It is also a story of economic hierarchy. The herders are not the owners of the cattle. Some of them are owned by shadowy big men, who encourage them to bring home the profits. So those who argue against the herdsmen also are pitching battles by proxy against the Fulani hegemon. It makes the matter even more complicated.
The question of banditry has become another hobgoblin. Is the herdsman a bandit, or it is just the bandit masquerading as herdsman. If the herdsman was so busy trying to sell its cows, what time will they have to sell their cows if they lay ambush everyday on highways? According to some analysts, the herdsmen exist who have always been with us. These men still occupy the farms and wreak havoc. They still want grazing fields for their animals. Yet, when we see them, we only see sticks. They don’t read. They don’t follow the fire and outrage of contemporary angst and debate. They just go about their businesses.
But some say there are bad herdsmen, but most of the havoc we see come from bandits who have lost their way in the world. So, they live and die by killing and dispossessing the victims. According to recent reports of captured marauders, some of them are trained outside the country. They steal into the country through the borders. Yet, the reports show that they would not know their way around the country if they did not make companionship with locals. That is why the economic blends with the cultural. The Zamfara case tells us that it is essentially an economic matter.
Zamfara State would, in a properly governed environment, be a near Eldorado with networks of highways, high-rises, shopping malls, a buzzing airport, the panoply of spinoff commerce, burgeoning cultural exports, et al. But it’s the hallowed ground of bandits and crude adventurers. It is the economic equivalent of a hoodlum’s paradise.
Tied to this is the perception of the bandit crisis as class warfare. Take, for instance, the rage of elite kidnappings, especially in the north. The Abuja-Kaduna highway is now a thoroughfare of woe for even the Fulani elite. Those who say the bandit crisis is Fulanisation and Islamisation should answer why a governor, a minister, a permanent secretary, a money bag of the Fulani extraction would not travel that road with all the array of cars and security men. Rather they would huddle with others in the rowdy comfort of a train. The story is told of an imam who gave a pep talk in Abuja and told his audience that the Abuja-Kaduna expressway was safe. After his glowing delivery, it was time to return home to Kaduna. He did not hit the express. Rather his hosts escorted him to the train station. His faith was not tailored to his own soul, but to those he encouraged. Do what I say, but not what I do.
Nothing demonstrates the confluence of class warfare and economic imperative than the issue of kidnapping. They have redefined the value of human capital. You kidnap a judge or a minister’s son, and that is a great investment in human resources. The return could be more profitable than drugs. Within hours, you can make as much as N20 million or N50million, or even more, depending on the opulence and desperation of the captive and their family. Why would the talakawa, who neither reads nor write, and who cannot earn with all his manic muscles more than N20 thousand Naira a month, neglect so great a financial salvation? Within a week, he can stun himself with enough to buy a new car and build a house and enjoy all the soft life and luxuries that Maigida has taken for granted. All he has to do is kidnap again. It becomes addictive. Any catch translates into a generational wealth in their eyes. He becomes a money-miss-road, dross in gold. So, to such gold diggers, they don’t see Fulani, they see Eldorado.
In the northeast, the Boko haram flame has failed to abate. When it is not smothering lives in firestorms of surprise attacks, suicides bombs and all, it is smouldering in intermittent skirmishes. Yet, it all began with a class narrative. The poor under the cynical watch of former Borno State Governor, Ali Modu Sherriff, were used for elections and cast away. They needed shelter, food, and wives. A certain messianic creature known as Mohammed Yusuf provided them all these. All he wanted from them was his own version of Islamic piety. They are under the thrall of the man who gave them food. He works under what the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky designates as the triad of oppression. They are authority, mystery and miracle. These three weapons under a person’s command can make him a god on earth. That was Yusuf, and the founder of Boko Haram. After providing the Sheriff castaways with food, shelter and wives. He had made them his children, his urchins. As Dostoyevsky noted in his novel, The Brothers Karamazov, “anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom.”
With mystery, he gave them faith. With miracle, he gave them food, shelter, and all of that gave him authority. To other classes of humans, food may not be miracle. To the poor who is hungry, especially the destitute, food and shelter are miracles from God. Again, as Dostoyevsky defines it, “In a realist, faith does not spring from miracle but miracle out of faith.” You define your own miracle.
So, his followers now decided to strike. Was it about Islam? Well, yes, the extreme variant. But was it about class? Plenty. They brought down emirs, razed tony mosques, pillaged the markets, carted away the girls that would be brides to the rich, etc. They saw themselves not as evil people. They saw themselves as messengers of the Almighty, who loathed the moral squalor of the feathered class.
Yusuf took away their freedom and gave them his own. They all want to be free to be terrorists. Philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted that freedom was not only about the classical idea of western liberal thought. Anyone can define it their way. As the Marxist wants his freedom, so does the terrorist, so does Boko Haram.
Within the Nigerian state, we therefore see all of these clashes in the family. Each one wants a different definition of comfort and peace. In that ambience, peace is the major casualty, and where there is no peace, fear abounds.
When Boko Haram was at its peak, the military brass backed by its Fulani elite waged a quiet genocide against the Kanuri. Anytime they saw a Kanuri gathering, or a kanuri traveller with their distinctive tribal marks, they were targeted for arrests, harassments and killing. The shoe, as they say, is in the other foot now. The targets are Fulani today. No one trusts them, including the Hausa. Even the elite Fulani suspects the talakawa up north. As Samuel Coleridge once noted, even “whoring brothers disagree.” So, we have created fear as an instrument of governance. It will take fear banishment and as sense of fairness for the fear to go.
With each afraid of the other, we cannot stop banditry, or herdsmen crisis, or even Boko haram. We need a leadership of fairness and fearlessness. Is that not why the issue of banditry even in the southwest has become even a big problem. On the military level, why are we not using drones to target and isolate and knock out the hoodlums? Are they not living among us? Are they spirits?
What did the former Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima deploy to flush out many Boko haram players from among the people? They were the Civilian JTF. They are the unsung heroes of modern Nigeria. We need drones as intelligence since the intelligence agencies in Nigeria have failed us. We need to create civilian equivalents of the JTF in the southwest and other parts of the country. Then the drones can track their hideouts, and the Air Force and soldiers can go to work. In short order, we can deal with the scourge. That is a short term solution to the herdsmen bugbear.
After that, we can face the perennial issue of distrust. If we cannot stop it, it will haunt us, and the scourges will emerge in other dimensions. We have to awake the right identities and paradigms for the future. That accounts for why the philosopher Rene Descartes said, cogito ego sum, “I think therefore I am.” In his own book of polemics titled, The Rebel, Albert Camus wrote, “I rebel – therefore we exist.” In his novel, Satanic verses” Salman Rushdie declares, “to be born again first you have to die.”
So, it means we have to pursue a new birth and a new identity. Hence I titled this piece, “To secure, first we have to love.” That is love each other. It means a leadership of cooperative charisma beyond class and tribe and primordial loyalties. Or else we shall solve one and go into another problem. For instance, as Femi Falana has warned, the followers of Sheikh EL Zakzaky are fuming and growing. Is that the next bandit? Or cover for one?
So, the problem is not in anywhere else but in us. It is because we fear ourselves.