The title of this piece was the question that came to my mind immediately I read the Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released on October 31 detailing how government officials (camp officials, vigilante groups, policemen and soldiers) systematically raped and sexually exploited women and girls displaced by the Boko Haram conflict and how the government offers little or no protection to these hapless group and does nothing to stop the abuse not to talk of sanctioning the abusers.
Expectedly, the Nigerian state has come out feigning surprise at the scale and nature of the abuse described in the report. Same day, the President ordered the police and state governors of the affected states to commence investigation into the issue. The police in Borno state also came out expressing shock over the report and even questioning its authenticity. According to the commissioner of police in the state, Damian Chukwu “we have not received any complaint or report from any IDP camp on the issue, so the whole thing is strange to me”.
To be sure, these are all hypocritical responses. An official of the Human Rights Watch, appearing on Channels Television November 1, affirmed that the body had passed on the summary of the report to the government since July but the government hadn’t taken a single step to redress the situation. She said they also informed the Minister of Women Affairs, who, to be fair, made some inquiries but nothing much came out of it. What is more, several international bodies, including the United Nations, had since February alerted the government of the systematic abuses being perpetrated by its officials in the camp and the government turned a blind eye to the warnings.
Coming out now to feign surprise and horror at the HRW report is pure hypocrisy and an attempt to appear blameless before the international community. But we know the reality. The government just does not care about those at the internally displaced people’s camps scattered all over the country especially in the states of Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa – the three states most ravaged by the Boko Haram insurgency. Earlier in the year, news reports emerged (obviously from foreign media) that thousands of IDPs in over 20 camps around Maiduguri were starving to death because food and relief materials allocated to the camps are either diverted or stolen by government and or camp officials. In fact, the UK Guardian of Tuesday 13 September, 2016 reported protests by angry camp residents over the stealing of food meant for the residents while they are left to starve to death. The best feeding ration any IDP camp got was once a day. The paper quoted a camp resident thus: “In the night they load up vehicles with food and take it away to their houses…But I can’t complain. [A local official] said that if I complain he will tell soldiers that I am a member of Boko Haram and they will kill me.”
Meanwhile, Refugee International (RI), in its April Report titled “Nigeria’s Displaced Women & Girls: Humanitarian Community at Odds, Boko Haram’s Survivors Forsaken”, detailed the gory realities confronting the IDPs under the nose of Nigerian government officials including rape and sexual exploitation of women and girls, who in most cases, have to submit to the demands of the officials, soldiers and policemen for sex to be able to eat and possibly feed their children or family members.
What has been the government’s response to all these reports? Denial and cover ups. At a time, it even denied foreign media access to the camps. So, the government cannot, in all honesty, feign ignorance of the content of the HRW report. It knew of the abuses but was too preoccupied with fighting Boko Haram to care about the plight of the IDPs.
The experiences of the IDPs, in a way, demonstrate how Nigerian citizens encounter the Nigerian state. And those experiences – no doubt common among Nigerians – are principally why the state too has lost what C. Young and T. Turner call “the moral entitlement of the state to legitimacy”. Pray, how can a state treat its citizens so abjectly and expect them to confer it with legitimacy? As Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare in their edited work, Encountering the Nigerian State argue, for the most part, “the ‘modern’ Nigerian state relates overwhelmingly to its citizens as though they were, at worst, adversaries, or at best, a nuisance—and thus vomits or excretes them…”
But it is easy to see why the Nigerian state views its citizens mainly as nuisance or even adversaries. Modern societies are ordered in such a way that there is a symbiotic relationship between the state and its citizens. The citizens fund the state and the state, in turn, protects, cares for, and makes it conducive for its citizens to enjoy the good life. It is a strict contractual relationship where each has its part to play. Expectedly, there are also strict penalties for any party not playing its role. However, since the state is an amorphous entity, its agent – usually the government – is held responsible for its failings and pays the price.
The modern Nigerian state however, does not operate on such principles. Strangely, Nigerians’ notion of citizenship is one of rights only – one that sees itself more as receiving from but not giving to the state. Since the discovery of oil, successive governments no longer felt it necessary for the people to fund the state. Thus relieved of their basic duty, Nigeria citizens were thus reduced to the status of beggars – those who needed to be helped by the state but with no right or privilege to the resources of the state. Any wonder then the state treats its citizens as nuisance and in extreme case, as adversaries! Meanwhile, the ruling elite see the state mainly as a vehicle of accumulation and of exploitation.
Thus divested of its moral entitlement to legitimacy, the state resorts to repression to maintain control. That is why for many Nigerians, the state is just a repressive apparatus which functions chiefly by means of violence. That is why, for instance, it is convenient for the Nigerian state to order the massacre of a religious minority (the Shiites) in Zaria just because their members denied the Chief of Army Staff the right of way. And despite the many reports by human right watchdogs and commission established by the states, the government has said nothing and will do nothing about it.
Nigerians may have invested hope in the current government to fix the state and make it one that cares for its citizens. But they are mistaken; the nature of the Nigerian state makes it difficult if not impossible to make any substantial change in the way it treats its citizens. But the recession and crumbling price of crude oil offers hope for Nigerian citizens to take back their country and establish a reasonable and workable social contract where they take centre stage in the state. This will not come cheap. It will entail citizens playing their roles by funding the state and equally holding the agents of the state (the government) to account on the management of their common patrimony. How the citizens successfully renegotiates this contract remains to be seen but just like in most developed countries, duties always comes before rights.
Christopher Akor
