By Uche Ezechukwu
The late Chief Stephen Osita Osadebe, in one of his
indelible songs, allud-ed to Ndigbo and their resilience, thus: “they will
never tire from running if their enemies do not tire from pursuing them”. This
summarises why the Igbo Nation will never stop improvising to survive and stay
ahead of those who they feel, do not wish them well. That is basically the
story of the Bakassi Boys, the veritable children of circumstances, which the
ebullient governor of Abia
State , Dr Victor Okezie
Ikpeazu, announced last week, was being re-invented in his state to save the
day for his state, the way they did between 1999 and 2001.
Most Nigerians only got to hear of the Bakassi Boys as from
the late 2000, when it became a most unorthodox and unusual crime fighting
outfit in Anambra
State , especially when it
became an object of great controversy and jousting between the government of Dr
Chinwoke Mbadinuju and that of President Olusegun Obasanjo, at the centre.
Obasanjo had vowed to uproot the outfit by all means – and in fact did so
eventually – after it had completely de-railed in its initial objectives, and
had become a Frankenstein monster, which started gobbling the people it had set
out to protect. It is significant that Dr Ikpeazu, an ‘Aba boy’, has decided to
resurrect the Bakassi Boys, in what he must have seen as a last resort, just in
the same way that Aba traders had decided to create the original Bakassi Boys
in 1998, when they had been confronted with an unusual level of criminality,
and when the constituted authority had pretended an unusual incapacity to act.
The governor obviously knows how the Bakassi Boys were founded by shoe makers
and other dexterous Aba artisans whose thriving businesses were being laid
waste by criminal syndicates of robbers, kidnappers and cultist, broadly
described as Maffs, just as the herdsmen are today laying waste the means of
livelihood of the rural farmers.
As it happened in the late
1990s, the SAP economic policy of the Ibrahim Babangida had turned out to be a
great blessing in disguise for Igbo business-men and artisans, for whom it
offered a wonderful opportunity to dip deep into their homebred talents to
innovate and produce. Two groups of businesses – the leather workers and
tailors – had benefitted most, as they systematically bettered and perfected
their trades and targeted the ex-port market.
Many people who resided in Aba did not fully appreciate what was
happening around them, as they were not enjoying the enhanced products that
were being churned out around them. One young man from my village who had
graduated in Biochemistry from UNN had become a tailor in Aba, and had once
made a suit, gratis for me, but could no longer have the time to make more for
my friends or members of my family, as his time was completely taken up with
meeting-up with orders from his outlets in UAE and Europe.
One day, my wife’s friend who runs a boutique at one of Abuja ’s highbrow hotels with stocks from Europe and Dubai , brought some jeans
trousers for my daughters. When we looked at the labels, we gave out a big
laugh, and in-formed her that the jeans were not made in Italy , but in Aba , if not Amesi! She was very angry and
insisted that she had just bought them from big shops in Dubai . My wife went to my ward-robe and
brought out my suit as well as another suit Rome had ‘dashed’ her, with the same labels.
When the lady insisted that ours was an imitation of what she had bought, my
wife called our kinsman, Rome , on phone, and got
him to chat with our friend and confirmed that he stocks those two shops she
patronized in Dubai .
I have done this digression to show how good business was
for Aba artisans at the time; that meant that Aba city, like the other Igbo
cities – Onitsha, Nnewi, Owerri, etc – were awash with cash. And that was the
period when huge mansions were sprouting in Igbo villages like giant mushrooms
that had received an overdose of fertilizer. But then, the consequence was not
all salutary. Cash is to criminals the way nectar is to bees. The surfeit of
cash in Aba and other Igbo cities invited crime syndicates who descended on the
cities with a type of brutal vengeance never witnessed be-fore. Most devious of
these crime syndicates in Aba
were the Maffs who unleashed the most abominable types of crimes on the people,
in addition to the kidnap-pings for ransom, robbery, cultic deformations and
other abominable acts, like raping of wives in front of their husbands and
children, or forcing children to make love with their parents as their sibling
watched. All these were happening while the law enforcement agencies, some
members of which colluded with the criminals, most often threw up their hands
in pretended helplessness. In most cases, the criminals would return the
following day to relate to you how you had gone to report to the police and
what you had said, with exactitude. Under such a scenario, the victims bore
their fate with painful equanimity.
Issues got to a head when the
criminals started to kidnap, and even, kill the foreign traders who usually
came to evacuate the finished leather goods and clothing. There was a
particular case of ‘Hajiya’ (for that was the name she was known with) whose
decomposing body was found in a ditch, after she had been kidnapped and killed
by the Maffs. That was the last drop of water that overflowed the can. The Aba businessmen knew that it was between their livelihood
and the sundry criminals in Aba .
It is might be necessary to make outsiders understand that Aba symbolises the
best and finest in Igboness, hence Aba is always the bastion of Igbo resistance
and the symbol of the Igbo resilience. Aba
incarnates the best and finest - maybe also the worst – in Igbo personality.
So, most things that make up the Igbo reality are cooked in Aba .
There was a spontaneous uprising of the artisans at the Aria
Aria Market, as they mobilized other traders in Aba and the Bakassi Boys were founded. I
undertook a deep research of the Bakassi Boys phenomenon, at the period when it
had become institutionalized during the first tenure of Orji Uzor Kalu
administration in Abia
State , and my findings
were so eye-opening that they can make a great epic story. However, the Bakassi
Boys had started several months before OUK came to power, and not under him, as
I have read in some places. In fact the traders’ uprising that gave rise to the
constitution of the Bakassi Boys happened under the military administrator that
had handed over to the civilians in 1999.
From what most people know, the Bakassi Boys which many
believe have magical powers, drawn principally from Ngwa and Ogoni deities, but
in consultation with most deities in Igboland, were able to clean-up Aba and
other parts of the state of criminals, most of whom escaped to other states of
the South East. It should be noted that if the law enforcement agencies had
been able to provide security for the people of the South East when they so
badly needed it, the Bakassi Boys would never have become necessary in the
first place. Last week, Ikpeazu decided to bring back the Bakassi Boys to Abia State ,
in the face of the re-fusal or failure of the federal government to protect the
South East from the murderous menace of the herdsmen militia that is
devastating their lives.
In the following parts of this
serial, I will relate how the Bakassi Boys spread and were welcomed to the
other states of the South East – minus Enugu State – and how and why they later
became a tiger which might be easy to mount, but which might be too dangerous
to dismount, as the ‘mounter’ could end up in its jaws, as Mbadinuju might
have, had Obasanjo not ‘saved’ him by clearing away the Bakassi Boys.
11
As at the time Aba and the
other parts of Abia
State were being ravaged
by violent criminals of different descriptions, and which the arrival of the
Bakassi Boys effectively routed, Anambra became the worse for it. Onitsha and Nnewi which
were also awash with cash as Abia was also fell prostrate before the even more
daring criminals. The criminals that ravaged Onitsha , Awka and Nnewi were so daring that
they operated day and night undaunted. And of course, the law enforcement
agencies which pleaded low capacity were completely useless before the better
equipped bands of criminals.
Many
theories were advanced about the genre of robbers and kidnappers that beset Anambra State . They were such that would, on
their return from an operation, by day or by night, stop in front of the
Government House in Awka, conduct a mock parade and show of force, and send
volleys of bullets from their machine guns mounted atop their vehicles into the
air and shout aloud that they were giving an executive salute to the occupant
of the Government House.
The
first theory was that some of the criminals came from the theatres of the
raging Aguleri- Umuleri conflict at the northern part of the state at the time.
Another theory was that the criminals were extracts from the militant
hotspots in the Niger Delta. Of course, many of those that had been dislodged
from Abia State by the Bakassi Boys shifted their
base to Anambra and other parts of the country. But because there was more
money in Anambra and they could roam unchallenged, Anambra became their place
of choice.
In
that way did Anambra become a hell on earth, as citizens gravitated to
churches with their families to pass the night, perhaps as a way of saying
that they depended on divine intervention, having been failed by every other
secular authority. Needless to say that Anambrarians who resided outside the
state had abandoned their beloved home. Culture became bastardized in face of
the new dangerous realities, as people buried their deceased relatives where
they died outside Igboland. Traditional weddings were executed outside
Igboland, as every gathering was sure to attract the visit of criminals. Life,
in one word, became intolerable.
That
was the harrowing situation at the twilight days of the military
administration just before the arrival of Obasanjo’s administration. In the
same gesture of the Abia traders, their Nnewi counterparts also decided to
take their fate into their own hands. That was when the traders, in collaboration
with the local government authorities went to Aba to import the Bakassi Boys. Once they did
that, the story changed, and after two weeks of Bakassi operation in 1999, Nnewi
was freed as the Bakassi Boys moved over to Onitsha and the other parts of the state,
and started the wholesale sanitization of the Anambra cities and the country
side.
The
sanitization operations of the Bakassi Boys became so welcome that the government
of Dr. Chinwoke Mbadinuju that came to power in May 1999, inherited the outfit
and equipped it, after appropriating it as the official crime fighting
apparatus of the state. In spite of the so-called unorthodox and brutal methods
of the Bakassi Boys, they were welcomed and condoned by an overwhelming
percentage of the population that felt relieved. Life returned to the land and
business started to boom again. Life assumed its normalcy as social activities
resumed their previously lost verve and gusto. More importantly, Anambra people
were able to go home again, to contribute to development.
The
climax of the peace and sanity which the Bakassi Boys brought to the land was
demonstrated in practical terms during the Christmas celebration of 2000.
Almost everybody gravitated home from which most had been on self-exile. The
Christmas of that year recorded the largest influx of Anambrarians from all
over the world and everybody went out of his way to savour the freedom and
peace that reigned supreme. People would drive all around the state around the
clock and there was no single case of crime in the whole length and breadth of
the state.
Because
of the magical powers attributed to the Bakassi Boys which made it possible for
them to locate criminals, those people who were not so sure of their integrity
kept their distance, while those who were very nostalgic of home, like
returnees from South Africa and other crime infested places, stopped over in
hotels in Enugu and Imo States, as they dared not step their feet on Anambra
soil. The story is that if you had every committed a big crime or ever shed blood,
the Bakassi Boys could locate and finish you off.
As
should be expected Bakassi Boys soon ran into trouble as they ran foul of the
federal authorities. In the first place, when some criminals who made up the
thugs that were used by some prominent politicians were dealt with by the
Bakassi Boys, their powerful bosses started to pull strings to do the crime
fighters in. As a quick reaction, the state government moved to legalize the
activities of the Bakassi Boys by getting the state house of assembly to pass a
law legalizing them as the Anambra State Vigilante Services (AVS). However, so
determined were the opponents of the Bakassi Boys and the state government use
of them that the powerful politicians pursued with their influence-laden
campaigns against the AVS. President Obasanjo, ever ready to throw his weight,
descended on the boys, in spite of the widespread objection of the different
stakeholders in the state.
Governor Mbadinuju did not also help matters either; by the
way he allowed the control of Bakassi Boys to slip out of his hands into the
clutches of individuals who used it to settle personal, political and social
scores. Suddenly people that had no reason to fall under the Bakassi Boys’
machete were brutally murdered. One of them was a musician, De Doga who was
generally adjudged blameless. Then there was the popular religious leader,
Edward Okeke, alias Eddie Nawgwu, and some others.
Perhaps
the most abominable was the death of Barrister Igwe and his wife with an unborn
baby, who were murdered in cold blood in Onitsha ,
by people suspected to be connected to the Bakassi Boys, whose operations had
by then become totally bastardized. Incidentally, Barrister Igwe, an
Onitsha-based lawyer had been a loud supporter of the labour and civil organisation
elements that were campaigning against what was widely acknowledged as
Mbadinuju’s clueless administration.
When,
therefore, President Obasanjo allowed the strong arm of the State to descend on
and disband the Bakassi Boys, the action was largely supported as the outfit
had become dysfunctional and totally useless. Some people had started wondering
if they had not become worse than the criminals they had come to fight.
In
the short time that Bakassi Boys intervened in Abia, Anambra and Imo states,
their effectiveness was never in doubt. But like most good things which become
mismanaged by bad people, it became a dangerous monster. If it had just
intervened briefly and withdrawn, it would have been nothing but praises for
it. What happened in Anambra State should be an object lesson for Governor Okezie
Ikpeazu, who is definitely a polished and confident gentleman and kilometres
apart from those who governed Anambra
State at the time the
Bakassi Boys were bastardize and misused.
As
the Bakassi Boys return, Abia
State should ensure that
they do not become like the Frankenstein Monster that it turned out to become
in Anambra state. Okezie has reassured all that the new Bakassi Boys being
introduced in Abia would be refreshingly different. There is no reason why he
should not be believed.
*Uche Ezechukwu’s weekly column appears every Monday in a
national newspaper (ezechukwu1@gmail.com)
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