On a hot afternoon in October 1993, two American combat helicopters were shot into the dust of Mogadishu, capital of Somalia, by fighters loyal to Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid.
On that day, hundreds of elite US troops, intervening in the Somali Civil War had been dispatched to capture Aidid’s top commanders. Eighteen of those soldiers returned in body bags, two of which had been dragged across the streets of Mogadishu, dead and abused. In the encounter that followed the felling of those two Black Hawk helicopters, hundreds of Somalis were killed. Ironically, it was the corpses of those two American soldiers and the wreckages of those two helicopters that would be beamed across the world. Six months later, the US withdrew all its troops from Somalia, never again to intervene in a crisis in any African country.
That military disaster became the basis for a 2001 blockbuster movie, Black Hawk Down, featuring several A-list stars.
This Sunday, a Nigerian Air Force jet was downed by bandits over the Kuyambana Forest that sprawls over Zamfara, Kebbi and Niger states. The lucky and gallant pilot, Flight Lieutenant Abayomi Dairo, ejected and using “survival instincts,” according to a military statement, escaped to a village where he was sheltered, disguised as a villager and helped to evade the bandits homing in on the crash site like vermins. From the accounts, it sounded like a dramatic escape, one for which we are all grateful. No day is a good day to bury a national hero. Perhaps someday, Nollywood would make the movie.
While the gallantry of Ft. Lt. Dairo must be saluted and the effort of the military to extract him to safety should be commended, this incident should trigger all sorts of alarms in the military and among the civilian population as well.
These bandits, often described as a ragtag band of vagabond kidnappers and cattle rustlers with flip-flops and dirty turbans, motivated by profit, have often been treated as the poorer cousins of terrorists. In one viral video, an enthusiastic soldier celebrating a battlefield success over Boko Haram said as much.
“When we finish with these ones, we will face those bandits and finish them too. That one is a small thing,” he had said.
Incidentally, that was the attitude that military authorities had towards Boko Haram when they started. They were considered a small pest to be crushed under the might of the military’s jackboot. However, what the decade-long intractable insurgency has shown, rather glaringly, is that the might of the jackboot had been massively exaggerated and the insignificance of the pest scandalously underestimated.
Now the real numbers emerging show that the military doesn’t have the size, equipment or capacity to secure the country. Despite these, the military is repeating the same mistakes with these bandits that it had made with Boko Haram, and the Niger Delta militants before them, and the separatists’ movements before those and the Maitatsine before them.
While preoccupied with Boko Haram, even though bandits have ravaged hundreds of villages, massacred thousands of villagers and kidnapped a multitude, this ragtag army of bandits are growing in capacity. Now they have the capacity, and the taste of bringing down fighter jets, something that, all things considered, is perhaps the only advantage the Nigerian military has over them.
Over the decades, huge defence budgets have been poured almost directly into the pockets of Generals who have now become political power blocs of their own. While the Generals grew rounder, more portly, the military emaciated and weakened.
Shabby as it is, the only thing that has given this military superiority over these criminal gangs is air power. Yet, in the last six months alone, four military aircraft have fallen out of the skies.
In these crashes, about 20 lives have been lost, the most prominent of course being the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Ibrahim Attahiru. He died alongside several senior military officers when their NAF passenger plane plunged to death in inclement weather over Kaduna.
The first of these recent crashes was in February when a NAF Beechcraft King Air B350i plunked out of the sky just close to the Abuja airport and killed the seven officers on board. They were reportedly on their way to Minna to help secure the release of hundreds of schoolboys kidnapped by bandits in Niger State. Cause of that crash? Engine failure. Clear enough.
However, the circumstances around April’s crash of a NAF Alpha Jet over Borno State remain sketchy. The plane was flying over Boko Haram territory in the Northeast when it went missing. The remains of the jet and its pilot (at least one of them) turned up in a Boko Haram video.
While the NAF insists the plane went down due to some technical reasons that are not yet ascertained, and might likely never be since the wreckage has not been recovered, Boko Haram is trying to give the impression that they had something to do with bringing down the plane. The truth lies somewhere in between.
In scale, the May crash of Lt. Gen Attahiru’s plane in Kaduna may seem the bigger of these recent losses, considering of course the calibre of the victims, perhaps the most worrying would be Sunday’s downing of the Alpha Jet in Zamfara.
The connotations are huge. The bandits are building capacity for greater damage. With channels reportedly opening up between the bandits and terrorists in the Northeast, the signs are on the wall.
The strategy of frontally confronting Boko Haram in the Northeast while occasionally throwing the random sideway kick at the growing army of bandits in the Northwest is backfiring, as one would expect.
Ignoring security reports, waiting and watching nascent threats grow into ferocious beasts that feast on wretched Nigerians before making a grand show of taking them down is counterproductive.
If anything, the globalisation of the arms trade and terrorism should mean a more proactive approach, long before these threats grow links with external death merchants.
Nigeria has been an unjust society. But the one area it has been equitable in is the neglect of threats facing its citizens. Maitatsine was ignored until he grew too big, as was Mohammed Yusuf. And so was the menace of criminal Fulani gangs, and Igbo and Yoruba separatists who were all allowed to achieve critical mass and gain momentum.
The recent re-arrest of Nnamdi Kanu and its attendant drama would have been avoided if the justice system had been effective in dispensing justice in the first place. But when court proceedings are played out like badly-scripted Mexican soaps running over several seasons with months-long adjournments, dramatic fainting sprees and wheelchair cameos and inexplicable absences in court, what else would one expect.
The same applies to Sunday Igboho, who, as I write this, is reported to have been arrested in the Benin Republic while trying to flee to Germany, after starting a fire in his own country — or more accurately, dumping fuel on a fire the government allowed to fester in the first place.
When he began travelling around the South-West, calling for the eviction of the Fulani from the region, the security services should have acted more efficiently to tackle the situation before it got out of hand.
Yes, the security services could have acted sooner. But then again, we could say the same about the rise of the criminal Fulani militia, and the Niger Delta militancy.
But if Nigeria truly meant not to be in these straits, it would have paid closer attention to the social injustices and neglect that birthed these agitations and criminalities, allowed them to fester, grow wings and fly.
It took two helicopters to be shot for the US to wake up and change its policy.
Here, four planes down in six months and what lessons have we learnt? For one, there is no pulling out any troops because the beast is already out of the cage. The shit has splashed all over the ceiling and it is bringing down planes. It may even bring down the sky over our heads unless we are more proactive in dealing with these things eating this country and its poor citizens.
