You must have heard about her by now: Nabeeha Al-Kadriyar, a 400-level student of Biological Sciences at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, murdered in cold blood by bandits because her family could not raise the N60 million ransom—since increased to N100 million—imposed on them to free her and her five other sisters. Nabeeha’s family are now in the most horrible of circumstances: unable to raise the outrageous ransom for which their eldest daughter was killed, and yet unable to mourn her death for fear of what could happen to her sisters still in captivity.
Welcome to Northern Nigeria in the twenty-first century where human life is less than sand in value. But let me be clear: bandits throughout the north are demonstrating one thing only: that they have power of life and death over the rest of us. But it is not that bandits have any power. It is just that the rest of us are weak. After all, the power over life and death belongs to only Allah, and in very rare cases to the state after a thorough judicial process.
How have we arrived at this juncture in Northern Nigeria where bandits almost daily kill and maim in the vilest and crudest forms? How do we explain the rampant destruction of lives and whole communities in Northern Nigeria that we have seen in the past decade or so in the name of banditry and kidnapping? I can think of two reasons: we have lost our sense of self; we have lost our sense of outrage; and as a consequence of these two, we have not really engaged the bandits.
First, we have become so desensitised by violence that we have lost our sense of self as a people and as a community. Human life has a purpose—ordained by Allah—which dictates that the taking of it beyond any natural ways must be equally purposeful and equally ordained. No religion and no social system on earth stresses these points more than Islam and the Islamic way of life. And yet, even as a self-declared Muslim society we watch, day in, day out as bandits kill, maim and destroy completely aimlessly, for no reason, and perhaps just for the fun of it.
Occasionally, we blame outsiders or the security agencies for not doing enough to protect our lives. This is true, but we are where we are mostly because we cannot see how we have abdicated our own responsibility to ourselves, to our society and to our way of life. And by that abdication, we handed over the power of life and
death to empty and irredeemable criminals. Banditry affronts all that we stand for, or claim to stand for. Yet, we watch, or dig our heads deeper in the sand, pretending to not see as if we are a people cowed by our own self-inflicted misery, unable—more unwilling—to rise against evil even when we daily live with it.
And it is here that violence in Northern Nigeria is materially different from its forms in the other parts of the country. Biafra agitators have perpetrated violence too. But the bulk of their violence is against the Nigerian state and its institutions, or against other Nigerians who live there. Rarely is it Igbo on Igbo. The very realisation that continuing sit-at-home orders could only result in mass Igbo-on-Igbo violence was in fact the main reason Igbo leaders rose to bring calm to their troubled region, after a long complicit support for IPOB and its violent activities.
Much the same applied in the Niger Delta where militants were content to strike only at oil installations or soldiers, but not at their own communities, at least up to a point in that conflict. In the Southwest, especially the lessons of the 1960s have been well learnt: Yorubas never again attacked fellow Yorubas for any reason, not in the name of religion, not in the name of politics, and not even in the name of criminality; certainly not in the scale we have seen in Northern Nigeria of the past two decades where violence in the name of politics, religion or criminality has been mostly and distinctly against self or neighbour.
Secondly, we appear powerless against bandits because we have lost our sense of outrage. Bandits have abducted our girls from their homes and schools and raped them, they have killed thousands and wiped-out whole communities. They have even burned women and their babies alive. Yet, what did we do? We only said a few prayers or cried a few tears and moved on to the next gruesome episode. For me, this is the most difficult and painful truth about Northern Nigeria today: the absence of defining moments when all of us as a nation would rise up and say “never again”.
But as sociologists point out, the whole essence of moral outrage is to reform anomalies in society, to mobilise society and help it rediscover its ethics, to remind us all of what we hold dear as right or wrong. Yet, nothing the bandits do have outraged us enough to rise up collectively against them in part because some people have inadvertently diluted our outrage by claiming that the roots of banditry lie in the past injustices against the Fulani.
This may be true, but it is also a serious misreading of how violent conflict works. All violent conflicts have their root causes, some of which, as in the case under question, may in fact be justified. But if the conflict endures long enough, a qualitative shift occurs and the violence becomes distinctly criminal as the root causes become buried by more and more spillage of blood. This was the case, for example, with militancy in the Niger Delta after the unfortunate hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa when the degradation of the environment and resource control took on self-interested meanings, and criminality more or less took over. It was also the case with the Biafra agitations just before leaders intervened to bring calm.
And it is the case, I believe, with banditry in Northern Nigeria today. What we have seen of bandits and their activities in the past five years have little bearing with the injustices against the Fulani in the past. This now is plain criminality and must be treated as such. And no one is better suited to lead this fight than northern leaders themselves. Federal security agencies have a responsibility, yes, but they will only follow where the body language of northerners themselves lead. The reality is that the bandits have not really seen enough shege from the rest of us.
What, then, is the life of a young girl worth? What does Nabeeha’s cruel death at the hands of bandits mean to the rest of us? As a people and as a community, I think from this moment onwards, we have a duty and a responsibility to, after Nabeeha, rise up collectively and say, “Never again shall we witness this”.
