Nigeria is now disastrously split into half – no thanks to bandits’ knife. A portion is the geographical space where President Muhammadu Buhari and governors sit on exalted thrones with access to our commonwealth to dispense as they wish.
The other half is where bandits reign supreme. It is polluted with fear, anger, bloodshed, mysteries, and blame-game. Bandits have captured, blindfolded, hypnotised and brutalised our psyche, leaving us bleeding and wailing helplessly. In our desperation, we have made a decoy to ancient grudges and fault lines, generating meaningless accusations against the North and South, while our collective enemy mocks, curses and jeers at us from our ungoverned forests and rural communities.
The precision with which bandits have plunged and plundered Nigeria brings to my memory what I read about powerful Mithridates, the youthful King of Pontus (a kingdom around the Black Sea) in 88 BC. As an adolescent, before ascending to the throne as king, Mithridates was said to have wandered through Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) collecting intelligence in bazaars and markets. He was dressed as a camel boy or a merchant and engaged in this intelligence gathering enterprise until he attained the age of twenty-one when he qualified to ascend to the throne. In order to expand his territory, he commanded the Pontus army to raid Asia Minor, and they did it effectively as they knew every pass and road in advance. They knew the identities of those who were dissatisfied, the traitors and would-be turncoats, everywhere. City after city, these disgruntled persons and turncoats yielded to him. In few years, Mithridates captured Turkey and ruled over the territory for years.
Mithridates’ story resonates here, with the invasion of Nigeria by bandits from other African countries. Working with disgruntled elements, traitors and turncoats, bandits have turned Nigeria into their gold mine, taking the peasant and the powerful captive and extracting huge financial resources from us in a manner that the Vikings did in France. From wandering through parts of Europe, the Vikings found France as a soft ground, plundered it, took over territories and formed a colony. The criminal gangs waxed so strong that French king Charles the Simple could not challenge them. Instead, he surrendered Normandy to Viking chieftain Rollo in the first decade of the tenth century. In this Twenty-First Century, bandits are taking root in Nigeria, and might, in no distant future, foist themselves on us as a colony.
Our tragedy could be traced to security operatives’ negligence of Open Sources Intelligence (OSI). Let me explain. In 2014, when the forerunners of bandits who spoke Fulani crept into our forests, robbing travellers on highways, Nigerians were alarmed that pastoral Fulani had switched from cattle herding to crime. Due to the loud outcry, Daily Trust on Sunday launched a series called ‘The Fulani Question.’ We dug into the archives, sent reporters to Fulani settlements, interviewed professionals and scholars, located several grazing reserves, and spoke to herders and farmers.
The newspaper discovered, among other things, that Fulani youths were being swayed from the pastoral lifestyle to narcotic drugs and expensive culture that their peasantry could not sustain. Parents openly lamented their inability to control these youths. But their predicament was not just about their children and ward. Grazing reserves had been converted to government institutions. For instance, the space between the University of Abuja and Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport was a grazing reserve. As grazing space had begun to shrink, herders and farmers locked horns in their scramble for land to carry on their trade, while the government stood akimbo, not lifting a finger to help either of the two camps. The last time herders felt a sense of belonging in Nigeria was in the 1960s when the late Sir Ahmadu Bello’s administration in Northern Nigeria designated grazing reserves and routes for herders, who, in return paid tax on their cattle. General Yakubu Gowon, in a show of political kindness, abolished the tax, but also abandoned herders to their fate, leaving them to wander through forests aimlessly without any buffer. Subsequent governments did not correct the error.
In the 14-part series, Daily Trust on Sunday rang the alarm bell, saying herders-farmers conflict would degenerate if the government stood aloof, expecting parties to the conflict to sort themselves out. Professor Tahir Gidado, Professor Ahmed Rufai Alkali, and Alhaji Walid Jibril, in separate interviews, advocated for the establishment of two ministries – Forestry and Livestock – and for the reinforcement of the Ministry of Water Resources. This way, there would be proper management of the country’s forestry resources and more attention would be given to the livestock sector. However, eight years down the line, the government has not made any genuine move to deal with the situation.
Our current predicaments emanate from the fact that despite OSIs, like the Daily Trust on Sunday reports, our security agencies failed to tame misguided Fulani youths. The exploits of these naïve and inexperienced robbers may have reached criminal gangs who had perfected kidnapping for ransom in the Central African Republic, Cameroon, Mali, and the Niger Republic. Now, they have invaded Nigeria, a resource-rich nation of fearful wealthy people whose security has been rift apart by corruption. They have found Nigeria as a soft ground for peddling their trade in the alternative use of our forests – holding victims captive and for ransom collection – other than grazing.
We bark and stab one another, invoking ethnic and religious sentiments because we have failed to look at the country’s problem in the face and call it by what it is. Nigeria is trapped in a well-orchestrated, calculated organised crime, meticulously executed by gangs whose interest is money. Organised crimes are perpetrated by two or more persons who operate as a syndicate, with the motive of profit and power. Such gangs have the support of some corrupt officials of the state and use sophisticated weapons of violence, threaten or kill victims. Some invest their illegal gains in legitimate businesses, and they use modern information technology to advance their criminal activities.
Various accounts by victims who survived kidnapping prove that the current insecurity is perpetuated by organised criminal gangs operating in cells. In their ring are peasant informants, security personnel, bankers, traditional rulers, businessmen, religious elements, and even scholars, who assemble to share ransoms collected from victims. To free Nigeria of these evil men, we must break the backbone of criminal gangs. But that is not what we are doing. Rather, the gangs have pitched us against ourselves, North versus South, as we reinforce unfounded conspiracy theories generated cooked in the fertile imaginations of crafty bigots.
Most ridiculously, blindfolded Nigerians choose words from the semantic field of defeat in our fire brigade approach to the puzzle. Amnesty. Dialogue. Compensation. And statements like ‘not all bandits are criminals,’ and ‘we have to preach to them to repent.’ It is unfortunate that we are too hypnotized, enchanted or beguiled to perceive the apparent reality that these criminals manipulate the entire nation. How? While we acquiesce and grant amnesty to some in Zamfara, they abduct school children in Kagara. While we piously take religion to them in Kaduna, they abduct travellers on Abuja – Kaduna highway. But we still trust them to tell us the truth. Too bad! Who says the devil ever repents? The only way to handle Satan is to cast him out.
Dr Abbah is of the Daily Trust Foundation
