By Sam Omatseye
We might not admit it in public, our government has reached its wit’s end in contending with both bandits and Boko Haram. This much is known from Mallam El Rufai’s rhetoric on the Forestry students. With his impotence, they were abducted. In his impotence, they stepped into freedom.
He fantatised a commando-style raid. It did not happen. It could not happen because, unlike us who have babyish intelligence networks, the bandits knew and strode out of sight. The Kaduna State Governor’s fantasy fell flat. Then he had the effrontery to tell us the story as though we should clap and caper over his imaginative failure. Generals don’t applaud strategies. They sip wines over conquests. Strategy ended Hitler’s bodies in ashes. Mussolini, known as the Sawdust Caesar because of his oversized ego, was burned in effigy. Ojukwu fled to Ivory Coast. Gadhafi expired in the hands of street thugs.
In the fever of El Rufai’s imagination, the air force would launch, wipe out the goons, save some of the students, and declare victory. He had wet dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger. He expected blood trails, corpses of some students with hurrah in the streets. He advertised his mournful fantasy and expected our praise? His dwarfish thinking blinded him to the meaning of victory. Parents would be in sack cloths, tongues limp from wailing, faces in runnels of tears. Even if the goons died, it would be what historians call a pyrrhic victory.
Even if they had a plan, good leaders keep mum. Such revelations don’t see the light until the end of the war, in the height of hostilities. Now, they know what government plans. The strategic cat is out of the bag. It shows he lacks as a leader the mental acuity for a people in crisis. El Rufai is too glib to lead.
We also saw that in negotiating the Faka students’ release, the family of the bandits were involved. One of them whose name is coincidentally Buhari was also coincidentally Known as General. His father had a role in the bargains. The story shows, one, that it is not just foreigners who torment us. They are part of us. As French philosopher Montesquieu noted, societies don’t fall from outside forces until forces within have already fallen. Bandits cannot abide in our forests with such prosperity and defiance without roots here. Two, if they have roots here, why are we finding it difficult to root them out and rout them? It shows we are not serious about peace in the land. It is, as it were, in the family. It is like we love our family too much to rebuke the bad boys. So the ferment of evil eats us alive while we look.
Three, it shows that we cannot fight the war on bandits with our army, intelligence networks, or air force. We might buy the best weapons, but we shall fail. Superior arms have never guaranteed victory anywhere in history. It only complements other factors, including intelligence and motivation. These two factors are lacking and they cripple any fire power. We are fighting bandits without bandwidths. Our telecom forces are not catching their phone calls or not understanding them.
Hence, we must go beyond our armed forces. The appeal to American forces will not do it either. When Americans fought ISIL in the Middle East, they employed what they call in their fancy and euphemistic language, “Private Military contractors.” The world calls them mercenaries. No one deploys that language because they have been declared illegal by the United Nations since 1989. So if the problem is that they are called mercenaries, countries like the United States who are signatories, decided to conjure a different language. All over the world, they come in handy. They are deploying the Illegal for the service of peace. Some of the best fighters as mercenaries are American veterans, including the dreaded Navy Seals, who still want to fight out of boredom and more pay. Two of the major such mercenary groups are the Wagner Group and Blackwater.
We cannot pretend we don’t know these fighters. There is nowhere in the world where there are conflicts, especially high intensity ones, where mercenaries are not at work. They are crack squads, if some of their personnel are crackpots. The Jonathan administration hired them against Boko Haram, and according to documented reports, they achieved in a few weeks, what the Nigerian army could not in six years. That fruit was exploited by the Lai Mohammed in the early days of Buhari’s administration when he boasted that Boko Haram’s end was in the horizon. Jonathan built, Buhari inherited. But he could not maintain the house. They did not pay the mercenaries to continue. They packed their loads, including their Mi-24 Hind helicopter gunships, and left. Their exit was a shot in the arm for Boko haram, hence their current swagger.
The reason is the hubris of our army and government. We cannot hope on an army that has failed his people. The Americans, with the best the world has ever known, uses them. Irbil, the capital of Kurdistan, is the chief marketplace of mercenaries today. Veterans of drug wars in Chile, Panama, Colombia, El Salvador, have been enlisted in their fiery market. In Africa, Sudan, Chad and Eritrea have harvested them for conflicts around the world. Even Ukraine and Russia, who are staring each other down like two cocks, have them in their armoury.
It is because the Nigerian army has failed that it cannot give up. That is the tragic irony. But we cannot stop these goons in the bushes until we get the mercenaries. They know no fear. They want to be paid. They care not for the herdsman or the gang of kidnappers. They will go from forest to forest like bush fire, and raze the bandits to ashes. They will save us time and money. New reports show we have spent N10 trillion in six years on security, and we are here walking our streets with our hearts pounding like a goat’s in a lion’s grip.
Reports say we have spent too much money and some in the political and military top brass want it so because security is profitable. It means the death of our fellow citizens is profitable. Lack of development is profitable. National fear and trembling is profitable.
Standing armies are not always the cure for fear. From the ancient times, mercenaries have been a forte of fights. In the Bible days, they were handy. Pompey and Caesar used them. Xenophon employed Greek mercenaries. Carthage deployed them for the Punic Wars. Hannibal’s army was typical as they mounted elephants. Alexander the Great could not write his exploits without them. Popes used and applauded them during the Crusades. Author Thomas More hired them to protect his Utopian state in his satire, Utopia. Colonial armies used them to take our people as slaves and conquer us into colonies. They also formed the West African Frontier Force in British West Africa and Senegalese Sharp Shooters for the French.
It is not a moral army. They have no ideologies or faith. In fact, Machiavelli described them in The Prince, as “gallant among friends, vile among enemies, no fear of God, no faith with men.” Frederick Forsyth wrote that Adekunle recruited some never-do-wells, including prison inmates, to form the Third Marine Commando, the fiercest force in the Civil War, where Alabi Isama was chief of staff. Their only loyalty is to get the job done. In my television show on TVC, Alabi Isama said, soldiers are not asked to do their best but to get the job done.
Our task is to flush out the felons. Let us get those who can do it for us. To hire the mercenaries is the beginning of wisdom, the urgency of freedom.
