Making sense of how bandits and kidnappers choose their targets is not complicated, if we assume that they are driven largely by economic motives.
They presumably go after the affluent and influential, those connected with wealth and power, in the sure knowledge that even if their victims are financially hamstrung, their kith and kin would quickly pay up whatever ransom is demanded.
So, this week the kidnapping plague sweeping through the country finally berthed – symbolically – in Daura, Katsina State, hometown of President Muhammadu Buhari.
The four gunmen who invaded the town had a special target: Musa Umar, district head of the town, who also happens to be father-in-law to Buhari’s aide-de-camp (ADC), Mohammed Abubakar.
The calculation would probably be that they would harvest a ton of cash given the Abuja connection.
Their action speaks volumes about where we are in terms of security. To target the family of a senior security aide to the president without fear of the immediate consequences, speaks to the contempt with which criminals hold the police and other state institutions. The fear factor keeps fading fast because the reign of impunity remains unchecked.
The abduction of the Daura district head is the latest such incident involving high profile figures in the North Central and Northwest zones of the country. Two weeks ago, Mahmood Abubakar, chairman of the Universal Basic Education (UBEC) was seized along with his daughter, Yasmin, by kidnappers operating along the Abuja-Kaduna highway. They were freed a day later, some say after the payment of ransom in millions of naira.
Before this incident, there was another that occurred along this same expressway. It happened at the same time that Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai was passing through. He made a very public show of stopping his convoy and marching into the bush with his security aides – ostensibly to pursue the kidnappers. Needless to say none of the criminals was apprehended, but there were photo-ops aplenty.
As fallout from this episode, men of the Federal Anti-Kidnapping Task Force made a much-publicised sortie along the highway. Again, yielding lots of Facebook posts but very little in terms of kidnappers taken out of business.
After a series of such operations, Acting Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu, emerged from a security briefing with President Buhari, to declare the infamous Abuja-Kaduna highway free of kidnappers. They must have laughed loudly in their hideouts.
Less than two weeks after the IG’s all-clear, they pinched the UBEC chairman and his daughter.
Northern Nigeria is in deep trouble. In Zamfara, bandits and freelance gunmen with unknown agenda are killing and maiming unrestrained. In spite of bombings and other security interventions, sudden and brutal death has become the reality that unarmed local communities have to deal with for the foreseeable future.
As has been broached earlier, large areas in the axis around the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Kaduna State and parts of the Middle-Belt have become kidnapper country. Everyone is a potential target as long as you are in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In Kaduna, reprisal killings between communities do not look like they would go away soon because each vicious episode, provides the rationale for victim communities to hit back in kind. The government, which only becomes aware after the atrocities have been perpetrated, is reduced to mouthing platitudes.
In other parts of the North Central zone, the gory harvest of deaths associated with herdsmen has largely exited newspaper front pages, but they haven’t been totally terminated. From time to time, fresh reports of mindless killings still pop up.
As for the Northeast, the Federal Government’s declaration of a technical knockout of Boko Haram insurgents operating in the region, now seems like a celebration called prematurely. Suicide bombers wreak havoc from time to time, while outlying settlements are remain vulnerable to attacks – such as the one that claimed over 20 lives recently in Adamawa.
The Islamists may be in retreat but they are far from defeated – especially with the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) breathing life into their operations.
Even more alarming than the fact that the entire region is increasing looking like untamed frontier territory where gunmen reign supreme, is the reality that nothing the government has thrown at the problem seems to be a long-lasting solution.
For a brief period, the bombing of the bandits in Zamfara looked like a magic wand that would wipe out the problem. It has since turned out to be a mere salve than didn’t address the issue at its core.
Similarly, whatever magic cure the Acting IG was touting a few weeks back over the rash of kidnappings along the Abuja-Kaduna highway, now looks like something with all the efficacy of a fake drug.
In the Northeast, the war against the insurgency brings good news one day and embarrassing setbacks another.
It is a dilemma that demands more than the government is offering – be it community policing or whatever. Beyond urging security agencies to “deal ruthlessly” with bandits, Buhari and his men have to come up with more creative and all-encompassing solutions – especially those that are not politically correct. Nothing should be off the table – whether it is state police or the hard-to-define concept of restructuring.
Security interventions may be useful in the short term, but they are not enduring answers. For one thing we don’t have enough soldiers and policemen to cover the vast territory that is Northern Nigeria. Isolated communities can never be covered for 24 hours and would always be at the mercy of the killers. What we need are solutions that provide vocational alternatives for the perpetrators of violence.
At the root of the troubles is a mixture of economic and religious causes. Banditry and kidnapping are enterprises that generate revenues through cattle rustling and ransom payment. The bandits in Zamfara have also been linked to illegal mining activities.
Our reality is that there is greater illiteracy and unemployment across the north compared to the rest of the country. For as long as the leaders of the region don’t develop their local economies, but remain hooked to the dwindling allocations from the federal purse, the situation can only get worse.
Unfortunately, a succession of northern governors and political leaders haven’t shown that they understand the gravity of the problem or the urgent actions needed to address their situation. It is a shame that a region that has produced the largest number of our Heads of State never thought it expedient to let their charity begin from home. Now the region is reaping grievous consequences of failure of leadership.
This crisis has taken five decades to come to a head and it will take more than bombings and posting of police commissioners to address.
The time has come for leaders of the North to develop a blueprint for economic restoration of the entire region so it can close the gap with the rest of the country. It should be a document that all will agree to implement on a cross-party basis. Today’s crisis transcends mundane partisan affiliations.
Amaechi, Rivers and South-South APC
Strange things are happening in Rivers State. After the political conflicts of the last general elections and, indeed, of the last five years, I was astonished to hear Governor Nyesom Wike, following his victory at the polls, call on his bitter foes on the All Progressives Congress (APC) side, for cooperation and reconciliation.
My initial reaction was that the comments were tongue-in-check. But at Easter, Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, again, struck the same reconciliatory tone – asking the people for forgiveness and unity, declaring that the state was far from where they envisaged it would be at this point.
Anyone who has followed the harsh rhetoric that has trailed the power struggle by both sides, would therefore have taken notice when Amaechi’s allies in the APC for whom Senator Andrew Uchendu spoke recently, accepted Wike’s olive branch.
The results of the governorship election in which APC never got to participate were never in doubt given the advantages of incumbency which Wike enjoyed. The closest he had to a challenger was the AAC’s Biokpomabo Awara’s feeble effort.
Now that the battle has been won and lost, what should a strategic politician do? Continue to moan over spilt milk or begin to plan ahead for the next contest?
The good thing is that there would be no incumbent on the ticket in four years – meaning the playing field would be more level. Lowering the political temperature gives the minister the opportunity of resolving the internal conflicts that ended up denying the party a chance to challenge Wike effectively.
Such was the bitterness of the legal battles fought by Senator Magnus Abe – who like Wike was one of Amaechi’s closest allies having served as Secretary to the State Government under him – that reconciliation may seem like a farfetched dream at this point.
Still, if Amaechi and Wike can be singing the same hymns of reconciliation, nothing makes it impossible for him and Abe to kiss and make up. That is why politics is referred to as the art of the possible.
A change of strategy is imperative as the parties begin to look forward to 2023. In this wise, APC’s relative weakness in the south is something the party needs to address because PDP may have lost the presidency, but emerged with better national spread – having governors in every zone.
In the south APC is strongest in the Southwest and weakest in the Southeast where it once again received an electoral rebuff.
The South-South zone therefore offers the party the best option for shoring up its presence down south. Aside Edo where it has a governor and produced the APC’s national chairman, much hope was invested in the party riding on the supposed political strengths of former Akwa Ibom Governor, Godswill Akpabio, to penetrate the state. That turned out to be a forlorn hope.
Which brings us back to Rivers, aside Edo and Akwa Ibom, as the party’s best hope of enhancing its national spread and shoring up its position in the South-South zone. There is no denying that APC retains substantial support in the state despite not being on the 2019 ballot.
If it had had candidates, even if Wike had prevailed in the gubernatorial contest the parties would have shared the state assembly, House and senate seats. The challenge for Amaechi as the party’s leader is to build again on that latent support base by dealing with all the recent fractures.
His job should be made easier by the fact that whatever losses have been suffered on the home front, have been ameliorated by the success of the presidential campaign which he headed. That virtually guarantees that he would be one of the returnees in Buhari next cabinet. A role in Abuja gives him the continued relevance necessary for this sort of effort.