They had an election in Nigeria. While they were getting ready to vote someone tried to blow up the Electoral Commission with a truck bomb. Truck bombs are pretty common these days. In Iraq and Afghanistan and a dozen other countries a truckload of flammable gas is a 100% effective, 100% lethal weapon.
Truck bombs are the insurgent’s weapon of choice now because – conveniently – there’s always a nutcase ready to get behind the wheel, a man who’s decided he’s happy to die for his meaningless cause, a martyr who’ll guide the thing all the way to its intended target.
The Nigerian truck bomb failed – let’s be honest – because a bunch of blokes shoved it down a hill before running away as fast as they could. Their potentially lethal, election-derailing truck bomb crashed into a telegraph pole, causing a small fire which was quickly extinguished.
These blokes just didn’t have a suicidal bone in their bodies. They jammed the biggest rock they could find onto the truck’s accelerator and hoped for the best. “Suicide mission? You never told me it was a suicide mission! Let’s just push it down the hill and bugger off…” In this fevered time of perfect, unimpeachable, hermetic fanaticism, this kind of 100% ineffective, Norman Wisdom-style insurgent action is almost comic relief. If only they were all like that.