Slaughter in the cathedral

 A siege by gunmen on St. Francis Xavier Catholic Church in Owo town, penultimate Sunday, left scores of worshippers dead and many others severely injured. Owo is the headquarters of Owo council area of Ondo State and native town of Ondo State Governor Rotimi Akeredolu. The church itself is vantagely located in the environs of the palace of the town’s monarch, the Olowo of Owo.

It was the softest conceivable target for a most heartless band of terrorists. The occasion was Pentecost Sunday – a solemn event for Christians in commemorating the inauguration of the Early Church – when many adherents endeavour to partake of congregational worship with whole households. At St. Francis, the mass had just ended. The choir was singing the closing hymns, waiting for the priest and other officiating ministers to process out of the church, when the first gunshot rang out. Seconds later, there was another gunshot, and soon it became a rattle of random shots. By then, wardens at the entrance were scrambling to close the doors to St. Francis sanctuary – yes, ‘sanctuary’ because a typical church auditorium is deemed a place of momentary refuge for worshippers from storms of the outside world. But those wardens were not fast enough with shutting the doors before the gunmen stormed in and staged a slaughter of parishioners. Eyewitnesses said they fired wildly at the worshippers, and capped their assault by lobbing dynamites into the auditorium.

Survivors were reported saying they expected the worst for themselves as they watched fellow worshippers they had known for years, including children running in fright to meet their parents, felled by bullets and collapsing in their Sunday best. The assault lasted about half an hour, and a viral video that circulated online on the heels of the incident showed bodies of worshippers lying behind the pews where they had apparently crouched for safety, in the aisles and other areas of the church auditorium in pools of their own blood. State Governor Akeredolu confirmed the fatality at 40 persons and 61 others hospitalised, of which 26 had been treated and discharged as at mid-last week. Community sources, however, estimated that the toll was higher.  

Some accounts said the gunmen pretended to be intending worshippers before they unleashed their assault. Others said they walked into the church premises with bags in their hands, unknown to everyone else but themselves that those bags were packed with guns. “The first person they shot was the boy who sold candy at the gate. After that, they went in and started shooting sporadically at everyone before they threw in dynamites,” one source was reported saying, adding that the attackers hijacked a car nearby before fleeing the scene. Still another eyewitness said: “We saw them, they didn’t cover their faces. Initially, we thought they were going into the church for the service, not knowing that they were gunmen. Suddenly, we heard gunshots; they directed the shots at anyone on sight, particularly women and children. During the period the assault lasted, we did not see any security operative to confront the attackers. We could not even count their number because everybody ran for safety. The attackers fled immediately after they were done and they were not apprehended.” The clergy at St. Francis corroborated those narratives with only minor variations of details.

On the heels of the attack, all known authorities deplored the incident. President Muhammadu Buhari said “only fiends from the nether region could have conceived and carried out such dastardly act,” adding that eternal sorrow awaits them on earth here and ultimately in the hereafter. Governor Akeredolu called the attack “vile and satanic” and the assailants “enemies of the people.” At a later parley with clergymen, he said there was no vocabulary adequate to describe the monstrosity of the incident. The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) described the attack as “sad, wrong, condemnable, outrageous, unacceptable and satanic,” adding: “There is no explanation for this unprovoked attack and assault on a place of worship.” Other authorities – clerical and political – expressed dismay in sundry ways, but one that strikingly articulated the horror felt by many was Catholic Bishop of Ondo Diocese, Jude Arogundade, who said: “This is madness. All over the world, there is nowhere people would plan to come and kill babies, children, husbands and wives worshipping on a special day, the Pentecost day. It’s quite unbelievable that somebody would come and the intention was to kill everybody in the church. Those who were running out were being shot from outside, and those who were inside were being shot inside… This kind of desecration can only be done by evil people.”

“Owo: It isn’t enough to vow arrest of culprits after the damage is done, but better to preempt damage being done.”

No group claimed responsibility for the Owo massacre as could offer insight into the attackers’ motive, but government late last week fingered the Islamic State, West African Province (ISWAP). Addressing journalists after a meeting of the National Security Council, Interior Minister Rauf Aregbesola said security agencies were closing in on the perpetrators. As against speculations that some suspects had been arrested, which set the ancient town of Owo on the edge Thursday, the minister said no one was in police net as at when he spoke. Not that the attribution of responsibility to ISWAP readily flies with some observers. That terrorist group is notorious for owning attacks – even those in territories that ordinarily seem beyond its reach – and it has not done so with the Owo attack till date. It is unlike ISWAP to shy from owning responsibility. But it offers no relief whatsoever if the Owo attack was truly ISWAP’s handiwork, because government impliedly acknowledged by the claim that the group was expanding its lethal operations from the northern areas into the deep south. In other words, the gangrene of vicious terrorism in Nigeria is spreading rather than being cured. Governor Akeredolu has been reported saying the attribution of responsibility to ISWAP was hasty.

Beyond the issue of responsibility, the circumstances of the Owo attack freshly highlighted the question about proactive intelligence and response alertness in the Nigerian security system. It could only be for sheer intelligence failure that a squad of gunmen – not a lone wolf that is typically harder to detect – hauled guns and explosive devices through a prominent Southwest city and into within the precincts of the city palace, and they weren’t intercepted all the way. Then, they operated for about half an hour uninhibited, and made a getaway thereafter unapprehended. In other climes, when lone wolfs or squads of criminals stage deadly assaults on public places, they rarely get away intact thereafter. In a number of cases, they are tackled down at the crime scene or forced to turn their weapons on themselves in escape by way of suicide. That happens often in lone wolf shootings in the United States, for instance, and we have an African example in Kenya’s Westgate shopping mall attack in September 2013. In this country, however, they get away most of the time. Some suspects do get arrested after-the-fact, but it is debatable in some cases that they are exact culprits of the occurrences for which they got nabbed. Following the Owo incident, there was no arrest of suspects, meaning those villains walked neatly away. 

What is more curious is that the aforestated challenge isn’t with just with the conventional (i.e. federal) security outfits. The regional security outfit codenamed Amotekun is supposed to be more grassrooted, but it hasn’t made much difference in the Owo incident, has it? In William Shakespeare’s classic, Julius Caesar, Cassius said: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” It can’t be a fated “Nigerian problem” that security outfits are most of the times backfooted. It must rather be how operatives apply themselves to run the agencies, and an operational / attitude reorientation would make all the difference. There is a long-running clamour for state police, but even that arrangement will only achieve the desired end if it is proactive and not reactive – a syndrome that characterises extant agencies, and which Amotekun as well seems to be falling into already. It isn’t enough to vow arrest of culprits after the damage is done, but better to preempt damage being done. The Owo massacre is another wake-up call to review the Nigerian security architecture.