Some governors in Nigeria’s troubled Northern region are closing markets, shuttering highways, prohibiting sale of petrol in cans, restricting movement of cattle and urging people to defend themselves to curb banditry and terrorism plaguing their states, measures indicating they are at their wit’s end.
This is worsened by a Constitution that puts control of soldiers and policemen in states under the control of a president in Abuja, who often does not know what is going on in the states.
Aminu Masari, governor, Katsina State (North Western), has ordered the closure of Jibia-Gurbin Baure and Kankara-Sheme roads gateways to the states commercial cities to all motorists until further notice.
Masari has also ordered all commercial vehicles, tricycles and motorcycles off every road in the state from 10pm to 6am in the state capital of Katsina, and 6pm to 6am in other local government areas in last ditch efforts to curb rural banditry.
Last week, murderous gangs riding in hundreds of motorcycles invaded Duba, a community in Batsari Local Government Area of the state, killing a dozen people and injuring several others.
According to Masari, in 10 out of the 34 local government areas, the word of criminals is law. In July, he told the youths in the state to defend themselves with catapults against AK-47 wielding marauders. Nigeria’s president hails from Katsina.
State executives in Nigeria’s Northern region are running out of ideas to contain what began as an insurgency by an extremist religious sect, Boko Haram, following the execution of its leader Mohammed Yusuf, to what is now low-grade warfare against the Nigerian state by terrorists and bandits.
In this warfare, children are fair game, women are spoils and terror is the prize. It is a war where it is often difficult to tell the enemy apart, where the generals double as saboteurs, and where every conquest looks too similar to bruising defeat.
In Zamfara, Governor Bello Matawalle has opened a backchannel to start peace talks with the terrorists, a capitulation, dressed as negotiation.
Read also: Agric growth lowest since 2018 as insecurity takes toll on farming
“We applied the peace accord as a means of an honest solution to the problem in Zamfara State, which has yielded tremendous results never expected in the last one year,” Matawalle said recently.
Governors in the North have offered cash to home-grown terrorists and bandits, shuttered major highways, ordered curfews, paid soldiers and local vigilantes to go after them, but the killings continue.
“Rural banditry in the northwestern states of Zamfara, Kaduna and Katsina has reached alarming heights in recent years. They have actually settled in Zamfara State, setting up fortified enclaves in the hinterland and on the frontiers, from where they plot and carry out their operations,” Chukwuma Al Okoli, lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Federal University Lafia, noted in a research.
According to a tally by SBM Intelligence, a Lagos-based research firm, over 3,000 people were killed between April and June, and nearly 300 security officials were killed in the same period.
Nigeria’s Northern region is fast morphing into killing fields as marauding gangs armed with military-grade weapons pillage communities, raid farms, rape women and abduct children. It is the Wild Wild West on steroids, a return to the state of nature, which English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’
The pervasive insecurity has unravelled the local economy, caused massive unemployment, as investors flee the region and throngs of young people flee the region on the back of trucks to become water vendors in Lagos.
Politicians who impoverish the region have long kept the people ignorant, docile and pliable with the aid of clerics. A generation of uneducated youths that were used to steal elections and foment mayhem have grown up with little else to do than get high on glue and wield guns for any cause that comes with a meal.
“Governments at all levels must present governance as a more attractive option to their youths than what armed groups and other non-state actors present as a means of recruiting from a pool of unemployed people,” said Confidence McHarry, a security analyst at SBM Intelligence, a geopolitical intelligence platform, based in Lagos.
The solution, according to McHarry, is to fix the economy. According to data released by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, Nigeria’s GDP grew 5.01 percent when compared with the same quarter last year.
“But that growth could have been much higher had the government not embarked on obnoxious policies such as the border closure, foreign exchange restrictions and import bans among several others. The inability of young people to find work is fuelling insecurity,” said McHarry.
Zainab Ahmed, Nigeria’s finance minister said the second-quarter growth of 2021 would have been much stronger than the 5.01 percent, but for agriculture, that recorded a slightly lower growth. A number of bottlenecks within the system, including insecurity, negatively affected the sector, she said.
Bandits have chased farmers away from their lands, set fire to harvests, rustled cattle and abducted young people to fuel their ranks. This partly accounts for food inflation at 22 percent, putting basic food items out of the reach of many Nigerians.
“Going further, it also needs to improve its intelligence gathering capability – massive investments in human and signals intelligence – as a means of forestalling attacks.
“So far, military operations in the North have not targeted the kingpins of the major armed groups. There’s a feeling that the government does not want to rock the boat and is thus content with sporadic air raids,” noted McHarry.
This timid counter-terrorism approach has produced ineffectual results. It has spread from the North East to North West and is fast morphing into an industry becoming difficult to tell apart bandits from terrorists.
This is markedly different from the counter-terrorism approach of the United States and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), which focus efforts on three main areas: awareness, capabilities and engagement.
They promote shared awareness of the terrorist threat through consultations, enhanced intelligence-sharing and continuous strategic analysis and assessment, according to NATO guidelines.
Adequate capabilities are built to prevent, protect against and respond to terrorist threats. Personnel and tools are provided to address asymmetric threats, including terrorism and the use of non-conventional weapons to protect troops, civilians and critical infrastructure against attacks perpetrated by terrorist
They also engage with allies to strengthen outreach and cooperation with partner countries and international actors.
Analysts say these are missing links in Nigeria’s engagement with terrorists.
