Category: Sunday

Niger State’s governor Muhammed Bago can be excused for reposing confidence in the option of negotiating with bandits. He was only recently sworn in as governor, and is just about three months in office. In those three months, he has met President Bola Tinubu a few times to discuss the subject of insecurity provoked by bandits and terrorists in his state. He had a highly publicised meeting with the president in June, and another one a little over a week ago. On the June occasion, he offered a brilliant analysis, by no means original of course, of the factors driving banditry and terrorism in Niger State. He was keenly aware of the rampage of the bandits, and he appeared to be clear on why they had become a terrible nuisance. But, his August meeting revealed an increasingly skeptical and disillusioned governor unsure how else to fight bandits who have become very active in five of the state’s 25 local governments.

After Mr Bago’s meeting with the president days ago, he told newsmen his government was toying with the idea of negotiating with the bandits and terrorists laying the state waste. Should negotiations fail, he said ruefully, he would encourage the military to use maximum force. Firstly, it is unlikely the military is not already deploying maximum force in fighting both banditry and Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency. In Niger State, where the military recently lost some 36 soldiers, deadly force is already in use. So, scaling up the use of force is not an option the military is just contemplating. Secondly, Mr Bago, perhaps inspired by the Niger Republic conundrum and the argument over which comes first, diplomacy or deployment of force by ECOWAS, has spoken gravely but no less desperately about the utility of negotiating with bandits and terrorists. He obviously holds out some hope that some accommodation can still be reached with the militants.

With five local governments under the sway of banditry, and many more highways turned into gauntlets between which Nigerlites and other travellers must run regularly, a clearly exasperated Mr Bago can be forgiven for turning desperate. Worse, the security agents who have had more than a decade to rein in the bandits and stanch the flow of blood have struggled to counter the massacres and bloodletting. Farmers are left defenceless, and travellers are routinely abducted for ransom. The governor is afraid that the crisis could gradually escalate into unmanageable proportions, and he is anxious to remove every impediment to farming in this season. This may explain his desperation for dialogue.  But what would he tell the bandits, and what could he possibly offer bandits in exchange for years of living in splendour on the sweat of farmers and levies from gold and lithium mines? The governor deserves sympathy, regardless of the futility of his peace offerings. He feels the pains of his bedraggled compatriots, and he fears the creeping anomie that is beginning to overtake parts of his state, wondering when and how the horror would end.

But Mr Bago’s peace proposition is hardly original. If he does not think that his state could possibly match what the bandits get from crime, the failure of other states’ previous peace deals with bandits should alert him to the utter hopelessness of dialogue with hardened and intransigent terrorists. If what is happening in Niger State has anything to do with a clash of ideologies, dialogue could be an option. But it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, negotiating with bandits who profit from illegal mining and farming levies. Many years of ineffective counterterrorism and anti-banditry operations have only hardened the militants and made the crisis intractable. Mercifully for him, there is no shortage of dissertations on the banditry and terrorism crisis coursing through the Northwest. The problem is determining and executing the right and effective remedies. As the country is torn between options, bandits seized the opportunity to become better organised, their instruments of coercion expertly oiled, and their tentacles spread beyond the forests to lure highly placed individuals in the society. In short by their lethargy and sometimes complicity, Nigerian officials have allowed the disease to metastasise.

In June, Mr Bago’s analysis was impeccable. He had said: “We are endowed as a state with a lot of mineral deposits…Most of the places where you see this banditry are places where you have lithium or gold. So, a lot of these activities are associated with why banditry is springing up. However, yes, we will harness our mineral potential; we don’t intend to come to Abuja every month to collect FAAC or JAC or whatever you call it. As a state, we have to put all things in order so that we can harness these potentials. Now, the state also has an SPV. The state mining corporation, where we’re hoping to have an MOU or synergy with other mining companies so that we can harness that potential and I assure you that in the next one year, we will come out tops…”

But days ago, after feeling the heat of the bloodletting in his state, and forgetting that Zamfara and Katsina States had also once negotiated with bandits and still came to grief, Mr Bago had begun to moderate his enthusiasm for a decisive victory against the militants. “We are looking at two options: firstly, non-kinetic; as a government, we have put in machinery to start talking to the bandits,” the governor said resignedly. “We have also created a ministry for nomadic and pastoral affairs to look at the issues of Fulani herdsmen. You also need to understand that Niger State has the largest congregation of Fulani. Niger State is 8.3 million hectares of land with bodies of water, and the environment is very good for grazing. A lot of Fulani across the world, not just Africa, converge in Niger State, so we don’t want them to leave, we don’t want any major military activities, we want to talk to them. But if we don’t get to that level of dialogue, then probably, we have to go fully military.”

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It is a dangerous fallacy for the governor to see his state as a refuge for the global Fulani. Nothing suggests that Fulani people everywhere should see Niger State, or indeed Nigeria, as their patrimony. This strange and impractical idea is not only disruptive, as the governor and Nigerlites have now seen, it also complicates law enforcement and exacerbates national security crisis. It is not clear by what immigration or even economic laws the governor hopes to keep the global Fulani in the state. With such massive disruptions and killings as perpetrated in his state over mines and farms, it is shocking that Mr Bago still feels more primarily protective of the undocumented Fulani than the oath of office he took. Clearly, this confusion about who a Nigerian national is may also partly explain the hesitations and confusion in checkmating banditry and terrorism during the Buhari years. Niger State, and any other Northwest state for that matter, can of course welcome the Fulani from anywhere, but it must be in line with the law. Nigerian borders are well defined, and immigration laws do not leave any lacuna for foreigners to exploit for devious and violent purposes. If Mr Bago and others are conflicted about their identities and Nigeria’s immigration laws, it is the duty of the federal government to educate them. And if any foreigner should shed blood on Nigerian soil, regardless of his cultural affinity with a part of Nigeria, it is the duty of the security agencies to deal firmly and unequivocally with such crimes, not negotiate.

Mr Bago’s views on the internecine war in his state are revelatory. Perhaps some north-western governors think like him, torn between their filial loyalty to the global Fulani and their constitutional duty to their states. One of the implications of such confliction is the unacceptably high cost in money, materials and men dedicated to combating banditry. The previous administration may have unwisely allowed the crisis to fester; the current administration must not be immobilised by sentiments and indecision. Nigerian leaders took an oath to preserve and defend the constitution; they must be clear what that duty means. They have the opportunity of scores of studies explicating the crisis; they should also take advantage of those analyses to decide once and for all how to fight the menace that has kept the entire nation prostrate and debt-ridden. A few more years of the dithering that characterised the previous administration in the fight against banditry in the Northwest, not to say the terrible price young military personnel are paying for a needless and soulless conflict, could very well strengthen the militants and tip the country into the abyss. Suggesting dialogue with bandits is nothing but weakness, for the crisis at bottom is neither ideological nor a case of two people fighting. It is essentially a case of a group of people levying war against the state and revelling in it.

The excitement and funfair that accompanied the inauguration of the ministerial council last Monday will be talked about for months to come. But far beyond the sights and sounds of the inauguration is the delicate matter of what seem like campaign promises which ministers are mouthing as they assume office. Perhaps, having lost out in the giddy delight of promising heaven and earth in the campaigns, the ministers are merely playing catch-up. Left, right, and centre, they are promising everything. If they are not restrained, they will soon promise Nigerians Mars and Pluto.

Irrepressible as ever, Federal Capital City (FCT) minister, Nyesom Wike, has promised to deliver on the Abuja metro in eight months. Before now, the intra-city train service had almost become moribund, indeed stillborn, partly on account of how it was structured and the routes it was designed to service, routes which are a little removed from the city centre and densely populated areas. But Mr Wike, whose government in Rivers years ago was characterised by boisterousness and breathless infrastructural development, sees the Abuja metro as Lilliput, and himself as Gulliver. Like Hannibal, he will scale those ragged, icy Alps and take the battle to the snobbish, gluttonous Romans in the Abuja city centre. Eight months, he swore; eight months it must be.

Nearly all the ministers are promising things, and it would be unkind to conclude that Mr Wike has promised the most in a ministerial council whose members seem eager to outdo one another with promises. In fact, compared to him, the vivacious and passionate Betta Edu, Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation minister, has scaled the Himalayas with her own manifesto. She promises that her ministry will create 10 million jobs. No, don’t faint. Ten million jobs? Why, it’s her version of the Punic Wars. Sword in hand, shield by her side, and breastplate covering her vitals, she is determined to storm Carthage, destroy joblessness, and enslave that vicious enemy for all time. Ten million jobs, heh. Well, then, let Nigerians banish cynicism. She has promised; she must deliver.

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Poets are not fond of mathematics, regardless of what WAEC and JAMB indicate as entry qualifications into tertiary institutions. But Art, Culture, and the Creative Economy minister, the poet Hanatu Musawa, spoke in the idiosyncratic arcanum poets love to use to assail the public. She will ‘generate unprecedented revenue’, she said candidly, without pausing to find out whether she left her audience flummoxed. What does ‘unprecedented revenue’ mean beyond the tacitness of the phrase? Don’t fuss, dear reader. After all, in the world of applied poetry, they call her quaint usage poetic inexactitude, or perhaps latitude. You would not respect their craft should they deign to use plain, easy-to-understand language.

And of all the promises members of the Tinubu cabinet made, that of the Defence minister, Abubakar Badaru, easily takes the biscuit. It took the Goodluck Jonathan and Muhammadu Buhari administrations about 13 years to ‘technically degrade’ Boko Haram insurgency, while leaving banditry nearly unscathed. But Mr Badaru, the generalissimo from Jigawa State, promises that banishing insecurity and containing banditry and insurgency will be done in a year, insisting that failure is not an option. “We hardly fail, and we will not fail,” he intoned. Very well, then. The clock is ticking. It’ll be a year soon, anyway. And the country can’t wait to see just what kind of guided thermobaric bombs his troops will use to bust the bandits’ bunkers and ferret them out of their lairs.

There are of course more promises from where those few mentioned above came from. Ministers who have not made a grand promise will soon do so; and those who have made feeble promises but now fear being outdone, will retrieve their previous promises and put some catalyst in them. President Tinubu should resist the temptation of thinking his own promises, gargantuan enough on their own merit, were comparatively puny. He will have a hard time meeting the promises he made during the campaigns; his glib and fecund ministers will have an even harder time, having set the bar in the stratosphere.

The African Union (AU) has taken a slightly different approach from the rest of the world to the July 26 Niger Republic coup d’etat. It welcomed and advised that existing sanctions be maintained and tightened, even adding one or two more of its own. While it refuses to be gung ho about the ECOWAS plan of military intervention, the resolution of the African Union Peace and Security Council (AUPSC), directing the Niger Republic “military personnel to immediately and unconditionally return to their barracks and restore constitutional authority, within a maximum period of fifteen (15) days from the date of the adoption of the present Communiqué,” clearly saves the blushes of ECOWAS.

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In retrospect, the West African regional body should have coordinated its response to the coup with the AU. It will be hopeless for Niger Republic to defy the whole of Africa. And depending on how the Niger Republic issue is resolved, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea will take a cue and moderate their defiance. But, despite all this, what are conservative AU and ECOWAS saying and thinking about the neocolonial overreach of France and other metropoles in the affairs of Francophone countries. The West African coupists disingenuously latched on to the subject, for they feel it more than any other country; it should not be ignored.