General Martin Luther Agwai (Rtd)) served as Nigeria’s Chief of Army Staff and Chief of Defence Staff between 2003 and 2007. Known as the peace-maker for his successful peace missions in Senegal and Darfur, Gen. Agwai, in this interview proffers solutions to some of the problems in the North.
The recent protest and the violent turn it took has raised concerns about poverty, poor education and unemployment crisis in the northern region. What is your take on it?
To me, the world itself is in crisis. There is extremism that is coming up, people feel marginalised. The greatest problem you have sometimes is perception, it’s sometimes worse than reality. And when you come back home to Nigeria, you will find the same thing. The major thing is that there seems to be a complete breakdown of the family system, the communal and community living and a breakdown of trust. And then you can’t remove the issue of ignorance and lack of formal education. And remember, the world we are in today has moved so fast. But is our society moving with that, especially, the society in the North. These are the realities we have to look into; that is, if we don’t address them, they will consume all of us. It’s not going to be an ethnic thing, because today, every ethnic group is found everywhere. It’s not going to be an issue of religion because you do not have a boundary that cuts you away. You could be a majority in one area, but in another area, you are not. Then there is ignorance and above all, poverty. So, when you put all these together, what you find is what is happening.
I would say there are three things today in Nigeria that if you don’t have money, you will not have them; education, health, and justice. Let the judges be the best of the judges, the most honest judges. When there is injustice, you will never have stability, you will never have peace and when you have people who are not healthy then the society itself is not healthy. So, you have people who are ignorant and those who know will deceive them by giving them half-truth and they will swallow it. And anyone who has a means of livelihood, people now believe that anything you have is their money that you have stolen.
If there’s this clear division between youths who are poor, uneducated and angry with anyone who is perceived privileged, doesn’t it send a signal that no one is safe?
Remember, a hungry man is an angry man. We are becoming so independent, everybody for himself. The truth is that, if your neighbourhood is not safe, you are not safe. I’ll tell you a story. I went to the United Kingdom for my staff college in the 80s, while I was in the military. I went for a function and met this British man who asked where I was from. I said Nigeria and he said, “oh, Nigeria is such a beautiful country. The only thing, I found out that all of you are building fortresses around you. All the rich people are fencing their homes and putting barb wires. If you had used that money and trained an effective and equipped police, your security will be higher than what you are doing individually.”
If we at one level reduce our greed, reduce our flamboyance and use part of that for the general good, there will be more children in school. But the number of dropouts is becoming more and then there are those that have not even gone to school. These are the people that are being used any day.
Some 20 years ago, when you talked about insecurity, you were thinking about somebody coming from Ghana or Niger to attack. So, we have to change our idea of security, because the basic things we don’t have will lead to insecurity, and there are lots of families who don’t know what to eat tonight, not to talk about tomorrow. There are children who go to bed hungry, there is no education, there are no skills. The world has moved, but we are not moving. The North is not moving at the same speed, in the same direction as the rest of the country. If basic things are not provided, if you have no food, you have no livelihood, you cannot go to school, then there is no amount of police or military that you will bring. So, I think this is time for all of us to sit back and ask ourselves… What is happening? What is wrong? Where did we go wrong? What do we need to do? It may sound difficult to some people, but what I have learned most was from the military itself. In the military, there is something we call Durbar.
Durbar?
Yes, where the commander sits with his men to discuss, listen to them, ask of their problems. What I found was that, 90 per cent of the problems, the men had the solution. They will tell you the problems and when you ask them, so what do we do? You will be surprised to hear the suggestions they will give. Then, you as the commander can now fine tune and come up with a policy that works for everybody.
- We must be united to address challenges in North — Dr. Bitrus
- With right leadership, political will, North can be self-sufficient – Zango Daura
The North is also the epicenter of banditry and kidnapping which has curtailed farming activities. Why does it appear as though we are not getting it right despite the different security measures?
What we should know is, if you find a tree, don’t forget how big that tree is. If you want to kill or eliminate that tree, going to cut all the branches will not kill it. The roots are there. What are the root causes of these issues in the North? How did people become bandits, kidnappers? It’s not overnight. Some people recruited them, capitalised on their ignorance and poverty. Some of them volunteered because of injustice done to their parents or to themselves, and they want to take revenge.
So, this is where people have found now themselves. If other people are living flamboyantly, they also want to live it. How much are we rewarding hard work? How much are we rewarding honesty? And where is good governance? So, it is a cocktail of so many problems, but honestly, I am not giving up. I believe it can be tackled. I believe it can be reduced. We must be able to contain insecurity, and that is what is happening all over the world. But our own situation is escalating by the day and until we tackle these things, we will not see the end of it. If we are not careful, it’s just like wildfire, when it starts, one match stick starts a wildfire, even you, who stroke that match, may end up being consumed.
So, there are fundamental things that are responsible and I am not naïve to believe that it can be done overnight. It’s a policy, we agree that this is the problem then we sit together and start finding the solution. It may take another five, six years. I will still say, there are jobs that the military are doing today that are not their responsibility. Is maintenance of law and order the role of the military? Guarding VIP’s, vulnerable points and key points, is that the responsibility of the military? So, we are overstretching them, yet if there is a failure you see it as a military failure. If you want the military to take that responsibility, then you afford it in the constitution and in their role and then they will train and you will equip them to perform that role. Now what I find is that we are creating a proliferation of so many security agencies. So, in the proliferation, who controls who and what roles? Where does your role stop and my own start? Is there overlapping? And you now find you are creating rivalry within the system.
You mentioned that we needed to go back to the root of the problem. How should we approach this?
In 2000, I was made a deputy force commander of the UN mission in Sierra Leone. I went on that mission and we started trying to get a semblance of peace. And then, there was supposed to be the diamond area which everybody believed that the rebels who held that place would not leave until they were defeated by the military oppression. And not that I didn’t believe it, there were issues that happened in that place and I decided to talk with the leadership. And what we started like a joke became effective. How did we do it, finding the leadership, not at the highest level, at the middle level. Personally, I may be wrong and I don’t have all the facts, but when you start dialoguing with rebels, bandits, kidnappers, insurgents, at the highest level, how many of them will you negotiate with? And in the process, there will be splinter groups that will come out because everyone wants to be a leader so that they benefit. Start working at the bottom and get the problem so that the day you want to conclude, you conclude at the highest level. So to me, all these things are happening because we are not applying the right tool at the right time. The person who started banditry, maybe they stole his father’s cows and he went to complain and somebody took a bribe from him. Or the person who stole bribed the authority. So, he will want to revenge because grievances come in. So, before you start a negotiation, you should know the causes and the grievances and how to resolve them. If we know the cause, then it will be easy to remove the roots.
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