By Jide Oluwajuyitan
I sympathise with Lt. Gen Tukur Buratai, our Chief of Army Staff, who has come under severe criticism for advocating spiritual warfare to counter the evil doctrines of Boko Haram insurgents as a prelude to resolving our crisis of nation-building at a recent seminar titled “Counter insurgency and violent extremism in Nigeria through spiritual warfare”. It is perhaps lost on Buratai’s attackers that we are a praying nation of miracle seekers led at different periods by elders statesmen like General Yakubu Gowon of “Nigeria Pray” fame, General Obasanjo who publicly declared his policy thrust and its implementation would be determined not by voice of expert advisers but that of God, and in recent times by Goodluck Jonathan who hopped from church to mosque in Nigeria and synagogues in Jerusalem with thieving government officials in need of redemption and, currently, by the duo of President Buhari who tries to remain faithful to his five times daily prayers as prescribed by the Holy Quran and his deputy, Osinbajo who hardly misses any of his important weekly programmes such as “Power must change hand and Holy Ghost night” holding at his Lagos-Ibadan express road Redeemed Church headquarters. He not too long ago publicly attributed his miraculous escape from a helicopter crash in Kogi State to the prayers of his spiritual father, Pastor Adeboye. They also seem to have ignored the fact that we are a nation of prayers warriors and miracle seekers with the biggest Roman Catholic Seminary in the world located in Imo State and the largest Pentecostal church in the world located in Canaan land in Ota Ogun state.
Of course, Buratai’s call for prayers cannot be regarded as a sign of weakness. He has in the last five years fought an heroic war driving out Boko Haram insurgents from about two dozen LGAs they carved out of Nigerian territory as their caliphate, stopped their incursions to Abuja, Kogi and other parts of the Northeast before declaring Boko Haram insurgents ‘technically defeated’ and their ability to visit terror on Nigerians ‘greatly degraded’.
When Nnamdi Kanu left his London comfort home to hold governors and youths of Southeast hostage, Buratai was on hand to launch ‘Operation Python dance’ that drove him out of town and out of Nigeria. He was also on hand when the Nigerian Police insisted the invading herdsmen who killed, maimed and seized conquered middle-Belt farmlands after chasing their surviving victims to IDP camps were ghosts. And when in recent times, Yoruba and Igbo criminal elements in the name of Fulani herdsmen without cows embarked on mindless killings and kidnapping in the mangrove forests of the Southwest, it was Buratai we turned to.
Buratai has no doubt given his best to the nation. But for President Buhari who doesn’t seem to understand that government is a science, he along with his tired and drained colleagues with very little left to contribute after attaining retirement age should be having their well-deserved rest.
If Buratai who had first-hand experience of the forces behind our crisis of nation building at a period the police claimed albeit falsely that those killing Nigerian were ghosts, a fraudulent claim Nigerians were almost believing until some powerful emirs and the Minister of Defence held brief for the killers, mooted the idea of spiritual warfare, the events of the last three weeks must have vindicated his stand that a nation that has chosen to live in denial needs other approaches beyond deployment of Ak-47 rifles and fighters jets .
Let us start with the tragedy of Zamfara State. It will be recalled that the killing of 203 people and kidnapping of 685 persons in the first quarter of 2016 in Zamfara led to the launching of Operation Sharan Daji (Sweep the Forest), Operation Harbin Kunama (Scorpion Sting) and Operation Diran Mikiya (Eagle Fighting), and the stationing of a full battalion of Special Forces in Zamfara State by Defence Minister Brig-Gen. Mansur Dan Ali (rtd) who is an indigene of the state. This was followed by the launching of ”Operation Maximum Safety” with 510 police personnel and 40 patrol vehicles”. Added to this was a “Joint Intervention Team of about 1000 police personnel comprised of seven mobile police force units headed by an Assistant Commissioner of Police, counter terrorism unit (CTU), federal special anti-robbery squad (FSARS), anti-bomb (EOD) squad, and conventional policemen”. Their mandate: “rout-out, arrest and prosecute armed bandits, vicious kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustling gangs operating in some parts of the state.
In 2018, a DIG was deployed there with three surveillance patrol helicopters and crew members to coordinate the operation to completely rout-out all armed bandits from Zamfara and other contiguous states”. That was not all; there was also the employment of 1,700 charmers to join the civilian joint task force to tackle bandits, kidnappers for ransom and cattle rustlers. Finally, after all the show of power, a deal was signed with Zamfara bandits.
Even without any evidence all these formations have ceased to operate in Zamfara, the unexpected and the in-explicable happened in Zamfara last week. Three local government areas including Mayanchi and Maru were sacked by 300 AK- 47 wielding bandits riding 150 motorcycles after an encounter that led to the death of seven soldiers.” They, according to Yusuf, The Nation’s insightful reporter, operated from Thursday night to Friday morning, before moving to Mayanchi petrol station where they re-fuelled their 150 motorcycles, stole N300, 000 sales proceeds from the fuel attendants and impounded a truck with which cattle seized from herdsmen were ferried together with looted foodstuffs and 300 cows into their Birnin Gwari base. Unarguably, Zamfara’s ongoing struggle is beyond banditry.
The second event is the attempt by some powerful Fulani politicians led by Bala Mohammed, governor of Bauchi State to confer citizenship on stateless Fulani immigrants first through RUGA and now through National Livestock Transformation Plan (NLTP) which Malam Garba Shehu, President Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant (SSA) on Media said are the same, minus Vice President Osinbajo’s semantics. Governor Bala Mohammed speaking on a Channel Television programme last week did not see any reason why immigrant herdsmen accused of mindless killings of Nigerians by Nigeria-based herdsmen that had lived for decades with their fellow Nigerians should not be allowed to benefit from NLTP programme funded by Nigeria’s taxpayers. According to him “The Fulani man is a global African person. He moves from Gambia to Senegal and his nationality is Fulani; and so we cannot just close our border and say the Fulani man is not a Nigerian”. This perhaps explains why Southern and Middle Belt Forum (SMBLF) out rightly rejected the policy dismissing it as ‘divisive and smack of domination and conquest of sections of the country by a section.
Last week’s Zamfara tragedy that went on for about 13 hours without interruption from the police and other security formations in Zamfara took the same pattern with mindless killings and seizure of territories in the Middle Belt without anyone, including those found in seized territories, questioned or arrested; abduction and ferrying of over 200 Nigerian Chibok school girls with buses for over three hours inside Nigerian territory to insurgents hideout in Sambisa forest and Buni Yadi’ selective killings of students of a technical school that went on for a whole night without help from the police and the army.
The cheapest route to resolution of our crisis of nation building is restructuring, devolution of powers, resource control and community policing. Unfortunately we have continued to live in denial deluding ourselves that what is needed to resolve our crisis of nationality is spiritual intervention.
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