My exit processes were going smoothly until I arrived at the desk of the United States Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
I made the mistake of not removing my laptop and ipad from one of my carry-on luggage before I inserted it in the scanner. The scanner beeped as my bag with my electronic gadgets went through it. The operatives stopped the machine and scanned the bag again. There was another beep. They looked at one another. They told me to step out of the line.
“You should have brought out your laptop and ipad before putting it in the scanner, Mr. Nnanna”, said a lady operative.
She opened my bags and started a toothcomb search, while an elderly, white male operative practically took me apart with his gloved hands, looking for something incriminating; perhaps, drugs or weapons or worse.
After about forty minutes, they took me further away and asked me to sit down. A minute later, a huge, heavily mustached operative looking like a character out of a John Grisham legal thriller, came. With a deceptive nice-guy smile and greeted me breezily:
“Hello, Mr. Nnanna! How are you?”
“I am fine”.
“Good. Hope you stay fine!”
Then another fifteen minutes of searching, with heavier gadgets conducted by three operatives, started. I kept looking at my watch, as departure time was closing in.
One of the black operatives finally smiled at me and said:
“Mr. Nnanna, you’re okay. If not, we’d have taken you in there, and your flight would leave without you”.
Since he seemed so friendly and chatty, I decided to ask him why all the fuss.
“Your luggage alarmed twice. You are a Nigerian, right? We are particular about people from Nigeria and the Middle East. Have a safe trip, Mr. Nnanna”.
This experience came rushing back to me as I watched on CNN how a couple of black men, who were later identified to have Nigeria roots even though they were born and raised in Britain, savagely stabbed and beheaded a British soldier in the glare of the public in Woolwich, London.
It was the most blood-chilling cold-blooded murder imaginable.
These young men, identified as Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale; converts to Islam, butchered army drummer, Lee Rigby. Adebolajo, in fact, went to a camera, still covered in gore, and ranted that the crime was retaliation for Muslims being killed by “Christian crusaders” around the world. After that, he crossed the road and joined his accomplice to wait for up to thirty minutes for the police to arrive! They were later shot and wounded before being taken into custody.
It is this type of crazy escapade (which reminds us of Farouk Abdulmutallab, the lad who attempted to suicide-bomb a US-bound plane) that is getting the world out there to put Nigerians in the basket of terror-prone people of the world.
It is very easy to hear Nigerians say: “we are not terrorists”. Nobody is really born a terrorist. Both Abdulmutallab and Adebolajo were known to be quiet and from families you cannot describe as “poor”. Somewhere along the line, the devil got into them and they became pawns in the hands of evil people masquerading behind religion.
About forty years ago, Arabs were perceived as being among the world’s most cowardly people, given the ease with which they were beaten in two regional wars by Israel. Today, they are feared even by the West because of their current, widespread suicide and war-mongering mentality over religion.
Nigerians, previously not associated with the ability to commit suicide bombing, are regularly doing it now. Something happens to change a docile people into monsters. When society loses grip of its core values, the young people drift off into the waiting hands of alien influences.
In their blind quest for material ends, parents are losing grip over their children. Communities, which used to play roles in the upbringing of Africans, are no longer doing so due to growing urban-related individualism. Government has lost its relevance because it is no longer able to play its role in the lives of citizens.
In Nigeria, everybody has to hustle to provide for his family all the basic things of modern life such as housing, water, electricity, education, health and security. Little time is left to pay quality attention to the moral and mental health of growing people, who so easily go astray.
Government also plays a huge role in promoting social injustice. The system does not allow citizens to come together as one. It rather encourages them to draw battle lines and be at one another’s throats.
This, to me, is the summary of the cause of the various problems that manifest in terrorism, militancy, violent crimes, evil cultism and general demonry. Others are noticing this gradual change in us, but we continue to live in denial of what we have become.
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