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
When a republic is held to ransom by an affliction that appears intractable to its government, the populace is left hopeless and helpless. About the viral insecurity now holding Nigeria hostage, the Tinubu government is in consternation and quandary. And the Nigerian public is in total darkness as to why no one seems to understand what is going on. Instead, government is more preoccupied with rehearsals for the 2027 general elections.
Let us admit that the present insecurity is not new. Tinubu did not bring the bandits and kidnappers. He inherited them, albeit in a more moderate proportion. The insecurity has only spread into a rampaging nationwide calamity that is threatening the very existence of the nation. An administration that took an oath to “preserve and protect” Nigeria is literally gaping while the nation unravels.
On a daily basis, groups of citizens are being abducted, kidnapped or senselessly murdered by a mix of bandits, jihadists and casual anonymous killers. From isolated incidents like the Chibok Girls school invasion, we now have a state-after-state roll call of schools visited by bandit squads that cart away large groups of school children and their teachers. Some teachers have been suffocated or beheaded in full camera view and posted on social media.
The growing spread of terrorist activity seems to have a disturbing strategic map. From the fringe border states of Borno, Yobe and Katsina, terrorist activity has descended southwards to unusual places like Niger, Oyo, Kwara, Kogi…. The implication of this north-south movement of terror is to give credence to a long-standing theory that Nigeria’s insecurity is all the product of Islamic fundamentalism spreading from the Sahel towards the Atlantic. This sectarian dimension has fueled the fear among Nigerian Christians that Nigeria is under threat of Islamization. This has, in turn, fed the contention by President Trump and US Christian lobby groups that Christians in Nigeria are under threat of sectarian genocide.
But the insecurity ravaging Nigeria is wider than this sectarian jihadist conspiracy. One version has been ascribed to foot soldiers of mostly Fulani origins. These were originally cattle herders that posed no threat to local populace among whom they grazed their cattle. In recent times, however, especially with the ascendancy of the Buhari presidency in 2014, the erstwhile harmless herders were reinforced by gunmen from across the northern borders. One version of the explanation is that Mr. Buhari was so desperate to take power from President Jonathan that he facilitated the mass influx of these militant jihadists from especially Niger Republic, his ancestral roots.
Mr. Buhari apparently had no subsistence plan for his political foot soldiers in the post -election years. So, they roamed free in search of livelihood. In Nigeria’s long-standing porous security environment, herder militants found work and livelihood in armed robbery, kidnapping, abductions and sundry crimes that incrementally altered the face of Nigeria’s insecurity. Because of the political origins of the herder criminals, law enforcement was mostly incapacitated. Arrests were few. Prosecutions were even fewer. Convictions were scanty if not rare.
Worse still, there was a free cross-border traffic of dangerous weapons by these free terror agents. Recent conflicts in places like Libya, Sudan and the wider Middle East provided a ready source of dangerous weapons for gangs operating in Nigeria. Corruption across our porous borders did not help in securing the national territory.
Freely trafficked arms became available for use by different internal trouble spots. Long-standing frictions between migrant herder communities and settled farmers found foot soldiers among the armed herders. Intercommunal violence grew into mass killings. Reprisals followed and death tolls climbed. Consequently, Nigeria’s mid-section states of Benue, Plateau, Nassarawa and Kogi have become theatres of interminable bloodletting. Inter-communal violence has acquired a religious complexion as the settler communities tend to be mostly Christian while the migrant herder communities tend naturally to be Muslim. What originated as a livelihood squabble has grown into a long-standing campaign of hate and violence.
There has developed, over time, a compulsive transactional commercial nexus to the uncontrolled insecurity. In Nigeria, anything that brings in cash has become attractive. Banditry in the form of forced leviews, extortion, transactional kidnapping and abductions has grown as a sector of the nation’s crime economy. All manner of cult and solo cells have mushroomed. Huge ransoms are being demanded and paid. In the process, miscreants and criminals are emerging as billionaires overnight. The incentive for honest work is declining in some parts of the country. It is reported that even banks are in on the ransom rackets as they facilitate the collection and domicile of ransoms.
In an effort to confront and combat the spiraling insecurity, the state has expanded the size and scope of its security forces. The defense and security budgets have grown. But allegedly, an internal racket of corruption has grown. Some security officials have been known to collude with bandits to fleece communities, states and individuals. Some state governments have been known to negotiate power sharing with bandits and criminal gangs. Even the federal government is not immune from the extortion ring. Security forces are reportedly buying second hand, expired and non -functional equipment or padding the defense and security budgets for cater for the self-interest of commanders who subsequently retire into opulence and wealth.
As we enter another election season, a different dimension has entered the theatre of national insecurity. Politics has become enmeshed in efforts by government to understand and deal with the insecurity epidemic. Politicians who have nothing of substance to say have given political coloring to these developments. One foolish viral version is that Tinubu’s political enemies are the ones staging these attacks to degrade the political asset base of Mr. Tinubu.
On a wider scale, the opposition is blandly blamed for hyping the instances of abductions as indications of political bad weather. Some ruling party talkaholics have carelessly alleged that the bandits are under the command and control of either the ubiquitous Peter Obi or the mischievous old Atiku Abubakar and their nationwide dragnet of foot soldiers.
The real danger of linking abductions and kidnappings to politics is not in these wild accusations. It is in the real fact that in Nigeria politics weaponizes literally every available tool. Politicians have been known to deploy thuggery, assassinations and arson to weaken their opponents. Politicians have been known in previous election cycles to arm and provide uniforms to their thugs to frighten off their opponents or confuse real security forces. In a landscape brimming with all manner of cells and squads of bandits-for-hire, the possibility that politicians will buy into the existing buffet of organized or freelance kidnappers and abductors is a clear and present possibility.
The foregoing gamut reveals the sheer complexity of the present specter of insecurity ravaging the land. We have a mixed bag of institutional collapse, untamed challenges to national sovereignty, uncontrolled criminality and political rascality. Add to these the commercialization of crime and Nigeria’s invasion of everything on the market. Therefore, what is being bandied as insecurity by the public and government alike is a complex national malaise that government appears too lazy and reluctant to understand let alone tackle.
It is not as if the government is doing nothing to contain the embarrassment. Bigger budgets are being proposed and passed. The military and security establishment has been buying and ordering fancy military gear from literally everywhere. The presidency has been appointing more and more fancy security “experts” into its arsenal and emplacing them in fancy air -conditioned offices in Abuja. Periodically, when terrorists and criminals embarrass us with mass killings, the president orders service chief to relocate to the theatres of the latest bloody outburst. Those ordered to relocate make a show appearance and quietly return to their cozy quarters in Abuja soon after the president boards his jet to fly away.
In a predictable knee jerk response, the president issues the familiar statements, vowing to defeat the terrorists, to protect the vulnerable and condole the bereaved. There is the usual pledge to bring the criminals and terrorists to book. Soon afterwards, another mass killing, another group abduction, another state school system is shut down in a nation where illiteracy and out-of-school incidence keeps climbing.
I daresay that the complexity of Nigeria’s insecurity has increased because little effort has been made to understand its dimensions. Deploying detachments of soldiers and policemen in Hilux pickup vans to trouble spots is no national security strategy. Unleashing drones under the control of illiterate and untrained soldiers to decimate innocent villagers in friendly fire does not amount to national security. A National Security Adviser who is basically a common barracks policeman can not take us anywhere closer to a secure nation. An NSA bureaucracy with hardly any back up intellectual input cannot bring us anywhere close to a secure nation.
Above all else, Nigeria’s viral insecurity is an aspect of the progressive failure of the state and its culture of governance. We cannot chase away insecurity in isolation of the overall collapse of governance at all levels of the state structure. It ought to instruct us that the level of national security has degenerated as the quality of leadership in the country has declined.
The clamour for greater and better security ought to form part of the democratic quest for a better regime of governance. Only a holistic approach that understands and analyses the aspects of our insecurity and targets them precisely can begin to approach a solution to the cumulative liability of insecurity under which we now live.
Ultimately, a state that cannot guarantee both its territorial integrity and the security of the lives and livelihoods of all its citizens is living on borrowed time.
