By Sylvester Odion Akhaine

In the preceding part of this subject, I have argued that there is connivance by state elements with the terrorists. The Zamfara State is a web of deceit. Security forces who have operated in that theatre have alleged that one of the former governors of the state built smart shelters in the forest where these terrorists are quartered. They remain allegations, but in our clime, anything is possible. The killings in Zamfara alone ought to touch human souls to want to end the carnage.

The case of the neighbouring state of Katsina is unravelling before our very eyes. There is the allegation that terrorists’ kingpins were sponsored by the incumbent governor of the state to go on hajj in Mecca. Dr Bashir Kurfi re-echoed it, and then a rebuttal from the state government. Subsequently, the damning corroborating evidence from the interior minister to affirm the arrest of terrorists returning from hajj. According to Tunji-Ojo, “We inherited a fractured system. But I’m happy to tell you that even last week, seven known commanders of Boko Haram and ISWAP, at the point of returning from Mecca, were arrested at Katsina Airport and handed over to the Department of State Services, DSS”. And reportedly, Dr Kurfi has been arrested for being patriotic. Now I turn to the uncompleted business of 1804

There is a section of the population that sees Nigeria as its birthright. For this set, the 1804 Jihad is still very much alive. The Jihadists have employed state mechanisms to achieve this. Before the 2015 ouster of President Jonathan, they brought in Fulani from all over Africa for the purpose. Kawu Baraje speaks to this point in 2021.  The former PDP chieftain said that the Fulani men who were causing havoc in the country were not indigenous to Nigeria and were brought in from neighboring countries like Sierra Leone, Mali, Senegal, Niger, and Chad for election purposes in 2015.  According to him: “We are not asking the right question on how the same Fulani we have been living with suddenly turned out a menace…We also must ask how they had access to their guns… The security agencies have not been open about the nature of the problem…They have made arrests. Why haven’t they told the public who the terrorists are…After the election, the Fulani have refused to leave. I and other like minds wrote and warned those we started APC with that this was going to happen, but nobody listened.”   Indeed, in ways corroborating, Nasir El-Rufai, the former governor of Kaduna State, admitted paying the herders, a metaphor, for terrorists, to stop the killing of Southern Kaduna people who have been on the receiving end of their brutality in 2016.

Intriguingly, Mr President, the former governor has also recently accused your government of paying off bandits under the pretext of a “non-kinetic” strategy, rebutted by your National Security Adviser (NSA). There are many allegations against your government official for ordering the release of captured terrorists in the Middle Belt theatre of operations. President Jonathan once claimed that Boko Haram elements were in his government. Yours, Mr President, is full of Trojan Horses. As the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Republic, I surmise that you might know but are bidding for time. Mr President, the evidence points to Nigeria as an insurgent state enabled by itself.

Still on the subject of the Islamic conquest of the country, Buhari was the last Mahdi in this regard, but the dynamics on the ground did not allow the outright fulfilment of that project. The slaughter in the Middle Belt testifies to this sinister motive. The no-visa policy for visitors from Africa into Nigeria was part of it. Recall that President Muhammadu Buhari, on 11th December 2019, at the Aswan Forum for Peace and Development in Africa in Cairo, announced the grant of visas on arrival to all travellers holding passports of African countries starting from January 2020, at a time Nigeria had not yet acceded to the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA).

The ostensible justification was to make Nigeria an investment destination for Africans, liberalise the movement of persons and goods, and boost tourism with a consequent impact on economic growth and development. Its latent function was to boost the jihadist plot. The deliberate swamping of the South by urchins from the North using goods-laden trucks to dump them across southern towns and cities; a statutory attempt to centralise inland waterways; the establishment of  RUGA and its several iterations fit into the plot.

It is on record that some youths in the Southeast and vigilantes in the Southwest made an attempt to halt their inroad. They are still pouring in droves while state governors in the North are sponsoring mass weddings with no future plans for the offspring of those marriages. Today, they have sleeping cells across the country. For them to succeed, there will be no country.

Nigeria is a multi-ethnic state, and a federal state structure suits it. Secularism should be its motto and merit its principle, the applications of equalisation principles. The Jihadists should look up to Somalia and Sudan and retreat from their sinister agenda. It would not succeed because the innocence and civility in some parts of the country would be gone. It would be a life-and-death contest.
The current subject will be completed next week.

Professor Akhaine lectures in the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University.