By Chidi
Odinkalu
Nigeria’s response to the onset of murderous
mass violence has evolved through phases of co-optation, brutal reprisal,
appeasement, and state incapacity. The two options that have never quite been
attempted with conviction are effective accountability and civic inclusion.
Through phases of anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism and, now, interminable and
metastasizing counter-insurgencies, the country has found itself mired in
chronic mass violence as the only language of political dialogue. With many
reluctant to acknowledge how the country quite ended up in this denouement, it
is important to look back briefly in order to look forward.
Outlawry in post-colonial Nigeria has a long and tawdry history. Stephen Ellis, who spent a lifetime researching and analysing this in some detail, recounted in his final book, This Present Darkness: A History of Organised Crime in Nigeria, when the spike started: “Shortly before the civil war, when government broke down in some parts of the Western Region and there was a blurred line between political violence, crime, and organised insurgency.” Many would argue that Nigeria has been one long insurgency since then in what has been – on close inspection – a long war against the logical consequences of chronic leadership failure.
The post-war continuation of the error that
we can shoot our way out of this failure of both leadership and national
inclusion can be traced back to the public executions by firing squad of armed
robbers, which began at the former Bar Beach in Lagos on April 26, 1971. The
spike in armed robbery in Nigeria coincided with the mismanagement by the
Yakubu Gowon regime of demobilisation in the aftermath of the Nigerian Civil
War. With neither preparation for post-military life nor skills to survive in
the rough and tumble of civilian existence after the war, the tens of thousands
of hurriedly demobilised men found alternative uses for their arms and skills,
often not in the most civil way possible. Public execution did not end armed
robbery. If anything, violent robbery escalated in both frequency and brutality.
The onset of presidential politics in 1979
did not just make civilians of soldiers, it also made civilians of armed
robbers, who provided the violent brawn to complement the political brains of
politicians in savage electoral brigandage. The numbers confectioned by this
criminal tag-team, as acknowledged by the Bolarinwa Babalakin Judicial
Commission of Inquiry into the Federal Electoral Commission (otherwise known as
FEDECO), often received judicial benediction from election tribunals. Senior police
officers, including former Inspector-General of Police, Sunday Adewusi and
former Police Commissioner in the old Anambra State, Bishop Eyitene, both now sadly late, compiled
infamous records of electoral joint enterprise with these merchants of
violence.
With the return of the military to
government in 1983, we had a gradual escalation of violence to the point where,
by the mid-1990s, the regime of General Sani Abacha fully deployed criminal
gangs and networks against peaceful civic advocacy in the Niger Delta. In
institutions of tertiary education, vice-chancellors in various universities and
rectors of polytechnics did the same. By the time the country returned to civil
rule in 1999, the politicians were happy to resume their marriage with violence
and its unlicensed suppliers. This time, as former senator Shehu Sani recalls
in the title of his book, in addition to using them to rig elections, they were
also freely deployed as tools of political assassination.
When the police liquidated a little known Islamic cleric,
Mohammed Yusuf, and hundreds of his followers in Maiduguri, north-east Nigeria,
in July 2009, they did not realise how swiftly or steeply the violence would
switch gears. Law enforcement, hitherto used to deniable means of committing
such atrocities, had become fully converted to the methods of outlawry. The
blowback ended any pretence to a law enforcement response to Nigeria’s violence
and launched the country into an interminable season of mass atrocities.
In 2011, President Goodluck Jonathan,
embattled in the North-East, invited a blue-ribbon panel to help the country
understand the issues and think through its options. To lead this task, he
tapped Gaji Galtimari, a former public administrator
and diplomat and leader of the Borno Elders Forum, who died in 2019. When it
reported at the end of 2011, the Galtimari Committee “traced the origins of
private militias in Borno State, of which Boko Haram in particular is an
offshoot, to politicians who set them up in the run up to the 2003 general
election. The militias were armed and used extensively as political thugs.
After the elections and having achieved their primary purpose, the politicians
left the militias to their fate since they could not continue keeping them
employed. With no visible means of sustenance, some of the militias gravitated
towards religious extremism, the type offered by Mohammed Yusuf.”
The Galtimari Report recommended
that the government should “beam their searchlight on some politicians who
sponsored, funded and used the militia groups that later metamorphosed into
Boko Haram and bring them to justice.” In its White Paper issued in
May 2012 on the report, the Federal Government accepted this
recommendation and directed the National Security Adviser to co-ordinate
compliance. One decade later, nothing has come of this recommendation.
Instead, what followed has been a descent
into sovereign abdication followed by capitulation. Three years later, in 2015,
the crisis in north-east Nigeria had become a source of earnings not merely for
elements in the security services but also for mercenaries imported by
government and paid with public funds. This, notwithstanding
that Nigeria was one of the prime movers behind the Convention for the
Elimination of Mercenarism in Africa adopted in 1977, which
criminalises mercenarism and renders liable to punishment all persons involved
in it.
As candidate in 2015, Major General Muhammadu Buhari
(retd.) cashed in on this and promised to provide the kind of leadership to end
it. Far from keeping his word, Buhari doubled down on the abdication, and
scaled it up to capitulation before replacing it with bare-faced coddling of
terror and insurgents. This appears to have led the rest of the country to the
conclusion that insurgency was the only path to dialogue. So, from the
North-East, mass violence has been replaced by an epidemic of mass atrocity and
from the North-East, the sites of these atrocities under him have spread to all
of the country.
As The New Humanitarian memorably reported
around the time of the Galtimari Whitepaper, the conclusion was inescapable
that “Nigeria’s criminal justice system has failed under the strain, with
security force abuses not being investigated and those responsible for Boko
Haram attacks not being prosecuted.” One decade later, the situation is
inestimably worse, not better.
In what looks like an ultimately doomed
effort to divert attention from capitulation to mass atrocity this past week,
the Chief Judge of Nigeria’s Federal High Court issued new rules directing that all terrorism
trials “shall be held in camera.” This is a breathtaking assertion by one
judicial officer of power to re-write with administrative ink the clear
provisions of the constitution and of international treaties on human rights to
which Nigeria is party. Section 36(4) of that constitution requires that every
accused person is “entitled to a fair hearing in public” and the only
person or authority who can order trials in camera under section 36(4)(a) is
“the court or tribunal” before whom the accused is charged.
Indeed, in its 2017 Report, the Justice
Biobele Georgewill Presidential Investigation Panel on the Compliance with
Human Rights Obligations and Rules of Engagement by the
Nigerian Armed Forces, insisted in a recommendation accepted by the Federal
Government that “an arrest under the Terrorism Prevention Act 2015 as amended
or any other Acts of Parliament, must be followed by expeditious prosecution
within a reasonable time before a court of competent jurisdiction as prescribed
by the provisions of Chapter IV of the Constitution of Nigeria 1999 as
amended.” As important as his office is, the Chief Judge of the Federal High
Court lacks powers to blithely amend the constitution or so cavalierly
expropriate rights granted by it.
This mis-step by the Chief Judge of the Federal High Court is the latest in a series of symbolic acknowledgements of the far reaching collapse of state capacity to guarantee that most basic affirmation in section 14(2)(b) of the 1999 Constitution that “the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” By the beginning of this century, the police and security agencies in Nigeria had come to adopt the methods of the people whom they were supposed to hold accountable. Two decades later, the courts appear keen converts to outlawry in a pretence to fight outlaws. The politicians and their families had for long lived by the mantra that all is fair in the rat race to power. With all of Nigeria’s rulers so committed to denuding it of legitimacy, is it little wonder that the curse of state incapacity in Nigeria is delivering that which communism failed to deliver – a proletarian Nirvana – in which all are joined by the assurance of painful death in mass atrocity or decapitation following mass abduction? 2023 will be interesting.
*Prof Odinkalu, lawyer and teacher, can be reached at chidi.odinkalu.tufts.edu
Excellent piece. It tells people not living a life of "Let's pretend" that Nigeria has probably gone off the edge of the precipice. The future is too cataclysmic to contemplate.
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