By Sylvester Odion Akhaine

Good morning, Mr President. I focus on a subject for which you already have raw data from the routine daily security reports. It is the insurgency and terrorism undermining the peace of the Nigerian people and the state’s sovereignty. My task as an academic is to process some of them as information nuggets with policy insights that may help your administration.

We have reached the point where we need to re-echo the African proverb popular among the Esan people of Edo State. It says that a child is not always conscious when he/she is being denied his/her meal by the natural powers of sleep. The Nigerian state is on the precipice, sliding towards the situations in Kigali, Mogadishu, and Khartoum. If this meteoric fall happens, it would not rise again.

Sovereignty simply means the absolute powers of the state to superintend over its delineated territory without external interference. This is a theory. The reality is different. As Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg have argued, most states in Africa possess juridical sovereignty, that is, international recognition as a result of the legal umbrella of the United Nations anchored in the clause on equality of states in its Charter, while lacking empirical sovereignty due to the absence of effective internal control over their own affairs, as well as resilience to external meddlesomeness.

Therefore, our country suffers from negative sovereignty not because of the ever-present external interference, but due to the fact that the country now has multiple sovereignties. Swathes of the country’s territory are controlled by actors, that is, terrorists and their sponsors, who have defied the coercive powers of the state.

Mr President, it is now obvious that security reports on your table may corroborate what I am saying here. For the purpose of this analysis, four social forces are identifiable in the security dilemma facing our country. State actors, the Jihadists, mineral hounds, and neocolonialists. These forces converge in unleashing terror on our dear country.

The state actors, complicit in the reign of terror in the northeast and northwest, are in government institutions. The northeast situation came about when politicians in Borno state courted the fundamentalists for political gains. State patronage increased their leverage, and they were poised to undermine the state with their backward anti-West orientation.

It happened in a context in which a set of northern governors undermined the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria through the introduction of sharia laws, rudely violating the secularity of the Nigerian state as enshrined in Section 10 of the 1999 Constitution as amended. General Obasanjo did nothing, resigning to the notion that the development was political and would fizzle out with time. Perhaps, he was cautious given the immediate instability created by the annulment of the June 12 Presidential election that heralded his presidency as an appeasement of sorts.

However, a kid-gloves approach gave way to an unbridled impunity. Governors, who, with hindsight, stole the resources of their states, amputated the arms and limbs of poor people.

President Yar’adua came to the rescue, applied the cold fingers of the state on Mohammed Yusuf, the leader of what is known as Boko Haram. It became the trigger for insurgency against the state. Unfortunately, the president’s ill-health undermined his decisive disposition and created a vacuum that allowed the set to wax into a terror force. The mission of the deployed troops was sabotaged by their political sponsors, poor military hardware, and the greed of some of their commanding officers, some of whom turned the counterinsurgency mission into an ATM machine.

In the northwest, cattle rustling, illegal mining, and ethnic rivalry between the Hausa and Fulani combined to engender the anarchy and genocidal exploits of Turji Bello and Kachallah. General Christopher Musa, the former chief of defence staff, in a rare insight, told the nation that the crisis in the northwest was also political. In his words: “What is going on in the northwest is [a] Hausa-Fulani fight. You know we don’t mention it. That is the bottom line.

The Fulani feels [that] anytime he comes to town, he is molested, killed. The Hausa man believes the Fulani man, using his herdsmen, enters his farm, destroys his crops. So it’s been a long time. I am sure you are aware, it has been a long time issue that has not been addressed, so it’s a political issue that should have been settled before. It had been allowed to evolve into what it is today”.

Nevertheless, there is the case of the gold mines of Zamfara and the lithium of Katsina, which are exploited by corporate actors, their Nigerian compradors, and with the cold complicity of successive state governors in the state. Hear what Adams Oshiomhole, a serving Nigerian senator, has to say: “Those involved in this illegal mining, they use choppers. They procure arms exactly the same way as our militants were doing in the South-South. They give them arms, they use choppers to come and cut away the gold, and they take them out of this country and make billions of U.S. dollars. And the federal government is not doing what it should be doing. I took this letter to the former president when I was national chairman of APC, and I said, call the general to give you more brief. In fact, what is happening or what is supposed to happen in that part of the country was exactly what the general told me was going to happen.

Because these guys have been weaponised by the illegal big men who deployed them, secure territories, and the weapon is made to protect the Chinese and other foreigners whom they actually employed to carry out the mining. And on occasion, they use the same weapon to carry out banditry, kidnapping, and all of the terrible things that are going on. Committee Chairman of Defence Staff, tell the Defence I said so”.

To be continued next week.

Professor Akhaine is with the Department of Political Science, Lagos State University.