Zabarmari is a metaphor. It is representative of the gruesome killings that occurred in Auno, Baga, Rann, Bama, etc. You can add up the countless atrocities these Boko Haram terrorists have perpetrated in the many villages and towns they took over since they were chased out of Maiduguri in the early days of the war.
Readers may recall that in January 2019, in the last few days of his tenure, Senator Kashim Shettima, then Governor of Borno State, led a delegation of Borno dignitaries, including all the state members of the National Assembly and traditional rulers to pay a visit to President Muhammadu Buhari, to discuss a one-point agenda: how to arrest the carnage perpetrated in the state by the resurging insurgents then taking over northern Borno. Most of the security chiefs were in attendance. After the preliminaries, the leader of the delegation Kashim Shettima was at his eloquent best briskly retelling the president the continuing calamity that had befallen Borno.
He painted the picture of a state that was rapidly being overrun by the brutal army of the insurgents and the reduction of a large portion of his citizens to the indignity of a beggarly existence in IDP camps. Baga a major trading centre on the shores of the Nigerian side of the Lake Chad had fallen to the insurgents and hundreds of thousands were running from there and the surrounding towns including Kukawa, and streaming into Maiduguri IDP camps. Many in the delegation were taken aback, when at a point, Kashim Shettima’s voice broke, clearly overwhelmed with emotions and live tears started streaming down his face. I guessed the president flanked by his stony-faced generals would be nonplussed but the point must have registered – that the political leadership in Borno, deprived of the required authority, was totally helpless.
His successor, Prof Baba Gana Zulum, was hardly in office in May when things just continued to worsen. The insurgents had added the Kano-Damaturu highway, the only safe corridor into Maiduguri, among their prized running grounds, wilfully attacking, robbing and killing defenceless commuters. One night in February, they struck at Auno snuffing out the lives of 30 citizens who were unfortunate to be caught defenceless sleeping in the open grounds at an army checkpoint. When Governor Zulum visited the site of the attack, he had an altercation with the soldiers that went viral in the social media. In the ensuing months, even the convoy of the governor was not spared from being targeted by the terrorists. In a particular instance, a number of his security entourage were killed when his convoy was attacked on the way to Baga. Meanwhile, a large number of killings have been reported at Gubio, Magumeri, Damboa, Gamboru-Ngala among others.
It seemed no part of the state is spared. Zabarmari then becomes a milepost in the heinous journey undertaken by these rampaging terrorists. The village had always been one of those sleepy string of farming villages around Maiduguri. Even when I was a kid in the early 1960s, I had known it as Zabarmari, obviously named after the Zabarmawa ethnic Hausas from Kebbi State who had settled in the village as workers on the land. Zabarmari along with Gungolong village sit on a very fertile plain called Jere Bowl where rice and wheat could be cultivated commercially. I recall that when I worked in the Chad Basin Development Authority in the late 70s and 80s we had plans for a 20,000 ha project for both rain-fed and irrigation cultivation of rice and wheat in the Jere Bowl. However, this was jettisoned in the late 1980s with the coming of Alau Dam upstream, which had dammed the Ngada river flowing into the Jere Bowl.
Probably due to the fact that the Zabarmawa came from Kebbi where rice cultivation was the practice they found it easy to acculturate in the area. But the first wave of migration must have come there on their way to Mecca, at that time when Hajj could only be made by road. Maiduguri, due to its strategic location in the region, had always been the main gateway for Nigerian pilgrims – then known as takari – before travelling to Mecca by air became the norm. My father was the major pilgrim agent in Maiduguri and had many houses surrounding us in Fezzan ward as pilgrim camps. I literally grew up in their midst. Many of the pilgrims that could not continue the journey for one reason or the other settled permanently in Borno. Those who remained in Borno went where their skills took them. Those who had a farming bent ended up in the plains around Maiduguri such as Zabarmari. The Zabarmari settlement grew as their kith and kin joined them over the years.
It is a great tragedy that Zabarmari, the quiet backwater that it was could be projected to international infamy by the evil acts of a few. It is the hope of many that Zabarmari would be the last milestone in this horrifying journey. Many eyes had run dry. There are no more tears to be shed. Governor Zulum has given two viable options. If the Nigerian Armed Forces are handicapped, then mercenaries could be contracted to finish the job. In the alternative, the civilian JTF could also be armed, and suitably trained, to supplement the regular soldiers.
