Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first Africa-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
A blistering urgency currently envelopes Nigeria. It is an urgency of war, the clear and present danger of an imminent national meltdown. It is a common truth that Nigeria is desperately embattled on all fronts. It has been so for far too long. Our leadership may not agree that we are at war. But our perceptive citizens, keen external observers, know we are in serious trouble. The Americans have advised their embassy staff to keep away from normal duties and avoid travelling to at least 26 of our 36 states. Other missions have quietly taken similar steps. I would not know what more defines a war situation than the mass casualties and treacherously risky atmosphere in most parts of the country.
On a daily basis, we are facing military challenges and confrontations of a form and intensity that literally qualify as warfare. A callous enemy is lobbing grenades at everything at sight. Strategic roads in Borno and other nearby states are littered with IEDs that frequently kill innocent people and combatants alike. Well-planned attacks are being carried out against our security forces. Planned ambushes are laid daily on the routes of military and political leaders in the embattled states. Our military is in full combat engagement with all the weapons of war – tanks, armoured personnel carriers, full combat air cover against an enemy that no longer hides its identity or intent.
Even worse, we are recording casualty levels that would make a formally declared war look like a joke. Troops and civilians are daily being decimated on an industrial scale. Forces deployed to engage insurgents in Borno and neighbouring States are no longer sure of the dividing line between the enemy and innocent citizens. In the prevailing panic, friendly fire is claiming more innocent lives than fire directed at the enemy.
Of greater concern is the heavy toll that the counterinsurgency engagement has recently taken among our senior military officers. Otherwise well-trained and highly valued officers in strategic combat roles are being taken out in attacks that look like sabotage from the inside. Clearly, there is leaky intelligence all over the theatre of this undeclared war. In the last fortnight, we have lost two generals and one colonel, that is an average of one dead general per week! Predictably, the political leadership has rolled out the usual messages of condolence to bereaved families. We have reiterated our determination to wipe out the insurgents and end terrorism very soon. It is the same empty boasts that the Nigerian state has reflexively issued over the last 12 years to no avail.
Over these years, the Nigerian state has treated combatant insurgents more like errant citizens than as combat adversaries. Some arrests have been made. After short periods of detention, those arrested have been released, granted state amnesty, rehabilitated with government allowances and dressed in government-funded outfits only to rejoin the terror gangs once they run out of cash. The ranks of terrorists and insurgents have grown just as their organizations have gotten stronger and more vicious. That is how we got to this dangerous stage in an almost uncontrollable war.
Politically opportunistic arguments that equate Boko Haram and other insurgent combatants with what used to be Niger Delta Militants do not hold water. Niger Delta militancy was fired by economic and ecological injustice in a region that has remained the life line of the Nigerian economy. Therefore, State amnesty for the Niger Delta militants and their rehabilitation in sustainable livelihoods was a sensible development policy initiative and a drive towards equity and justice. Once the policy was activated and institutionalized, the militancy died a natural death for the most parts.
With jihadist insurgents who have been engaged in over a decade long fundamentalist warfare against the Nigerian state, it is a different matter. Jihadist insurgents and terrorists are declared enemies of the Nigerian and other states in the Sahel. They have a creedal commitment that is adversarial to the existence of the Nigerian state. In contrast to the secular essence of the Nigerian state, these fundamentalist terrorists have a sectarian religious commitment. Their commitment is also territorial which makes them a dangerous secessionist movement.
They have sought to carve out swathes of Nigerian territory to form part of a caliphate. This is no different from the madness of ISIS in parts of the Middle East and Europe in the post 9/11 Bin Ladin era. Therefore, jihadist insurgents and militants in northern states of Nigeria cannot be regarded or treated as either misguided citizens or victims of economic, social or ecological injustice. They may share the blight of poverty and deprivation with other underprivileged Nigerians. But they are first and foremost adherents of a faith- based secessionist armed rebellion against the Nigerian state. When captured in combat, therefore, these Boko Haram and other jihadist militants should be treated more like war prisoners, not just common terrorists or casual criminals. They should be tried and punished under the best rules of the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war.
The wider Nigerian public is astonished that captured jihadist militants have so far hardly been prosecuted, convicted or punished. The news is filled with stories of mass abductions of citizens from schools and places of worship by jihadist militants and other faith-inspired squads of bandits and militants. But frequently and almost as a rule, those abducted are released but there is hardly word on the arrest or prosecution of their captors. Instead, a virtual industry of ransom for abductions is said to be thriving. The proceeds are “re-invested” in new recruitments and arms purchases for further attacks. The result is the present state of war involving a large army of terrorists, bandits, fundamentalist zealots, ransom takers and agents of foreign interests based in nearby countries.
State governors reportedly hold meetings and reach power-sharing agreements with bandits and terror merchants. Official security personnel observe and provide “security” at such meetings. Former state governors, some of whom have condoned and embraced these terrorists, have been known to be rewarded with ministerial portfolios by the federal government!
While the fire of war rages on, affected states like Borno presumably remain under civilian authority and presumed democracy. State governments sit in council. Politicians claim constituencies even if those areas are effectively under jihadist terrorist control and occupation. Democracy in a theatre of war. Civilian rule in a place where the only language spoken is armed violence and where the populace is sharply divided between ‘enemies’ and ‘friends’. The pretext to civility is indeed so laughable. If combat generals with their troops and equipment are constantly unsafe and subject to hostile enemy fire, all pretense to a civil democratic atmosphere amounts to foolish self -delusion.
How come the Nigerian federal government behaves in disparate, illogical ways when national security is at issue? When in Rivers State the political atmosphere became so charged that governance was threatened, the President declared a state of emergency and suspended the governor for six months to seek a restoration of governable civil order. The state was placed under a sole administrator. All elected officials were sent home.
But even at its worst, the Rivers political crisis was only a political threat to national security as a matter of conjecture and projection. There was hardly any armed threat to the nation. The enemy was the political factions within, not an armed insurgent faction that questioned the legitimacy of the Nigerian state.
In Borno and surrounding states, however, we are dealing with a naked armed foe. We are faced with a well armed and articulated insurgency project with an ideology, a creed and an armed force that daily assaults and seeks to topple the authority of the Nigerian state across a wide swathe of territory. The business of Nigeria is not being conducted in the areas of states under the assault of Boko Haram or ISWAP or whatever other name they call themselves. In response, all we are getting by way of counter action are sporadic and uncoordinated opportunistic attacks by the Nigerian military. A good number of the responses seem to be happening under a perforated intelligence atmosphere in which our troops are sabotaged routinely through intelligence leakages.
Where does the power and authority of a state governor as chief security officer of a state end and that of a deployed military commander with orders from the Commander- in- Chief begin?
While the nation is faced with a war of survival, the federal government continues to delude itself that we are faced with a normal national security challenge requiring normal budgetary allocations to the defense ministry. The foolish assumption is that the structures and activities of normal social and democratic existence can co-exist with an atmosphere of serious warfare.
The state government can continue to operate normally even if the state governor has himself been ambushed and nearly captured by the enemy on a few occasions. The political elite who represent the affected states in the National Assembly in Abuja continue to live and flex in Abuja from where they issue occasional silly statements about insecurity from far away.
Meanwhile, a war economy continues to thrive in and around the embattled states. Successive defence chiefs in Abuja are associated with some shiny luxury castles in Abuja and elsewhere. Some business and political elites have been fingered as financiers of the war ravaging the nation. This Mickey Mouse approach to a serious national security crisis has prevailed for more than a decade. But we are now at a stage where the jihadist insurgency in the northern states is threatening to dismantle the fragile Nigerian state. From the troubled frontline states, violence is being “exported” to other parts of the country, thereby creating a nationwide atmosphere of insecurity and perpetual imminence of war. Abuja is besieged. Kaduna is similarly encircled. Katsina and Niger states are war outposts which are routinely assaulted by terrorists and bandits.
As matters now stand, it does not matter how many meetings President Tinubu holds with his Defense and Security chiefs. It does not matter how many statements Defense Headquarters issues to explain the deaths of senior officers and other ranks or the collateral mass killings of innocent civilians by badly trained soldiers armed with equipment they hardly understand. The truth is that we are at war and we seem to be losing badly. Some of our states are now more of war theatres than states in a democracy.
The urgent political decision that President Tinubu needs to make is simple. Declare a state of emergency in Borno and other states that are now virtual theatres of war. Under that state of emergency, the affected states should be under total military rule led by a military administrator. While it lasts, the rules of war should govern life and affairs in the affected states. The military administrator should have a clear mandate to clear the state of all insurgent forces, bring those captured to book as prisoners of war. Politicians and political actors from the affected states who value their mandates and the reign of democracy should aid the military administrator in the war effort to end the war and restore democracy in the affected states.
The intensity of the jihadist insurgency war can no longer be glossed over. Downplaying the reality of the raging war because there is an election in the horizon would be the height of self -delusion and governmental foolishness. This is not just insecurity as captured in normal political parlance. The incumbent administration cannot outsource this crisis to previous or successor regimes. I doubt that any serious political party can campaign in this election cycle without addressing a definite solution to this raging war. This embarrassing conflict with all its nasty dimensions cannot be carried forward to yet another presidential term.
The first step to ending a bad war is to formally declare it by calling it its right name. Democracy is a ceremony of peace and life. A place of death cannot host a festival of peace and life. Only the living vote in an election. Those who are not sure to see tomorrow can neither prepare for nor vote in an election. Therefore, for all those politicians who seek votes from people in Borno and our other war theatre states, the first task is to replace unnecessary death with security of life by ending this yet anonymous war. You cannot renew hope if there is no certainty of life. Hope is a treasure of those living today, not a promised wreath on the grave of those who will die tomorrow.
