If you are the President of this Federal Republic, and in the middle of a security briefing about the mayhem at Shasha, a security aide rushes in and informs you that bandits have kidnapped 27 students and their teachers at Kagara in Niger State, and before you could react, your secretary says the Governor of Katsina State is on the line to tell you about the abduction of 13 women at Faskari, and as you drop the phone another aide slips in a note saying there is a riot at Billiri in Gombe State, what will you say in reaction?
You could borrow a phrase from the character Captain Archibald Haddock in the comic strip Adventures of Tintin: “Billions of blue blistering barnacles!” On another equally tricky occasion Captain Haddock said, “Ten thousand thundering typhoons!”
Pictures and videos from the Ibadan neighbourhood of Shasha, if they ever get to the president’s desk, are very unnerving. Sacked and burnt houses, cars, shops and stalls, many people dead, food baskets overturned. Trailer trucks that ferried food and vegetables across the country to feed Ibadan’s multitudes burnt, all because they were thought to belong to the ethnic kinsmen of the man who engaged a pregnant native woman in a fight and, according to some accounts, hit her and she died.
It is the wages of ethnic profiling. Some Southern Nigerian political leaders, governors and cultural groups seized upon the anger stemming from kidnappings, crop destructions and rapes and whipped up sectional sentiment against a whole ethnic group. Sure they said “Fulani herdsmen” but since, in the psyche of many Southern Nigerians, all pastoralists are criminals and there is no distinction between this group and Hausa or indeed all other Northerners, they created a combustible mix waiting to explode. It did at Shasha. A man dropped rotten vegetables, accidentally or deliberately, in front of a woman’s stall. Aren’t there market authorities to resolve the dispute? The ethnic identities of the two disputants should not matter. If it results in a fight and one of them died, the ethnic identity of both should not matter either; police should apprehend and punish the culprit. But no, not when you already have a volatile situation created by politicians and “statesmen,” championed by Igboho, amplified by the media and swiftly cashed upon by hoodlums.
What about the danger of “reprisal attacks”? If you are a hoodlum in Ibadan, it probably matters to you not that your deed could put your ethnic kinsmen and women in other parts of the country in grave danger. There are hoodlums like you out there also looking for opportunities to loot, maim and kill innocent people. I suspect a hoodlum wouldn’t care a hoot but governors and other community leaders ought to. Inter-ethnic brinkmanship by the likes of Yinka Odumakin, which armchair newspaper columnists amplify from the comfort of newsrooms, could bounce back to consume anyone who does not have a private jet to flee to Europe.
Northerners returning home from Ibadan also pose a security danger. They will be telling stories, exaggerated or not, about the events at Shasha, which hoodlums could capitalize upon to unleash “reprisal.” It happened before. Northern community and political leaders have already moved, with much success so far, and prevented their own hoodlums from capitalizing on the stories to unleash mayhem, lest we create the kind of irreversible situation that General Abdulsalami Abubakar talked about.
Kagara, coming less than two months after Kankara, calls for the utmost national security soul searching. Pictures from the decrepit Government Science College, Kagara suggest that it was a disaster waiting to happen, but that was not the whole story. Are we to dispense with boarding schools all over the North, since we apparently cannot protect them from determined bandit attacks? Even if we do, what stops bandits from raiding day schools? Students attend those ones in the daytime, but that alone cannot deter the bandits, since they case the joints and determine which ones are most vulnerable.
Defence Minister General Bashir Magashi said they will use the “Kankara template” to deal with Kagara. We don’t know exactly what the Kankara template was. Sure it ended on a happy note, since all the abducted students returned home unharmed, but was ransom paid? If it was, then that was a gaping hole in the template because every other bandit wants to get as much money as he can, if he can get away with it. If the Kankara kidnappers had been taken out even after they collected the ransom, other mass abductors could have had a rethink.
In all this insecurity, we speak about forests and “ungoverned spaces” in Nigeria. Former Chief of Defence Staff General Olonisakin said at his Senate confirmation hearing last week that there are more than 1,000 forests in Nigeria, suggesting that they are natural bandit territory. I don’t think so. The Taiga forest which stretches from northern Europe to Siberia to North America and covers 10% of Earth’s surface is not bandit-infested. Nor is the vast Australian Outback and nor even the forbidding 15,000 islands and islets of Indonesia. Compared to them, Katsina’s Rugu forest, Zamfara’s Kuyambana Forest Reserve and Ondo forests are but small bushes.
No forest is off the administrative map of Nigeria. Every forest is part of a state, a local government, a district, a chiefdom or an emirate. Traditional authorities and hunters know the inside of forests as much as the bandits do. Bureaucrats using files may not know the forests, but drones, surveillance aircraft and satellites can map and monitor every inch of Nigerian territory. If we don’t have them, it is time to get them. Forcing pastoralists to register before they can graze in Ondo forests has earned Governor Rotimi Akeredolu political claps. If he is logical, he should order every Ondo farmer, civil servant, city resident and student to register as well because many of them also commit crimes.
Meanwhile, amidst all the serious nation-wrecking problems, people are rioting in Billiri over the choice of a traditional ruler, the Mai Tangale, to succeed the late Dr Abdu Buba Maisheru who died in January. One coded statement in Governor Muhammed Inuwa Yahaya’s state-wide broadcast following the riots gave the game away. He said “religion is not a criterion in the choice” of Mai Tangale. This suggests there are Muslim as well as Christian princes among the short-listed candidates, so the race has become an inter-religious contest.
Ethnic profiling here; banditry there; royal/religious contest up there. I am already seeing billions of blue blistering barnacles!
