By the provisions of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, the President of the country is said to be among the most powerful presidents in the world.
But it appears that there are some individuals in Nigeria today, commonly referred to as non-state actors, that are more powerful than the president. These actors are not one, not two. Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a Kaduna-based Islamic cleric, is one of them.
By his utterances and the views he holds, especially at this time in Nigeria when government seems out to criminalise free speech, Gumi seems to be in that mould.
Whereas the government of the day frowns at people whose opinions are divergent from those of the government, Gumi appears to have immunity over all darts from the seat of power in Abuja. Some observers strongly believe that something must be working for him.
The Kaduna cleric can say anything and do anything that catches his fancy and gets away with it. He seems to be enjoying absolute powers. Some say he enjoys immunity because his tentacles are stretched deep into the Aso Rock fortress.
At a time when government launches attack on anyone who tries to advise it on how better to handle the secessionist campaigns, banditry and insurgent activities in some parts of the country, and when the government had taken a position against negotiating with terrorists and bandits, Sheikh Gumi is still insisting that negotiation with them is the way to go.
Yet, he has not even been invited by security agents, let alone put behind the bars for promoting agenda that is at variance with that of the government.
The Islamic cleric, who has featured in a number of negotiations with terrorists, and had canvassed state pardon for them, was recently quoted as saying that government must go into negotiation with the terrorists as an antidote for incessant abduction of school children in the northern part of the country.
“To secure schools, why not engage the bandits? Engage them; they are not many. You can count them with your fingers. How can you guard schools? It is not possible. In the whole North-West, they may not be more than 100,000 bandits. And that is just a drop in the ocean. That is talking about those with weapons; because not all of them have weapons. Ninety percent of those who have weapons use them to protect themselves against cattle rustlers,” he said.
According to him, “They are victims too. Aerial bombardments will only worsen the situation because when you start killing their children, you remember they also have our children.”
Someone pointed out that the implication of all these ‘unguarded’ utterances from an otherwise highly placed and respectable Nigerian is that those who are overtly enemies of the state are not faceless after all; they are known up to their families, number, and operation (destruction?).
In his published commentary headlined, ‘Gumi and the case for bandits,’ Olusegun Adeniyi wondered the common sense in advancing dialogue with bandits.
Adeniyi said: “Rather than confront criminals, the federal government is being advised to seek ‘dialogue’ – after which we then ‘settle’ them with public money. It started with Boko Haram which was conflated with the ethno-religious politics of the time. We of course can see where that has brought our country. Now the same mistake is being made regarding bandits who target schools for easy prey.
“The chief promoter of this idea is no other than respected Islamic cleric, Sheik Abubakar Gumi, who has made himself the emissary for Nigerian bandits he romanticizes almost as if they are members of the International Red Cross. I am of course aware that there are those who cite the example of the Niger Delta amnesty deal to rationalise why insurgents, bandits and other criminal cartels holding the country by the jugular should be ‘taken care of’. Such thinking is not only misplaced, it is also dangerous and very soon.”
He further said: “These are the people the Federal Government is being encouraged to ‘engage’, simply because the Nigerian State has become too weak to enforce law and order. The bandits on whose behalf Gumi is negotiating are violent men who have turned women to widows, children to orphans and displaced hundreds of thousands of our people from their communities. Yet, with this idea that they be appeased, we are unwittingly adopting a criminal code in which individuals can terrorize without consequence and be rewarded for visiting their violence on innocent citizens.”
Reacting to Gumi’s observation through his twitter handle, Femi Fani-Kayode, a former minister of Aviation, said it was wrong for the Sheikh to ask the government to stop killing bandits.
“Just listen to this heartless defender of child-abductors and cold-blooded killers. He is a dark and wicked soul, a callous Philistine and an unrepentant barbarian,” he tweeted.
“Every blood-thirsty terrorist and Janjaweed bandit should be brought to justice, exterminated and sent to hell.
“Those that speak for them, defend them and attempt to rationalise or justify their barbaric actions like this unconscionable and evil creature deserve worse. Hell-fire awaits you,” he added.
The Islamic Sheikh, who appears to know the workings and mode of operation of the bandits, last Wednesday stoke a fresh controversy when he accused the nation’s security agents of colluding with bandits terrorising the northern part of the country.
He made the allegation during a television interview.
“A lot of bad elements in the country’s security forces are in collusion with the bandits,” he was quoted as saying.
The cleric said the cooperation of the security agents “in the business” is the reason the bandits have been able to access the trove of assorted weapons that they own.
“These bandits, if you don’t know, are cooperating with a lot of bad elements in our security system. This is a business. So many people are involved, you’ll be so surprised,” he said.
“They were caught in Zamfara; they were caught everywhere, how do these big weapons cross our borders? How can these big weapons cross our borders and get into the forest without the cooperation of some bad elements of the security operatives assisting them? It’s not possible. If I give you the same amount of guns, can you take it to the UK? You can’t because the security is alert. Part of fighting this banditry is to overhaul our security system.”
Attempting an explanation why it seems that Gumi is above the law, Amos Alao, a public affairs commentator, said it was the same reason that has made it difficult for the killer herdsmen to be brought to book, despite the atrocities they commit across the country.
According to Alao, “I laugh loudly when people wonder why Sheikh Gumi has not been called to order by the powers that be. He can’t be questioned. He is enjoying some kind of immunity, the same way the killer herdsmen are enjoying.
“I have told whoever cares to listen that any day the Presidency gets serious against the killings by herdsmen, that form of insecurity will cease. If it were anybody from the South here that is doing what Gumi is doing, posing with terrorists in viral photos, such a person would have been forgotten by now.”
Gumi appears to have the same idea with some members of the Northern elite about the “entitlement mentality” of the terrorists, that the terrorism going on across the country was a reaction to some injustice done to them by the country.
For a long time, key northern leaders, including traditional rulers, had taken offence at what they complained was the stigmatisation of the Fulani, insisting that crime was crime, a vice that knows no ethnic or religious coloration.
In February this year, Bello Matawalle, governor of Zamfara State, was quoted as saying that “Not all bandits are criminals.”
But his belief runs counter to the suspicion that the surge in banditry in his state was a fallout of the illegal artisanal mining of gold in Zamfara.
Matawalle had also repeatedly called on the Federal Government to grant amnesty to repentant bandits, despite the havoc they had wreaked on innocent citizens.
“Not all of them are criminals. If you investigate what is happening, and what made them take the laws into their hands, some of them, sometimes were cheated by so-called the vigilante group,” he said.
According to him, “they normally go to their settlements and destroy property and take their animals. They did not have anyone to speak with, so sometimes, they go for revenge. When the vigilante group attacks them, they go for reprisals. That is exactly what happened.”
“Some of them are living in settlements close to villages or towns. When there are military operations, the military will go and destroy their property and animals. They are angry with such actions sometimes. If you are talking to them, you can understand where they are coming from and their problems,” the governor had ractionalised.
In his article published in The Nation in May 2021, headlined, ‘The Sheikh Gumi terrorism paradox’, Adekunle Ade-Adeleye noted that “Both Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore spokesman, Saleh Hassan, and popular Islamic scholar, Ahmad Gumi, are on the same page in their interpretation of the breakdown of law and order in the North.
“They suggest that dispossessed and alienated Fulani nomads are only responding violently, through banditry, to the pressures put on them by other ethnic groups standing in the way of their livestock business, either by robbing them directly and rustling their cattle, or restricting, constricting or even erasing grazing routes. In summary, they argue, the Fulani herdsmen are engaged in brutal and unrelenting existential fight for survival.”
He noted therefore, that it was not surprising that the banditry crisis in the Northwest has become intractable, and that Gumi and Miyetti Allah see banditry interchangeably with Fulani nationalism.
A so-called repentant bandit, Auwal Daudawa who confessed to having masterminded the kidnap of Kankara, Katsina State students in December last year, said the attack was carried out because Governor Bello Masari dared them.
“I did that in Katsina because the governor came out to say he will not dialogue again with our people. So, we said since they said they were not interested in a peace deal and they were sending military jets to torment our people and destroy what we had, we should take the battle to those who are not interested in peace,” Daudawa said.
Perhaps, this is why Gumi believes that negotiating with the terrorists could check their activities.
But observers say that the cleric may be the official voice of those in power on the banditry issue, hence, his larger-than-life disposition.
Mike Ejiofor, a former director of the Department of State Services (DSS), said the secret police must be in a state of dilemma on whether or not to arrest Gumi.
“If you go and arrest him, you are going to provoke his supporters or the people he is working for and if you don’t arrest him, people will say why has he not been arrested as other people who acted in the same manner have been arrested? So, it becomes a very dicey situation that needs to be handled with care.”
Ejiofor however, said: “I have never supported Gumi’s position because it is like he is now becoming an agent of the bandits but on, the other hand, he cannot just come openly to tell government to pay (ransom). Even if the government will use backdoor to pay ransom, it shouldn’t be made public.”
One man that has consistently condemned government’s dichotomous handling of insecurity and people’s views on it, depending on who is involved, is Samuel Ortom, governor of Benue State. He believes that the Presidency’s reaction to bandits’ activities and killings by Fulani herdsmen is suspect.
Ortom is resolute in his conviction that the magic wand that can end insecurity and mindless killing in the country is in the hand of the president and the day he decides to use that wand to effect is the day all the killing and kidnapping incidents in the country will cease.
