun that he came in with and pointed
it at one of the hostages at that point, our tactical units moved in
and shot the suspect.”

The kidnapped
journalists were released not because of any special rescue efforts by
the police force but by the “special grace of God” as we always say in
Nigeria. The kidnappers released their victims of their own volition,
yet the police lied to the general public that they were rescued. Till
now, no clear explanation has been given about what took place; we
don’t know who the kidnappers were or what has happened to them.

Hopefully the new police IG will help sanitise a Force that is in need of a fundamental overhaul. So welcome, chief.