Former Executive Secretary, National Health Insurance Scheme, Usman Yusuf, an oncologist, has as usual been talking up a storm over the Bola Tinubu administration’s plan to fight banditry and insecurity in general with every determination the government can summon. Tragically, some northerners, to whom he has directed his inciting rhetoric, appear convinced that he is the genuine article. On the one hand, the fight against insurgency in the Northeast has reached a crushing and intense level. It may be plagued by half measures, such as deradicalisation and rehabilitation of insurgents after capture or after surrender, especially ahead of their victims still marooned in refugee camps, but any indication that the counterinsurgency efforts were directed against the Kanuri has since subsided. On the other hand, however, the campaign against banditry in the Northwest appears bogged down in ethnic and religious rhetoric incomparable with any zealotry the country has seen since independence in 1960.
The press, which today is largely against the Tinubu administration, loves to get the opinion of the eminent Prof. Yusuf. Last week he regaled the media again with his careless summation of the fight against banditry. His previous staple of deconstructing Boko Haram within the ambit of his zealous ratiocinations is no longer as marketable as it once was. He is not Kanuri. His new pastime is banditry, an affinity he shares with Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, a notable northern Islamic cleric famous for his sympathies for bandits. Reacting to a question on the Nigerian Defence minister’s logic about fighting banditry to its logical conclusion, the oncologist argued that such a fight would unfairly target the Fulani and indicate prejudice against that race. He was more worried about the atrocities he claimed security agencies and Hausa vigilantes were meting out to the Fulani than respond to the cruelty and economic sabotage occasioned by the bandits.
Never known to mince words on the painful subject of insecurity, Prof. Yusuf had said: “We strongly reject any plan by Nigeria’s Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, to wage war against Fulani bandits. He must understand that he is now a political office holder, not a battlefield soldier, and therefore has a duty to listen to the people. We do not support a full-scale military campaign against Fulani bandits. What we demand is dialogue and non-violent solutions, not endless warfare. Any insistence on military confrontation will ultimately fail. We have firsthand experience. We have entered forests where bandit leaders are located, engaged directly, and witnessed the devastation caused by military operations and vigilante groups (Yan Banga). In reality, these bandits see themselves as freedom fighters.”
It is true that sometimes dialogue resolves a number of sore issues in a society, but that would depend on what the causes of those sore issues are. There have been suggestions that socio-economic factors are to blame for banditry, amidst a number of other causes, including farmers-herdsmen clashes mostly instigated by shrinking grazing reserves. However, it is not clear what kind of dialogue Prof. Yusuf wants. Most Northwest states had at one time or the other entered into dialogue with the bandits, as a former Katsina State governor Aminu Masari once exasperatedly noted, but each time a truce was reached, and handsome money paid out, it was followed by only very brief spells of peace. After those spells, vicious campaigns of pillage and abductions often and constantly resumed, each campaign signposted by extreme cruelty disproportionate to the alleged cause of the disagreement between the bandits and locals.
The governors who dialogued with the bandits and later resigned to fate are themselves Fulani. So what kind of dialogue do Prof. Yusuf and Sheikh Gumi want? While the beginnings of banditry so-called might be reasonably attributed to farmers-herdsmen clashes, they have in recent years, especially in light of the rampant and lawless artisanal mining ravaging the Northwest and parts of North Central, morphed into very lucrative kidnapping business. In turn, the kidnapping business is morphing into jihadist fantasies as the Mamuda, Lakurawa, and Jama’a Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (Arabic for “Group for the Support of Islam and Muslims”), an expanding Salafi-jihadist organisation and al-Qaeda affiliate in the Sahel region of West Africa, take firm root in the Northwest. Some northern political leaders, particularly the progressive ones, are painfully aware of the dangers constituted by these groups, and the fact that banditry, not to talk of the short-sighted political rhetoric of some northern governors, opened the doors to the hyenas to ravage Nigeria.
What is raging in the North, which Nigeria as a country has taken an unduly long time to adequately respond to, is more than a civil war between the Hausa and Fulani, or between farmers and pastoralists. A more formidable but less obvious war is also raging below the surface between the reactionary and conservative political elite in the region versus the progressive and fairly liberal political and business elite of the North. The former are cocooned in religious conservatism which they see as the be-all and end-all of life, and the second are insistent that whatever ideologies are introduced into the system must birth progress and advance the cause of mankind in a world constantly evolving through scientific and technological wonders. The fierceness of the war is indicated more poignantly in the fears of the first group as they desperately seek to prevent the inevitability of the progress advocated by the second group. The Northeast has taken an awful long time to recognise the madness they once seemed generally enamoured of. On the other hand, the Northwest is tragically the new epicenter of a deathly fight likely to determine the future of Nigeria in more ways than the erratic and infantile self-determination struggles of IPOB’s Nnamdi Kanu or the complacent and rose-coloured liberal lenses through which the Southwest has chosen to view Nigeria.
Weeks after the United States president Donald Trump threatened to bomb terrorists and their sponsors in Nigeria and also warned against political and criminal justice part of sharia, a warning amplified by some Nigerians particularly from the Middle Belt, a group of Islamic clerics disseminated a video in which they scathingly condemned Nigerians who denounced sharia as both divisive and unconstitutional and also dared the US to do their worst. Watching the video, no one is left in doubt as to the fierceness of the conservatism Nigeria must contend with in order to make progress, or the depth of indoctrination and radicalisation that has infected the body politic. Mr Trump’s war of words, which is not limited to Nigeria or even Africa, but is directed indiscriminately, including at Europe, may grate on the nerves of Nigerians, but in no part of his declarations against Nigeria or his warmongering did he say he would bomb Muslims. But his threats have been appropriated by the clerics, and their ire directed at mostly Middle Belt Christians. The threats, expansively interpreted, have encouraged the divisive former Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai and many others to amplify religiously and politically divisive posts on social media.
Little introspection is going on over the Nigerian condition in many parts of the North as leaders and communities double down on their extreme positions. No lessons are learnt from the tragedy that took place on Australia’s Bondi beach where two radicalised persons, a father and his son, took up arms and enacted a slaughter directed against Jews. Indications are that they were influenced by the Israel-Gaza war, which in many circles has been equated with a war between Muslims and Jews instead of a war over land and living space. Even in Nigeria, and shockingly among the enlightened, any crisis or conflict between Palestinians and Israel is often seen as a war between Christians and Muslims. Such intensely binary view of conflict is also indicated in Nigeria where every disagreement balances on the fulcrum of ethnicity or religion, and seldom on issues, ideology, political platforms or even class division. This binary treatment of issues has permeated families, leading to the radicalisation of children and household members compelled to view life through the prism of religion or ethnicity. But it is not only political opportunists like Mallam el-Rufai, or former vice president Atiku Abubakar, or former governor Peter Obi all of whom recklessly appealed to ethnic and religious sentiments during the 2023 elections. Many other political leaders are guilty of the same sins. The radicalisation has now ended up producing millions of extremists, some of them operating from closets, and constituting existential danger to Nigeria’s fragile unity, stability and development.
Addressing the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) National Executive Committee meeting late last week in Abuja, President Tinubu underscored the fragility of Nigeria in his promise to go all-out against non-state actors and terrorists. The truth is that he has no choice, caught as he is between the US rock and Nigeria’s insecurity hard place. But almost immediately, revisionists like Prof. Yusuf decided to ethnicise the war against terror as if Fulani and Muslims were to be specially targeted, just as Mallam el-Rufai has painted a dismal but fallacious picture of Muslims being purged from office and power. Such incendiary and opaque views are believed to resonate in some parts of the North, especially among the gullible. However, Nigeria’s economic indicators show that if growth is not sustained at a high level, the country’s rising and unchecked population could trigger chaos or revolution. But how can growth be assured when insecurity gulps a significant proportion of national resources, not to talk of young men and women consumed by needless war in at least four regions of the country?
As the northern elite take their eyes off the ball in a wild goose chase for ethnic and religious advantage, they have virtually forgone billions of dollars in tourism revenue. (Kenya makes about $3.5bn annually). The North has multiple tourist destinations either in game reserves or other destinations: Yankari and Borgu game reserves, Mambilla Plateau, Gurara Waterfalls, Wikki Warm Springs, Kajuru Castle, and dozens more. No one visits those exotic and beautiful destinations anymore. Tribe and religion, and years of indulging northern youths and neglecting to curb their bloody tendencies when they were still amenable to control, continue to rob the region of huge earnings. The region’s dominant political and business elite concentrate on Abuja and political power, gorge on oil earnings, and by their incompetence and exploitative orientation impoverish their population. No elite and no generation have been so irresponsible. Worse, no remedies are being conceived or applied save in a few states led by modern and progressive governors who see no future in the bestial return to atavism overtaking the region.
The disintegration of Somalia, the ongoing civil war in Sudan, the irresolvable chaos of Libya, and the coup-ridden countries of West Africa offer no lessons. That was why Russian flags were hoisted in parts of the North during hardship protests in August 2024, and why some members of the elite sold the idea of a coup d’etat, a bait bought by some incurable optimists unable to appreciate that Nigeria had become too big, too exposed, and even too fractious to fall under the magic wand of military officers. The times have changed, ethnic and religious differences have ossified, and political divisions have become intractable. It is sheer fantasy to expect that a country of more than 230 million people can consequently be mesmerised by a few officers armed with guns, a coup speech, and promises of utopia which their military ancestors failed to midwife for the more than 28 years they seized power and wrecked the country. Reforms are being undertaken, even if imperfect, and democracy, though it continues to wobble, is taking roots. There is free speech, rule of law, freedom of conscience whether they are what they are cracked up to be or not. If the elite will not eschew the madness that is consuming them and find ways of minimising the differences that unsettle them, and if they continue to embrace and wink at the waspish rhetoric of yesterday’s men like Prof. Yusuf and Mallam el-Rufai, then they most brace for calamity, for it will come as surely as day follows night.
