SOMETIMES lethargic, at other times unduly polemical, the Muhammadu Buhari presidency has sought unwisely to compare the killings being perpetrated by armed bandits in Zamfara and Sokoto States, with the massacre orchestrated by herdsmen in Benue, Nasarawa, Taraba, Adamawa and Plateau States. Yet what Nigerians ask for is not a dialectical consideration of the wholesale murder painting Nigeria red everywhere and sucking the country needlessly into the vortex of low-scale war, but a firm and sensible solution to end the killings, free the countryside for living and development, restore unity and peace, re-engineer the society, and haul the country’s massive bulk into the 21st century.
For more than a year, the government has struggled to even provide both an explanation for the killings and the profile of the killers, whether the killings were done by herdsmen or by people they describe simply and simplistically as common criminals. Confused and paralysed, and sometimes spreading a veneer of bucolic jokes on the co-incidence between the identity of the herdsmen and the president’s, the government has given not less than five different and contradictory explanations for the unending killings laying the country waste. The president has proudly offered two explanations, and his security team, three. Unable to reconcile the explanations, and reluctant to divorce their backgrounds from the crisis, the government and its security teams have alternately called for either tolerance or prayers, or something even more newfangled.
Under the Goodluck Jonathan government, the Northeast was riven by the Boko Haram war. Nigerians were at the time dismayed by the political explanations given by that government, and the general inaction of the president and the ineffectiveness of his response. Now, while the Northeast is yet to be fully pacified, the tinder in the Northwest has caught fire, with Zamfara and Sokoto virtually in flames. Worse, while sporadic fires were lit now and again by herdsmen in the Middle Belt under the Jonathan presidency, the fire has become a relentless conflagration under the Buhari presidency. Dr Jonathan met the incipient crises with ineptitude; President Buhari has met them with lethargy and, as many Middle Belt and Christian elders allege, with complicity.
Assailed by the agonising cries of helpless Nigerians buffeted by all kinds of deadly attacks, President Buhari has again appealed to Nigerians to be patient. Patience? His spokesman, Garba Shehu released this statement on behalf of the president: “I wish to assure all Nigerians that their security is receiving the greatest attention from this administration and there is no compromise in this commitment. I appeal for your patience while my security teams rack their brains to put an end to this horrendous violence…This wanton violence against innocent people won’t be tolerated by this government, and we are working round the clock to identify the people sponsoring these heartless attacks. It is curious why any group of mass murderers would be targeting and killing innocent people for no just reason…Identifying and defeating these callous killers is receiving priority from this administration, and we shall spare no effort in tracing the root of this evil, especially their sources of funding and arms.”
The president says his security teams are still racking their brains to put an end to the violence. Three years after his assumption of office, more than two years after the deadly killings took on added ferocity, more than one year after he was accused of pulling his punches because his Fulani kinsmen were the aggressors, and nearly a year after Christians began to allege persecution and presidential indifference, the president has still neither felt nor understood the urgency of ending the carnival of blood, but now suggests that his security chiefs are still racking their brains. It is truly perplexing to situate the president’s plea for patience against the backdrop of accusations that he deliberately skewed the appointment of his security chiefs to reflect his insularity rather than the merit, competence or relevance of the appointees. Worse, his plea for futile patience is coming well after many Nigerians, including national lawmakers, governors, and leading politicians and human rights activists, have pressured him to reshuffle both his security teams and the country’s security architecture to reflect the complexity, even intractability, and modernity of the security challenges the country is contending with.
The president has stood idiosyncratically pat on the reshuffle question. He does not like to be pressured, let alone compelled by criticisms or evidence, to change policy, personnel or direction. The weakness in his security organisation and the ineffectual response of his government to the killings are unlikely to prompt him into making drastic changes, or making the desired changes soon enough. He sees responsiveness to both superior arguments and incontrovertible evidence as capitulation, where bedraggled Nigerians see indecision. This is why he has viewed calls for cabinet reshuffle as an attempt to stampede him into pandering to the ulterior motives of some nefarious interests. Worse, he remembers how long it took him to appoint the second eleven that his cabinet is widely believed to have become, to assemble the agency boards he pussyfooted over for years, and to concoct the abhorrent security policies to which he has genuflected for more than a year. Remembering all this, he is wary of going through the same drudgery all over again, especially when the nuances of his actions and the many interpretations associated with them escape him badly.
No, the president’s security teams are not racking their brains, as Mallam Shehu plaintively puts it. They are at their wit’s end. What ails the security teams — how many does he have anyway? — is that they operate and reason from the same cracked and narrow cultural and moral prisms. They have all suggested that the problem is either communal or economic, with both ailments unfairly stacked against the herdsmen. They have even all suggested with indecent exculpatory arguments, and sometimes with embarrassing contradictions, that the attackers are remnants of the Libyan civil war, without explaining why those remnants would take over Middle Belt lands or avenge grudges alien to them. And the security teams, and the president too, now appear to be convinced that politicians with an eye on 2019 are sponsoring the killers even in the face of claims of responsibility by vengeful herdsmen.
No, no racking of brains is being undertaken. What is taking place is handwringing, with the added wistfulness that the problem, like an epidemic, would expire on its own. That expiration will of course not take place. What will happen is that increasingly, and apocalyptically, the problem will metastasise into ethnic and religious conflicts far worse than their ‘racking’ brains can fathom, and too complex for the security teams to analyse, let alone find a solution. The teams are buying time and hedging their bets with a lot of existential contrivances and prevarications. They know that the crisis could jeopardise the president’s re-election. But they hope that after his re-election, and despite his inaction over the killings, he would come out more assertively to both enunciate and implement jaded, one-sided and unworkable formulae.
One of those jaded formulae is the ranching panacea. Unwilling to examine the past, present and future of Nigeria’s animal husbandry economy, the Buhari presidency and its security teams are determined to ram the ranching panacea down the unlubricated social and economic throats of parts of the country living in dread of the herdsmen and their cantankerousness. Even the ranching panacea has also gone through unprincipled and poorly reasoned metamorphosis. They started with the idea of grazing reserves, then moved to cattle colony, and then to cattle ranches, and now back to the 415 grazing reserves they say the government owns across the country, some 177 of which they say have been gazetted. Instead of doing the hardheaded exercise of finding out why the existing cattle breeding methods have become so problematic, and what new methods exist that could eliminate clashes with farmers and avert cattle rustling, the government is bent on maintaining the old practices with which it obviously maintains sentimental attachments or nurses political undertones.
The Buhari presidency is either incompetent or unwilling to find a solution. Consequently, it has allowed a situation that was, on its assumption of office, serious or even critical, to become dire and apocalyptic. Indeed, there is little doubt that the country is at war. Nigeria is battered by cults, bandits, herdsmen, Boko Haram insurgents, and tyrannous law enforcement agents who have run riot. No one is safe, and no state is a haven of peace. The government itself has embraced violence and strong-arm tactics in law enforcement. Like its predecessors who were denounced for their appalling tactics, the Buhari presidency has militarised the country and politics, circumscribed the rule of law, openly celebrated the use of force, and treated dialogue disdainfully. The electorate thought that changing government would bring about a change of tactics and policies. They have been bitterly disappointed. The Zamfara governor throws his hands up in resignation at the breakdown of law and order in his state; Sokoto is now tasting that same bitter pill of bandits who have lost hope in government and are determined to get their pint of blood wherever they can find it; Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Nasarawa and Adamawa are bleeding profusely; and the rest of the country are frightened, dispirited and on tenterhooks. No solution is in sight because the government’s fundamental approach to the crises is terribly defective.
The problem is not the people’s patience, which Mallam Shehu quoted the president to be asking for. The bleeding is continuing, and victims are perilously close to damning the consequences and taking up arms to defend themselves. They have been more than patient enough in the face of official dithering and paralysis. If the government cannot demonstrate the urgency the situation demands, and the brilliance the complexity of the problem needs for a solution, it will have no basis to be called a government. Nigeria faces apocalypse; but the government which should mobilise the country and all its resources to fight the menace has proved almost completely inured to the danger. How many more deaths, seized lands, and old and abominable practices will it take to force the government to stop quibbling?
- Palladium will be away for a few weeks
