Still On Operation Python Dance, By Na-Allah Mohammed Zagga

Haba Southeast Senate Caucus! You are condemning Operation Python Dance as inappropriate in peace time, but you never once condemned Kanu's fatal threats to peace through his "freedom by any means necessary, including war" incendiary propaganda.

You can't ignore the larger picture, straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What role did you play to avoid the current escalation?

The government took you into confidence by inviting Southeast leaders, including traditional rulers, to the Presidential Villa in order to prevent escalation.

While the Arewa Youths Coalition heeded the voice of reason and caution, and withdrew their quit notice to the Igbos, the IPOB leader Nnamdi Kanu grown ever more pigheaded and resistant to gentle persuasion.

He reduced the Southeast leaders to eunuchs and wimps to the extent that nobody had the spunk to restrain him.

He is treated like an infallible little tin god, a deity whose foibles nobody could criticize, and then he morphed into an untameable pit bull that seems determined to fatally sink his teeth into the heart of Nigeria's corporate experience.

Having abdicated their moral responsibility to help the cause of peace, the Southeast leaders should be reminded that their own timidity to draw a line in the sand for the IPOB leader has contributed to the current militarization of the Southeast.

Didn't they intervene to help Kanu secure conditional court bail, and then watched him willfully violating these conditions?

This is an abdication of responsibility by the Southeast leaders.

With what moral authority should they now be criticizing the army, but reluctant to condemn, even mildly, Kanu's recklessness, an attitude leading to lawlessness, such as the unprovoked attacks on soldiers and their vehicles by IPOB supporters?

The army should be commended for handling the situation professionally by demonstrating restraint, despite Kanu's strategy to provoke them to shoot his supporters and use the casualties of innocent civilians as images of propaganda to attract international sympathy.