By Austin Oboh
More than a week after President Muhammadu Buhari spoke in the much celebrated interview on Arise TV, wherein he proffered his improvised solution to herdsmen and bandits’ attacks in states, I am yet to recover from the blatant dishonesty. The event has reinforced my belief that he is not truly willing to arrest the security crisis in the country. Whenever I come across the kind of argument the president made in that interview, I feel hopeless. And my sense of hopelessness about Nigeria is now particularly intense because I realise that nothing can be done about the situation if the man who reserves the privileging of the last word on security and defence is intentionally diverting people’s attention from the crux of the matter.
In that interview, President Buhari, who was supposed to give his opinion on the agitation for state police, as usual, went off on a tangent. He said he recently sent back two South- West governors who had come to complain to him about insecurity in their states. Deliberately or not, the president avoided stating his views on the agitation for state police – most observers would claim he was still on course; I don’t agree.
Now,
his word: “Two South-West governors came to me to say cattle rearers are
destroying farms in their states; I asked them what happened to the grassroots
security panels from traditional rulers to local governments who meet regularly
to identify the root of their problems and identify crooks within their
environment. Who destroyed this system? Go back and fix it, give your people a
sense of belonging. I don’t like it when people campaign to become governors
and people trusted them with their votes and, after winning, they can’t
perform; they’re trying to push responsibilities to others.”
We
can roughly interpret the president as saying: The solution to the security
challenges you have is to revive the local consultative and information
channels in your state in order to identify criminals among the people.
Intelligence flow from these channels would ensure the criminals who carry out
these attacks are routed and their activities terminated. The other arm of the
argument – giving the people a sense of belonging – appears, to me, to be out
of place. Making people informers doesn’t necessarily give them a sense of
belonging, does it?
To
approach the issue, let’s try and understand the basics. The kind of security
challenges that have mostly ridiculed security systems in the country in the
last few years – which, I believe, the South-West governors reported to the
president – are itinerant or nomadic attacks. This involves attacks by agents
who are not usually resident in the communities they attack. They may be
prowling in nearby farmlands and forests. They launch attacks with high-calibre
weapons and plunder whole communities.
They
have been described severally as bandits, herdsmen, terrorists. None of these
agents live among the people, and only combing of forests by armed men can lead
to their detection and arrest. It would be foolhardy for anyone or group to
attempt to confront these agents of death unarmed. At best, what communal
intelligence gathering – the type that the president has suggested – can do in
the circumstances is to monitor their invasion and sound the alarm among
targeted communities to make a run for it, and return some other day when the
threat has been vitiated. The president knows the variant of outlaws that the
governors were concerned about, but his charge to them was escapist. These
days, when it is reported that a community has been plundered, people generally
know those behind the localised blitzkrieg. Their trade mark desecration is
easily recognised miles away.
But
to be fair to the president, communal intelligence gathering is sine qua non.
It is very basic to communal security. It’s very useful when the criminals live
among the people not when they hibernate in nearby forests as the now
ubiquitous Fulani herdsmen, the current source of nightmare in most Nigerian
communities, do.
Clearly,
this was the kind of thing Governor Samuel Ortom of Benue State complained
about when he recently stated that the state may be forced to “procure AK-47
rifles for responsible citizens so that when the Fulani from Chad or wherever
come to kill us, we too will be prepared”. But it is now generally known that
the president is not comfortable when Fulani herdsmen are mentioned in
reference to instances of insecurity in the country. “An old woman is uneasy
when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb,” so goes the saying.
Despite
the president’s attempts at veiling his support for herdsmen, his actions make
his position quite dubious. On my mind is the haste with which the Presidency
revoked the Ondo State government’s order, in January, for herders to quit its
forests.
“All
Forest Reserves in the state are to be vacated by herdsmen within the next
seven days with effect from Monday, 18th January, 2021,” Ondo State had
declared.
The
governor gave his reasons. He said: “The security reports and debriefings from
victims of kidnap cases pointed in one direction traceable to some bad elements
masquerading as herdsmen.
“As
the Chief Law and Security Officer of the state, it is my constitutional
obligation to do everything lawful to protect the lives and property of all residents
of the State. This meeting, therefore, is convened to address the issues of
insecurity with the ultimate aim of attaining the goal of a safe
environment.
“Recent
security trends attest that these times require all hands to be on deck as the
difficulties we face are dire. The challenges are quite enormous but we are
determined to confront them head-on.
“We
decided that all the criminal elements, who hide under various guises to aid
the destruction of farmlands as well as perpetrate other violent crimes such as
kidnapping, drug peddling and other nefarious activities, must be stamped out
of our dear state.”
In
a swift reaction, the Presidency, through Garba Shehu, Special Assistant on
Media and Publicity to the president, noted – among other things – that what
was clearly emerging from the Ondo State government’s order was “a lack of
consistency in messaging which in turn leads to various contradictions
regarding accuracy and the intent behind the message”.
The
Presidency went ahead to chide the governor over the order, reminding him that
he was a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and had held the position of
president, the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).
It
said: “Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, a seasoned lawyer, Senior Advocate of Nigeria
and, indeed, a former President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA)… in our
view, will be the least expected to unilaterally oust thousands of herders who
have lived all their lives in the state on account of the infiltration of the
forests by criminals”.
It
added: “If this were to be the case, rights groups will be right in expressing
worries that the action could set off a chain of events which the makers of our
constitution foresaw and tried to guard against.
“We
want to make it clear that kidnapping, banditry and rustling are crimes, no
matter the motive or who is involved, but to define crime from the nameplates,
as a number of commentators have erroneously done – which group they belong to,
the language they speak, their geographical location or their faith is atavistic
and cruel.
“We
need to delink terrorism and crimes from ethnicity, geographical origins and
religion—to isolate the criminals who use this interchange of arguments to
hinder law enforcement efforts as the only way to deal effectively with them.”
Needless
to point out that the Presidency’s statement was in defence of one side while
blackmailing the other. This same governor who was being blackmailed was
probably one of the two South-West governors whom the president alluded to in
the Arise TV interview. Why would President Buhari reject a decision taken by a
state governor to secure his people and later turn back to ridicule the same
governor for seeking his intervention? Were the governors’ decisions not based
on reports from the local consultative channels that the president wanted the
governors to revive? If this is not the height of insincerity, then what
is?
We
have seen this deceit applied when Amotekun (a security outfit set up by the
governors of South-West states to contain the activities of marauding outlaws
on highways and in the forests) was formed. The Presidency immediately became
jittery and instructed the Inspector-General of Police to step in, and soon
after the security outfit was watered down.
Today,
Oyo and Ondo states are being attacked by herdsmen – as consistently reported –
but there is no group as equally armed as the herdsmen to repel them. Local
vigilantes have tried to expel suspected killer-herdsmen from their communities
but the police and the military have reportedly escorted them back and the
villagers thoroughly dealt with. So, what was the president saying? That
governors should be holding security meetings with traditional rulers and other
groups in the grassroots knowing that their findings would not matter? Or that findings
from local sources should be passed on to the police and the military whose
mandate have already been defined by the federal powers that be? How many
herdsmen have been arrested and tried by federal law enforcement agents despite
the hue and cry over their activities and despite the Presidency’s acceptance
that there are criminals among the headers?
The
rule has been: states invoke and Abuja revokes. So, as long as the Presidency
insists on cajoling states to act within the strictures defined by it and in
the same breath scoff at them for allegedly abdicating their responsibilities,
the suicidal slide, as already identified by Wole Soyinka, would continue until
the day the abused people of this country take up the gauntlet and fight back
with their blood. The only way to avoid this scenario is for the Federal
Government to allow states run their affairs in the interests of their people
while leaving legal structures to arbitrate where injustice have been suspected
to have been committed in reference to human rights. After all, in this same
country, we have civilian JTF and Hisbah (in the North) who act without
restrictions from Abuja, such that a Hisbah official can even arrest a
policeman.
The
Nigerian centralised police and the armed forces are controlled by President
Buhari who appoints their heads, and they kowtow to him, yet he claims security
matters in Nigerian peculiar federal states are to be determined by the
governors. Let’s hear something else, Mr. President.
*Oboh is a commentator on public issues
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