Hunters As Missing Link In Nigeria’s Security Architecture

 By Bonaventure Melah

Until Nigeria takes necessary and bold steps to commission a special security agency that is dedicated and committed to fighting crimes and criminalities that are planned and executed within and around forests, all efforts by the government towards ending heinous crimes like banditry, cattle rustling, kidnapping and others, would continue to be a mirage.

Today, Nigeria has the Police which fights and prevents crimes within cities and rural communities, the Nigeria Army which was created to protect the nation from external aggression and insurrection, the Navy to fight crimes within the nation’s territorial waters as well the Air Force to defend our air space while the NSCDC oversee national assets and work to stop pipeline, public electricity and other forms of vandalism and related crimes.

Nigeria’s Perennial Flooding: Estate Surveyor/Valuer Perspective

 By Toyin Aluko

One of the most prevalent natural disasters in Nigeria is perennial flooding. In recent years, incidents of flooding have been devastating. Some states have been increasingly experiencing flooding, particularly during the rainy season with the attending challenges to food production, food security and livelihoods. The country no doubt experienced its worst flooding in 2022.

Farmers and investors have suffered huge losses as floods destroyed thousands of hectares of farmlands and food crops. The extent and nature of the disaster is such that the actual losses, displacements and fatalities figures cannot be truly established due to poor records and reporting.

Mister President, There Is Hunger In The Land!

 By Ayo Baje

“As of April 2021, the inflation rate was the highest in four years. Food prices accounted for over 60 per cent of the total increase in inflation. Nigeria’s economic growth is being hindered by food inflation, heightened insecurity, unemployment and stalled reforms”. – World Bank Report. 

*Buhari 

Talk is cheap. But walking that talk is what truly matters for effective leadership. For instance, Nigerians have over the recent years discovered that some of our top political leaders are far removed from the harsh economic realities on the ground. They make fanciful promises during electioneering campaigns only to disregard or jettison them soon after mounting the pedestal of political power. 

Nigeria: Senseless Killings As National Pastime

By Dan Amor

Irrational impulses are not surprising in the stress and tension that characterize a demented society. In an atmosphere of violence, reason is sometimes abandoned and humanitarian principles forgotten. The inflamed passions of the time lead men and women to commit atrocities. 

*President Buhari and Army Chief, Gen Burutai 

But the concern here is not with the psychological pathology of those who commit atrocities but rather with what has turned our nation into a slaughterhouse where human beings are daily killed with intimidating alacrity. Throughout modern history, atrocity propaganda has often mesmerized readers thousands of kilometres away from the scene of the crime. Often, the improbability of the actions described suggests that the stories were little more than fantasies concocted for diverse reasons from even more diverse sources.

Time To Review Nigeria

Alabi Williams

When some concerned intelligence quarters in the U.S advised that 2015 could be ominous for Nigeria, not many people took the concern to heart. Some even jeered at the peep as another meddlesomeness of the West. There was sufficient time between when the alert was issued way back in 2006 and 2015 for some reasonable measures to be put in place to shame the doomsayers, assuming that was all there was to it. There were also no signs that the matter was handed to local intelligence units to interrogate. In the absence of a concerted official position on the prediction, individual politicians swore to high heavens that Nigeria had come too far to disintegrate. Private citizens, as usual, launched into prayers to ward off the forecast from hell, and to possibly return it to those who sent it.

(pix:nigeriancurrents)

Year 2015 has come and gone and the house has not fallen, even though we did not do anything special to reinforce its structures. Glory be to God. But how long can the house continue to stand when there are no deliberate efforts to prolong its lifespan, except to hope and pray? But citizens continue to do a lot of other things to hewn at its foundations and the leadership refusing to hearken to calls to retool for enhanced cohesion and greater performance.

Until three weeks ago, the most disturbing news item was that of herdsmen who prowled communities of Benue, Enugu, Oyo, Delta and everywhere, unleashing terror on armless victims and setting their homes ablaze. Skirmishes between herdsmen and farmers had gone on for decades, but such were settled with sticks, and perhaps bows and arrows. Herdsmen used to carry local guns for hunting animals. In those days, herdsmen travel for kilometers in search of grazing lands and they did not seek to drive local farmers away to inherit their lands. If there were skirmishes, they were isolated and were within the capacity of community leaders to manage.

But as if to hasten the U.S prediction on disintegration, even if not within the 2015 timeline, herdsmen of recent years leave no one in doubt about their notion of a country. They want to operate like doctors with borders, roaming without inhibitions of law and space, trampling on territories and annexing vast swathes, even ancestral lands. They went to Plateau and left behind desolation and deaths. Then they went with temerity to Kaduna, south of the state and inflicted collateral damage on the local population. Then they went to Nasarawa, where prevailing internecine suspicions among local tribes aided their exploits. Then they crossed into Benue, Kogi, Ondo, and Oyo and were unhindered, even though they made front pages when they visited chief Olu Falae. It was in Enugu, and of recent Ekiti that their accomplishments received more than the usual feeble condemnations of the past.

As We Await Buhari's Response To The 50 Nigerians Killed In Benue

By Perry Brimah, Dr.
The account of the massacre given by the governor of Benue state was harrowing. The raiders came in typical style and killed at will, men, women and children. They set fire to homes and farms, burning flesh, wood and brick alike. This time it was Governor Ortom's very own village. These terrorists do not discriminate one farming village from the other. The same way they raid and set farming villages ablaze in Borno is the same way they light them up and fill the paths with blood in Benue, Enugu and Ekiti.

*President Buhari 

Their enemy is clear: the farmers and their farms. A weeping governor Ortom narrated how they burned hectares of rice farms. It does not take a rocket scientist to get what's happening here or what was happening in Borno; with the insurgent and not political Boko Haram, that is.

Chief of Internal Security, Buratai Agrees They Are Boko Haram

Dare I say, to our relief the Nigerian 'chief of global security,' Lieutenant General T. Y. Buratai has finally admitted that these men ravaging the middle belt and south of Nigeria are the same 'ol Boko Haram. It took a lot of convincing for the man Buhari has put in charge of Nigeria's internal security to admit this feature of the spread of terror that we have long wailed about.

The target is the farmers. Dislodged from the Sambisa forest, these enemies of farmers have spread wide in the hinterland and gone deeper than before. They do not attack towns. They do not attack senators and governors. Their enemy is the farmer. Their need can only be the land.

Cattle Herdsmen As The New Boko Haram?

By Reuben Abati 
“No matter how far the town, there is another beyond it” – Fulani Proverb.

There has been so much emotionalism developing around the subject of the recent clashes between nomadic pastoralists and farmers, and the seeming emergence of the former as the new Boko Haram, forbidding not Western education this time, but the right of other Nigerians to live in peace and dignity, and to have control over their own geographical territory. From Benue, to the Plateau, Nasarawa, to the South West, the Delta, and the Eastern parts of the country, there have been very disturbing reports of nomadic pastoralists killing at will, raping women, and sacking communities, and escaping with their impunity, unchecked, as the security agencies either look the other way or prove incapable of enforcing the law.  The outrage South of the Sahel is understandable. It is argued, rightly or wrongly, that the nomadic pastoralist has been overtaken by a certain sense of unbridled arrogance arising from that notorious na-my-brother-dey-power mentality and the assumption that “the Fulani cattle” must drink water, by all means, from the Atlantic Ocean.

It is this emotional ethnicization of the crisis that should serve as a wake-up call for the authorities, and compel the relevant agencies to treat this as a national emergency deserving of pro-active measures and responses. It is not enough to issue a non-committal press statement or make righteous noises and assume that the problem will resolve itself. Farmer-pastoralist conflict poses a threat to national security. It is linked to a number of complex factors, including power, history, citizenship rights and access to land. Femi Fani-Kayode in a recent piece has warned about Nigeria being “on the road to Kigali”, thus referring to the genocide that hobbled Rwanda in the 90s as the Hutus and the Tutsis drew the sword against each other. Fani-Kayode needs not travel all the way to Rwanda. Ethnic hate has done so much damage in Nigeria already; all we need is to learn from history and avoid repeating the mistakes of the past.

Ethnic hate, serving as sub-text to the January 1966 and July 1966 coups, for example, set the stage for the civil war of 1967 -70. The root of Igbo-Hausa/Fulani acrimony can be traced back to that season when Igbos were slaughtered in the North, the Hausa/Fulani were slaughtered in the East and Nigeria found itself in the grip of a “To Thy Tents, O Israel” chorus. Ethnic hate also led to the Tiv riots, crisis in the Middle Belt since then, and the perpetual pitching of one ethnic group against the other in Nigeria’s underdeveloped politics. We should be careful.

The Afenifere Threat To Secede From Nigeria: Open Letter To The Sultan Of Sokoto And The Caliphate’s MACBAN

—Part 2 of the Series “Buhari’s 100 Days—an X-ray”

By Chinweizu

Sundoor999@gmail.com

21oct15

President Buhari’s silence and inaction, during his 100 days, on the issue of Fulani herdsmen seems to have poured petrol on the long smoldering embers of the Fulani menace in Nigeria. So there is a need to raise two questions: (a) Is Buhari’s inaction part of his Caliphate hidden agenda? (b) Is the Sultan of Sokoto, as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of MACBAN, the cattle breeders association, not the Grand Patron of a criminal enterprise--an enterprise that uses, for its economic gain, the crimes of trespassing, destruction of other people’s property, kidnapping, arson, murder, ethnic cleansing etc.?

In his Inaugural Address, President Buhari mentioned some security issues that he would solve as part of his change agenda. Among them was “herdsmen/farmer clashes”:

“Boko Haram is not only the security issue bedeviling our country. The spate of kidnappings, armed robberies, herdsmen/farmers clashes, cattle rustlings all help to add to the general air of insecurity in our land. We are going to erect and maintain an efficient, disciplined people–friendly and well–compensated security forces within an over–all security architecture.”

-- President Buhari’s inaugural speech, on May 29, 2015  

http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/05/read-president-buhari-inaugural-speech/ 

Though he didn’t give it the priority and emphasis he gave to Boko Haram, these herdsmen/farmers clashes have quickly escalated into a security problem of far greater countrywide menace than even Boko Haram. Yet he has said nothing and done nothing visible to solve it. Perhaps his change agenda does not include change in this long-established security problem in Nigeria. If so why?

As we shall see further down in this x-ray, because of its territorial scope and its potential to ignite inter-ethnic war in 5 of the 6 zones of Nigeria, this Fulani menace is by far a greater threat to the lives of Nigerians and to the peace and territorial integrity of the Nigerian state than Boko Haram. Yet President Buhari has thus far chosen to leave it unaddressed.  Why?

Reports of the criminal activities of Fulani herdsmen have captured the headlines since May 29. And Afenifere, the apex socio-cultural organ of the Yoruba nationality, stung by the exceptional provocation of the abduction of Chief Olu Falae, a distinguished Nigerian, Yoruba grandee and one of Afenifere’s leaders, reacted by renewing its threat of Yoruba secession from Nigeria.