Pursue truth, seek understanding as insecurity escalates

Last week, mayhem returned to same Plateau, leading to imposition of another 24-hour curfew in Mangu Local Government. From reports, instead of the usual mid-night terrorist onslaught on communities, like the Christmas Eve simultaneous killings in Bokkos and Barkin-Ladi, which claimed 200 lives, the tone this time was sectarian and the triggers were identified. No fewer than 30 people were reported killed and worship places and homes were set ablaze.

Mangu has become notorious for curfews, but that has not solved the problem. Following a mid-night attack on May 16, 2023 by suspected militia herders in Kubwat and Fungzai villages, which claimed 29 lives, the government imposed a curfew in the council area.

On June 19, 2023, another curfew was activated when in renewed attacks Governor Caleb Mutfwang lamented that 150 persons were killed within three weeks. On July 9, 2023, another curfew was due after bandits invaded Pushit and Sabon-Gari. That tells something about government’s understanding of the crises and the lack of sincerity to deal with them.

Plateau used to announce itself as a peaceful haven for investors and holiday makers. The climate is friendly and the soil good for cash and staple crops. Livestock thrives well in the Plateau. For a government that is shopping for foreign investors to come to Nigeria, the daily blood-letting stories coming from the Plateau do not serve as incentive.

Unfortunately, Plateau is just one pronounced aspect of the insecurity challenges the government of the day is struggling to understand. In Taraba, communities are exposed to regular killings and displacements by terrorists. Far-flung communities in the South of the state, according to reports from Ussa Local Council Area, experience a history of regular attacks by armed militias. Citizens are not protected at home or in their farms by a government whose responsibility it is to secure life and property.

As it is in Plateau and Taraba, so it has been in the Northwest, with Katsina and Zamfara being worst hit in that axis. Katsina, home state of former President Buhari was not spared when bandits invaded schools and took hostage hundreds of students. Bandits were courted by governors and paid to repent and sin no more. They soon returned to their wicked ways and even flourished.

When banditry surfaced in the Northwest, in the early days of the Buhari government, there was some reluctance by the intelligence community to clearly define it for what it was. It took them a while to communicate the ensuing but deadly confrontation between roaming Fulani herders and settled Hausa farming communities.

Buhari, being the patron and protector of Miyetti Allah (cattle herders’) interests across ECOWAS was too partisan to be neutral. His tribal interests conflicted with those of a Commander-in-Chief, whose responsibility it is to protect all citizens.

Even when governors of Northwest identified the nucleus of the budding crisis and were willing to nip it, they were limited by Buhari’s parochialism. The herders became emboldened and began their spread all over the country.

When the terrorists took their nefarious activities too far into Southwest forests, the political leadership responded with the formation of a regional security network, known as Amotekun. The Federal Government (FG), rather than commend and support that regional effort, which is what true federal systems operate, worked extremely hard through the Office of Attorney General and Justice Minister, Abubakar Malami, to frustrate Amotekun.

When that didn’t work, they rushed to excavate colonial-age grazing routes that human development had rendered obsolete. The FG tried to push Rural Grazing Area Scheme (RUGA) in 2019, a policy to forcefully annex lands for livestock farming. That was resisted but the FG was hellbent on exporting herders to territories that don’t have enough land.

The North has by far more grazing space. In a federal system, states should decide what farming methods are convenient to operate. RUGA was later replaced yet with another scheme, the Livestock Intervention Programme (LIP), still being tested in pilot stages. The FG did all sorts, just skirting around the herders-farmers clashes and refusing to call it what it is.

By the time Buhari left office after eight years, not less than 63,111 persons were killed in terrorist attacks, banditry, herders-farmers clashes, communal crises, cult wars and in extra-judicial killings, among others, according to data supplied by the Nigerian Security Tracker (NST), a project of the Council on Foreign Relations’ Africa Programme.

Maybe, if General Buhari had lived up to his responsibilities as President and Commander-in-Chief and had cultivated the discipline to remain neutral and see all of humanity as his constituency, the numbers of deaths could have been less and a handover note on insecurity to his successor, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, could have proved useful in dealing with the upsurge that has engulfed the country.

Buhari simply had no blueprint on insecurity. If he had, citizens didn’t see any, apart from a cold detachment from the pains he facilitated. It is incumbent on President Tinubu not to mix politics with security. He should not tolerate more deaths anywhere, or skirt around the real issues because of 2027. The year 2027 is in God’s hands.

Let him not recline on a settee like Buhari, with a tooth-pick in his hand, totally oblivious of the misery ongoing in Zamfara, the mass burials in the Plateau, the agony in Southern Kaduna and the fear that has overtaken citizens all over the country.

Things were not this bad when the All Progressives Congress (APC) promised it would end Boko Haram insurgency in a matter of months. Instead of ending Boko Haram, defence budgets went haywire while insurgency morphed into banditry and deadly kidnapping.

The peak of insecurity under Buhari was when terrorists bombed a Kaduna bound train on March 28, 2022, during which 14 travellers were killed and 63 captured as hostages. Those Nigerians coughed out about N6 billion to regain their freedom, with the last of them being freed on October 5, 2022 after close to seven grueling months in the bush. Some pregnant women were assisted to deliver in captivity.

As if that was not enough, on July 5, 2022, terrorists broke into the Kuje prison and freed over 800 prisoners, with about 60 of them being hardened Boko Haram elements. At the time of the attack, according to the then Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola, over 31 military personnel of the Nigerian Army, five personnel of MOPOL 50, two personnel of the counter-terrorism unit of the Nigeria Police, seven personnel of the Immigration Service, three personnel of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and 10 personnel of correction armed squad were on ground, and they were well armed.

But the terrorists of ISWAP who claimed responsibility had a field day. At the end of the day, despite the promises to investigate the jailbreak, nothing happened in terms of publishing a report for citizens to identify with.

That is Buhari’s security legacy and it is not what Tinubu should aspire to replicate. The president should distance himself from it by getting the right intelligence.

But it was saddening and disappointing when the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Taoreed Lagbaja, glibly profiled the 2023 Christmas Eve killing of 200 people in Bokkos, Barkin Ladi and Mangu communities as “political conflict wrongly managed that snowballed into Christmas Eve attacks.” Really? Is that what intelligence told him, that 200 people had to be killed in the dead of the night over some political conflict?

So, what was the prize at stake and the political offices that are up for grabs? Which political parties were at war to warrant that level of carnage and who are the arrow-heads of the political conflict? The Chief of Army Staff will do well to update Nigerians on his findings. If he cannot find the updates, he should be kind enough to apologise to Nigerians for sustaining an old, imposed narrative.

Conversely, the Director of Media Operations, Major General Edward Buba, told Nigerians last Thursday, that the crisis of last Tuesday in Mangu was “triggered by a number of factors including the attempted cattle rustling and the killing of a Mangu man by herder militia. The herders reportedly killed the man on the spot. Consequently, militia mobilised and attacked residents in the early hours of 23rd of January.”

So, in the Plateau, there are herder militia who are armed to kill on the spot. Meanwhile, the government said civilians cannot carry guns, but herders carry guns. Also in the Plateau, we still do not admit of a clear intelligence on what the causes of the incessant clashes are.

When in 2005 a conference report by the American National Intelligence Council (ANIC) suggested in a mapping of Sub Sahara Africa’s future, that Nigeria would fail and lose the capacity to govern its space, that intelligence was scorned. It was felt that some enemies of Nigeria had conspired to wrongly profile Africa’s most prosperous country.

So, when in 2015, the year Nigeria was predicted to dissolve, it did not, instead there was a successful political transition from former President Goodluck Jonathan to General Muhammadu Buhari, there was jubilation. But the signs were clear.

Politicians were more concerned with reclaiming swathes of land from Boko Haram so that elections could go on, that was myopic. Right now, there is so much ungoverned space for terrorists and bandits to hibernate.

Let the Tinubu leadership not surrender more territories to terrorists on the altar of political correctness. Let this administration restore human dignity to all Nigerians and free them from ancient hegemonies.

All Nigerians are born equal and no tribe should deny others their right to life. If those in charge of intelligence gathering are still pandering to the old order of domination and subjugation, let them be removed. Let this government read the signs and do the proper thing, save lives.