If Britain could rehabilitate 5m soldiers after World War Two Nigeria can deal with the menace of herdsmen and kidnappers too

Ayo Akinfe

(1) Today is February 5 and for me it is significant in that it was on this day in 1945 that America’s General Douglas MacArthur returned to Manila after the US recaptured the Philippines from Japan. By February 1945, it was clear that the Allies were going to win the war both in Europe and Asia. Thinking ahead, they began immediate work on a decommissioning and rehabilitation plan

(2) I have been using the lockdown period to step up my studies of World War Two and forever marvel at the ingenuity of man. How we bounced back from that near-collapse to build such a robust global economy offers lessons on how mankind shall recover from the economic devastation of this current pandemic

(3) What still leaves me in awe is how countries like Germany, Japan, France, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, etc bounced back from the devastation of war to rebuild their economies almost immediately. Within five years, they had surpassed pre-war industrial output. Coronavirus is childs play compared with World War Two, so will soon be forgotten

(4) By 1945, in Germany, virtually every factory had been bombed, in the Soviet Union, nothing was left standing by the Nazi occupiers and in Japan, cities like Tokyo were more or less flattened. However, by 1950, you would not have known that a war took place. Is the African capable of bouncing back from the economic effects of Covid-19 this way?

(5) When World War Two was over, in the Soviet Union, about 25m people perished, in China the Japanese had slaughtered 27m souls, in Poland, 20% of the population was wiped out, while in The Netherlands, people resorted to cannibalism to survive. They all suffered 10 times more than what we are going through in Nigeria today but alas, they came through. It is amazing what the “can do” spirit can enable humans to achieve

(6) Nigeria is currently wracked by insecurity as Fulani herdsmen, kidnappers, Boko Haram terrorists and armed bandits run riot. However, are the total number of individuals we are talking about up to 1m? We are also suffering from the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic as crude oil exports are at an all-time low. We need a masterplan to get out of this rut

(7) At the end of World War Two in May 1945, there were 5m British ex-service men decommissioned. These were young men who had been trained to kill, with many of them suffering from all sorts of trauma after what they went through. Had they not been properly rehabilitated, there would have been a crime epidemic in the land. Nigeria needs to go and study how they were settled back into society

(8) Under an ambitious plan presided over by Ernest Bevin, Britain’s labour and national service minister, by the end of 1945, demobilised soldiers reached 750,000 and this number doubled two months later after Japan's surrender. By 1947, about 4.3m men and women returned to civvy street

(9) Demobilisation centres were established where service men and women were offered retraining to enable them adapt to civilian life. I ask myself sometimes why Nigeria does not open herdsmen rehabilitation centres to train our cattle rearers on modern animal husbandry techniques, how to run ranches, how to manufacture compound feeds, etc. I am sure that in the process they will uncover thousands of potential veterinary surgeons and some will even go on to become professors

(10) Has anyone in Nigeria actually compiled statistics, detailing how many criminals and miscreants there are in society today? If we did and had an industrial plan to get them back to work, we could have peace within a year. I await details of our rehabilitation plan. Personally, I think this initiative should come from the Nigerian Governors Forum