By Muka Popoola
No fewer than 18 persons were brutally killed and 21 injured when Boko Haram insurgents attacked Damasak town in Borno on Tuesday 14th of April, 2021.
The Tuesday attack on Damasak, according to residents, was the sixth in two weeks by the Boko Haram/ISWAP groups.
Let me say that I’ve picked on the Damasak attack just because it’s the latest in the series of violent attacks on harmless citizens from the hands of the various shades of bandits running amok in the country these days.
The more disturbing about the violent activities of the bandits in today’s Nigeria is how they’ve been carrying on in a manner that one could easily concede to as having a free reign and operating almost unchallenged. It is as if they’ve castrated the present day government of President Muhammadu Buhari, who incidentally was a war general in the Nigerian military.
No aspect of the Nigerian nation is today free of organised violence and attacks from armed bandits, and the nature of the attack will always tell whether it was by terrorists, insurgents, killer Fulani herdsmen, highway robbers, separatist agitators or some itinerant criminals who kidnap people for a ransom.
Why the recent Damasak attack is significant at this moment, however, is because it has once again brought to the fore the systemic haemorrhage that the North has been suffering since 2010 when the Islamist terror group of Boko Haram first launched its bloody insurgency on the nation. The group was for many years contained in the North East up until when Buhari took the reins of power in 2015 with a promise to end all terrorist activities in the country within three months, but the reality today is that no where in the North can be considered to be safe and secure for peaceful habitation.
For one odd decade, the states of the North have been bleeding ceaselessly with bloody activities of Islamist terrorists and other violent armed bandits. From the North East, where the terror group of Boko Haram first started its bloody campaigns in 2010, the other parts of the North – West and Central – have over the years become home to strangers who visit them with violence, taking away their peace and comfort.
So, after Damasak killings, the cries are, will General Buhari be able to end the criminalities everywhere in the country these days; indeed, can he stop the bandits?
“Bandits come to town, spray bullets, kill indiscriminately for no purpose and no reason whatsoever. How can a human being behave the way an animal cannot behave?” That was a statement made by Mallam Aminu Bello Masari, governor of Katsina State, in the North West part of Nigeria, sometime mid-2020.
The statement captures Masari’s frustration over the incessant invasion of communities in his state by the bloodhounds who mindlessly kill harmless citizens, burn down their houses, rustle cattle, rape women and kidnap people including school pupils, sometimes in hundreds, to extract ransom from obviously distraught family members or force out amnesty from government for the release of criminal gangs arrested by security forces.
Nothing explains better the unceasing heamorrhaging of states in the northern part of Nigeria since the past years than this statement by Masari, and nothing will better explain the expedient need to force a stop to the festival of violent attacks that have turned citizens almost to war captives in their homelands. Interestingly, Masari’s Katsina is also the home state of Nigeria’s President Muhammadu Buhari.
Hardly does anyone sleep anymore with their two eyes closed in most areas of the North; so bad that even governors have on different occasions been targetted by gunmen who waylaid their convoys on the highway with a hail of bullets. Few weeks ago, Samuel Ortom, governor of Benue state in the North Central, was attacked on his way home from his farm. Borno state governor, Professor Babagana Zulum, in the North East had been attacked twice by Boko Haram terrorists that he only escaped by the whiskers. Kaduna, a strategic north western state, has also been a theatre of armed banditry with reccuring incidents of community invasion, mass killing and hostage taking.
The situation in the North today is definitely at variance with the high expectations that Nigerians had in the run up to the 2015 general elections that the orgy of terror campaigns by Boko Haram, which at the time remained confined to the North East, would be exterminated if their was a change in the leadership of the country.
The brooding insecurity with street bombings occuring almost daily had bolstered the campaigns of Buhari, an Army General, and gave his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC) a big harvest of votes from the electorate who sacked the then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which had ruled the country for 16 years. Sadly, however, the security challenges have taken a turn for the worse in the last six years. It is hard to put an accurate figure to wasted lives and the value of properties ruined by violent gangs in the North, and across the country generally.
The bandits have upped their games with the abduction of secondary school pupils and the fact that they’ve targetted only government-run schools is enough a clear statement that it is a defiant strategy of blackmail on where they know they could extract the most handsome of ramsoms. At least six states in the Northern part of the country have had to shut down boarding facilities in schools on account of incessant bandit attacks and abduction of pupils.
From the North East to the North West and the North Central, farmers can no longer go to their farms for the fear of being abducted or killed. In November 2020, terrorists seized and slaughtered no fewer than 43 rice farmers in a single attack carried out in Maiduguri, Borno State. Life in Zamfara, Sokoto, Niger, Nasarawa, Kaduna and Katsina is more of living at the mercy of bandits.
As is certain that where there is no guaranteed security of life and property there can be no economic viability and social prosperity, the collapse of security in the North is already taking a toll on the social and political life of the region, just as spilling effects to other parts of the country have generally downed the economy and livelihoods of the ordinary Nigerians.
This calls for very concerted efforts from the federal government, and in crucial collaboration with the states, to rise up and stem the rising wave of criminality across the country. More critically, President Buhari, given the high level of trust and confidence reposed in him by the Nigerian electorate when he was in 2015 preferred to a sitting president as one that could tackle the emerging security challenges, has the abounding responsibility to uphold his integrity as a soldier by defending his people against what seems like the fiesta of bandits that have held everyone hostage.
It must be acknowledged that the federal government has given reasonable support to the military in order to confront the monsters disturbing the peace of the nation, if we are to go by the huge sums of money it has appropriated to security and defence since the life of this administration. But there can be no limit to the encouragement and support that the federal government should give to the military and our soldiers who have been laying down their lives in the battle to keep the country safe and secure from the violent activities of insurgents and other criminal gangs.
Government must, however, pay critical attention to how the monies being appropriated for purchase of arms and necessary war inventories, welfare of soldiers and other critical logistics are deployed and ensure they are used for the purposes for which they were allocated. The occasional cries of lack of basic necessities by soldiers at the battlefront can be depressing and that will surely weaken the fighting spirit of the troops. That must not be allowed to continue.
The war against banditry should not be seen from the prism of the war of guns and bombs only. As the military arsenals are supported by necessary technology, it is important to also consider the possible causative factors of age-long neglect of citizens development especially in the area of education and lack of infrastructure.
The large armies of neglected, uneducated and unexposed youths in the North and everywhere in the country had clearly created for the criminal gangs a stream of ready recruits for their nefarious activities and to dismantle the recruitment sources totally, the stream must be dried up by taking the idle youths away from the streets, either back to school or some other meaningful vocations that can help redefine their existence.
Particular attention must be paid to street urchins called areas boys. Everywhere you go these days you see them sit in clusters; sometimes as early as 7 a.m they are gathered doing their vanities of loose enjoyment, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes including taking other banned substances like hard drugs. We all have them in our various neighbourhoods.
The visible danger of this growing menace is that the area boys are beginning to graduate before our very eyes into what I will describe as area bandits. But unlike other violent criminals, they are not operating in the forests, neither are they covering themselves with the darkness of the night. They waylay people right on the street, take valuables from their victims and even inflict injuries on them which have sometimes led to deaths. It is happening regularly in Lagos where I live, and I can hazard a guess that it is most likely occuring in other popular cities across the country.
These are the byproducts of the government’s open weakness to curb criminality and Buhari as the topmost sheriff takes the greatest blame for this situation that has turned the country into a hell for the citizens.
