Between The Legislative Arm And Boko Haram

The law sought to empower the American government to fish out terrorists within and outside the country. Essentially, t he American military is saddled with the responsibility of fighting terrorism and protecting the sovereign integrity of the American nation as a whole. Ever since the incident of September 11 2001, America’s military effort has been diverted almost solely to combating terrorism.

The American military are the “unofficial” police of the world. When they need to arrest, infiltrate and annihilate terrorist camps in the 3rd world countries, they do so without any form of backlash or sanction. In addition, they have the Guantanamo bay prison camp where terrorists are held without any form of judiciary supervision.

In signing into law the “National Defence Authorization ACT”, the American congress gave the president and the military the power to extend their anti-terrorism duties to the streets of America. Section 1021 and 1022 of the act allows the American military to walk up any streets of America and detain anybody at all, both citizens and non citizens for any length of period of time, without any form of trial if it deems fit, if in the interst of national safety that person is deemed to be a terrorist or has links with any terrorist groups what so ever. This interprets that Americans could be declared domestic terrorists and thrown in a military detention with no recourse at all. President Obama was overtly critical of this law, but for the safety and sovereignty of America, he signed it into law.

It is nothing short of amazing that Nigeria does not have external terrorist groups causing havoc on our home soil, but rather the internally bred terrorist groups are actually the ones bringing Nigeria’s sovereignty to its knees. Nigeria as a country is devastated by terrorists and yet there is not a single legislation in existence in Nigeria now that barks at terrorism. Terrorists have turned Nigeria to a laughing stock of the whole world.

Enacting an anti-terrorism law is not that hard to define. If we are that inept to enact our own indigenous law, then maybe we should copy and paste the American “National Defence Authorization Act”. It does not follow that the automatic enacting of such a law would bring an end to this gory situation, but it is a step in the right direction. We need our legislative arm of government to join in this war against terrorism.

Written by Adedayo Matti.