One important value of a federal arrangement as a social system is that it liberates groups and individuals from the tyranny of the state. No one therefore needs to be ashamed of his tribe because by nature we have dual citizenship. The problem has always been our self-serving hypocritical leaders, the major beneficiary of our current state of anarchy who demonise tribes to give a false impression that we are one.

This was why until BBC’s airing of “Bandit warlords of Zamfara” on July 25 which finally revealed what has been going in Zamfara in the last one decade as a tribal war, the ruling hegemonic power in Zamfara and their supporters in Abuja refused to admit that the sources of social dislocation in the state as well as in many other parts of the north is ethnic rivalry over control of political and economic fortunes of their different communities.

Today after over a decade of playing the ostrich, except those that constitute the hegemonic ruling group in Zamfara, everyone is a loser: the Fulani warlords who attributed  mindless killings of subsistence farmers to closing down of traditional grazing routes and systematic exclusion of Fulani from government jobs and other economic opportunities; the  Hausa farming community vigilantes of Kurfa Dunya who swore “If allowed, we will kill every Fulani man, even in the town, because they killed our mothers, our fathers, our children, and dumped their bodies here”;  and of course  the people of Zamfara regarded as the poorest people in the north despite the state political elite and retired Generals’ exploitation of the state’s  huge gold deposits which they selfishly deployed to fund their intra elite wars.

But for the hypocrisy of Zamfara ruling political elite and their Abuja backers, the only people benefiting from the Zamfara tragedy, what has always defined the state is distributive injustice.  Farmers have no access to their land without paying tax to their Fulani overlords.  Indeed   Ibrahim Dosara, one time Zamfara State’s Commissioner of Information long ago struck the nail on its head by declaring that the “genesis of rural banditry in Zamfara started with a conflict between the Fulani and Hausa communities in the state leading to 2,619 deaths, 1,190 abducted and 14,378 livestock rustled with 100,000 people displaced from their ancestral homes between 2011 and 2019.”  He went on to indirectly call for community policing on the premise that “Zamfara lacks enough security forces from the Federal Government to secure the lives and properties of the people in the state”.

But the president’d men, Shehu Garba, Abubakar Malami and defence minister Major Bashir Salihi Magashi, pretending to know what the people of Zamfara needed without listening to them, opposed state and community policing not controlled from Abuja. For them to “rout-out, arrest and prosecute armed bandits, vicious kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustling gangs operating in Zamfara State”, what Zamfara needed were: a full battalion of special forces; “Operation Maximum Safety with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles”, “Joint Intervention Team of about 1000 police personnel, counter terrorism unit (CTU), federal special anti-robbery squad (FSARS), anti-bomb (EOD) squad, and conventional policemen” and Air force indiscriminate bombing from the air.

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Besides the fact that this was not how to bring irreconcilable inter -ethnic hostilities into conciliation, there were tell-tales of internal sabotage within state security apparatus. The Hausa subsistence farmers alleged dropping of arms for bandits by helicopters at nights. Then Aileru, a notorious Fulani gang leader who was on the run  after leading a massacre in the village of Kadisau in June 2020   was turbaned in an open ceremony and given the title ‘Chief of the Fulani’ by an Emir in Zamfara State. And if government needed more evidence to prove what was going on was a tribal war, both governors Aminu Masari and Nasir El-Rufai confirmed the killer  herdsmen are Fulani while Sheik Gumi went a step further by going into the bandits’ den to obtain their demands which include- amnesty and re-integration into our security services and larger society.

And still if further evidence as to the ethnic nature of the crisis was needed, Shehu Garba and Abubakar Malami and Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi who saw nothing in bearing of arms by Fulani herdsmen and their illegal infiltration of south western reserved forest embraced Gumi’s bitter pill which was an affront to families of victims of herdsmen killings and those in IDP camps following confiscation of their land by the rampaging immigrant Fulani herdsmen.

There are however other Fulani opinion leaders who understand that the well-being of other Nigerian is the well-being of Fulani tribe and eschewed ethnic sentiments to pitch their tents with Nigeria. Abdullahi Ganduje of Kano for instance embarked on massive construction of ranches for herdsmen who threaten Nigerians peaceful coexistence.  Masari of Katsina having been serially betrayed by the bandits not only embraced ranching but also called on his people to arm themselves against killer Fulani herdsmen. Nasir el Rufai of Kaduna did not only see ranching as the future of cattle farming in Nigeria, he called for summary elimination of killer herdsmen who find kidnapping for ransom too profitable to return to cattle farming business.

But perhaps, the greatest scourge of people of Zamfara remains their successive governors since 1999. In 1999, Ahmed Sani Yerima did not just betray his people, he chose to exploit their religion sentiments by introducing sharia law in October 27, 1999 in breach of the country’s constitution. Today Zamfara and the country are reaping fruits of Yerima’s weaponisation of religion with some of the young men some northern governors sent for indoctrination under Osama Bin Laden in Sudan returning  to form the nucleus of terror groups in the north.

Abdulaziz Yari Abubakar governed mostly from Abuja while his state burned.  He was not in the state on November 2016, when gunmen overran a mining camp in the Maru district of Zamfara State and killed 36 people. He was dragged to court by Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC) where he lost N700m on  January 24 this year, when the court “held he could not prove how he got the funds while or before serving as governor of Zamfara State between May 29, 2011, and May 29, 2019.”

Last week, 29 duplexes in different estates in Jabi, Maitama, Kaduna, Zamfara and Abuja were placed under interim forfeiture by ICPC which declared them products of corruption by Yari, it accused of allegedly diverting Zamfara State’s funds, using some companies, including Kayatawa Nigeria Limited and B T Oil and Gas Nigeria Limited.”

As for Bello Matawalle, besides asking people to denounce bandits by swearing by the Quran and his war with his predecessors over the sum of N970 million ransom payment to “the 30,000 identified bandits, operating in more than 100 camps” ,  embracing Masari and El Rufai’s long abandoned failed bandits amnesty policy is not likely to bring relief to his people.

Although the major victim of alleged crime, by Zamfara’s leading light according to ICPC, “is the Zamfara State Government”, I think we can add the thousands of children who according to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) died in mining villages and hundreds more suffering from lead poisoning in the villages of Dareta and Yargalma according to United States Centres for Disease Control (US CDC). And the biggest loser of course is Zanfara, “a state of three million population, with 23 hospitals and 23 doctors, 300 public primary schools manned by a single teacher each while many others in remote rural have no teachers”