IT is now clear that the Nigerian Army has never really perceived and wished to treat the killings in several parts of the country by Fulani militia groups as anything serious. The latest confirmation of this attitude to the crisis is the army’s so-called investigation conducted into the allegation of military collusion in the crises made by General T.Y Danjuma (retired). The respected ex-chief of army staff had said during the convocation ceremony of Taraba State University, Jalingo that the army had not only proved incapable of stopping the killings but was openly colluding with the killer herdsmen to hurt innocent people.
The statement was a huge indictment on the army’s reputation. General Tukur Buratai, chief of army staff, admitted that much and that was why Nigerians were happy when he announced soon after that the army would investigate the allegation. At that time, nobody suspected that his motive was to throw rubbish at the door-steps of the Taraba State governor, Arc. Darius Dickson Ishaku. Now the army has proved to the public how good it could be in making a monumental joke out of a matter of life and death.
The report which the army gleefully celebrated was a one-sided blame document intended to get the public to accept that its men deployed to stop the killings by armed Fulani herdsmen in Taraba and all the other states in the axis of their bloody aggression did a perfect job. Rather, the report only singled out the Governor of Taraba State for blame. And his offence, according to the report of the panel, was that he did not cooperate with the soldiers. Whatever that means!
It was obvious from the outset that army never really intended to do any serious probing of the allegations against its men. Otherwise, Buratai should have disqualified himself from being the one to set up the investigation team. The reason is that it is impossible for the panel he personally constituted to indict the army which he presently heads except, of course, if members of the panel are saints. And, we all know that none of them is a saint. An indictment of Buratai’s soldiers is also indirectly an indictment of the chief of army staff.
A combination of the facts that Buratai set up the probe panel, selected its members, decided its terms of reference, received and reviewed the report before finally making a pronouncement on its findings justify the groundswell of public apprehension about the entire exercise. In fact, the general feeling is that it a failed mission. But was this poor handling an oversight on the part of the army or its chief of staff? No! It was rather a deliberate act of hoodwinking the public to accept the undeserved verdict of “not guilty” of the collusion charge.
If the army wants the public to believe that it did a good job in preventing the killings, let it roll out the statistics of arrests of the killer herdsmen it made in those killings fields of Benue, Taraba, Kaduna, Adamawa, Plateau and Kogi states or during its so-called Operation Ayem Akpatuma in Benue and Taraba. In a country where over 14,000 lives have been lost to killings in the first four months of 2018, the most provocative thing to do is for the army which was trusted with the responsibility of halting those killings to set up a panel to, by some kind of “arrangee” understanding, absolve the army of any blame whatsoever. In case the army does not know, nobody is deceived by this so verdict of “not guilty” which the report has delivered in its favour. The Nigerian public is more knowledgeable and wiser than the army probably knows.
The lapses in the report of the panel are numerous. Why, for example, did it fail to acknowledge the series of letters that Governor Ishaku wrote to President Muhammadu Buhari, to the Chief of Army Staff, the Minister of Defence, the Inspector-General of Police and Director-General of the DSS on the security situation in Taraba State, all of which were ignored? And the governor is the chief security officer of the state. Does this portray the army and other security agencies as sincere in their halting the killings which the letters were drawing attention to?
The more bewildering aspect of the report is the commendation of the Commanding Officer of the army battalion in Takum from whose custody about 150 cows ‘mysteriously’ disappeared during the crisis. The cows belonging to the retreating herdsmen who had attacked and killed innocent people in Takum were taken to his custody by the government. He was to use them as bait to arrest their killer owners. The cows were given back to their owners without anyone of their owners being arrested and questioned on their roles in the killings. But Buratai’s panel saw nothing wrong in this but rather commended the commanding officer for doing “a very professional job.” This is how serious Buratai wants his investigation panel and its verdict to be taken.
If the intention was not to deceive the public, a much more serious and dispassionate approach ought to have been adopted in the investigation of Danjuma’s allegations against the army. The involvement of the military in the investigation should have been very minimal. It should have been headed by a judicial officer either serving or retired. The members should not have been appointees of the army chief of staff and the report should have been reviewed by an independent body for it to earn some credibility. In this case, the report was not only submitted to him, he personally decided what the public should know about the panel’s report. There was no involvement of an independent body in the assessment of the panel’s findings. This was a curious omission and it chopped off a huge amount of credibility from the exercise. That’s where Buratai went goofed.
That is also the reason I support Taraba State government’s condemnation and dismissal the report as biased and unfair. The report falls below acceptable standards of credibility and believability. The exercise must be repeated. This time round, the right things should be done. The army should not constitute the panel. The new panel should be made up of all the critical stakeholders – the security agencies, human rights activists and representatives of the states being targeted by the herdsmen. The panel should conduct public hearings and nobody who has evidence to offer should be denied the opportunity to do so.
What the military panel did before is a caricature of how matters like this are handled in civilised societies. Buratai got it wrong by assuming that whatever verdict his panel returned would be acceptable to the public. This one has been rejected. And it stands rejected in and outside the shores of this country.