By Cheta Nwanze
A country’s capital is the city where its national government is located. This location is usually carefully chosen and designed to offer the best impression and position for a nation’s government and people to connect optimally with citizens and visitors. Sometimes nations change their choice of capitals to get new ones that adequately serve these purposes and this was the idea behind the Nigerian Government moving the federal capital from Lagos to Abuja in 1991.
Thirty-one
years later though, what we have is a situation where Abuja is dealing with a
significant terrorist threat that began as a spate of armed robbery attacks on
the outskirts of the Federal Capital Territory and recently manifested as
prison breaks that had arrested terrorists and criminals being freed.
The situation should be shocking but it really isn’t. It has sadly been rather predictable and began with the regime of retired Major General Muhammadu Buhari responding to attacks on Northern minorities with a disdainful lack of concern that had many onlookers believing it was complicit in some way.
Benue
and Kaduna states had been dealing with violent attacks that were said to be
“clashes” and the Benue State Governor, Samuel Ortom, was even attacked on his
farm a couple of years ago and has recently asked the American government to
hold the Buhari regime responsible for the violence and deaths arising from the
actions of the terrorists who were described as “ordinary herders” by the
Federal Government for years.
The
so-called “herders” had also been involved in a spate of attacks in the
largely-Christian Southern Kaduna portion of Kaduna State and the complaints
and casualties of the Southern Kaduna people were contemptuously waved aside by
state and federal officials. The communities under attack insisted that the
violence was being deliberately fostered to enable the seizure of lands.
Rather
than respond responsibly, the government through one of its spokesmen, Femi
Adesina, asked the people under siege to surrender their lands to stop the
violence. Adesina’s very words on national television were: “Ancestral attachment?
You can only have ancestral attachment when you are alive. If you are talking
about ancestral attachment, if you are dead, how does the attachment matter?”
Governor
Ortom went to see President Buhari and was told: “I ask you in the name of God
to accommodate your countrymen.”
The ethnic and
religious identities of the victims of the attacks were clearly a factor and
this was made even clearer when the Federal Government tried to even placate
the terrorists, who were masquerading as herders, by creating
government-sponsored ranches for them in all states of the country. Fierce
resistance from the Southern and Middle-Belt regions led to the abandonment of
the idea.
The lack
of backlash encouraged the terrorists and criminals who eventually started looking
for more lucrative opportunities and set about kidnapping commuters on the
Abuja-Kaduna Road, and got bolder and started attacking the Kaduna-Abuja train
service. Now they have become bold enough to target the country’s capital.
All
this could have been avoided if the government had not let ethnic and religious
differences mute its response to a situation that had dangerous implications
for national security. For those of us who dared to voice out, in those heady
days, how dangerous the slope we were on was, we were assaulted by troll farms
and called choice names, “bigot” being the favourite. People tend to forget
that when you feed a baby monster with your enemies, it grows to become a
teenager, and if you’ve run out of enemies by that point, it will eat your
children.
Now
Abuja is facing a significant terrorist threat and the impact is going to be
widely felt for a long time outside of the immediate security threat. You see,
Abuja and other Nigerian cities were already struggling in the fight to become
commercial hubs for the African ecosystem and were losing major ground to
cities in Ghana and Kenya.
The
city of Nairobi scored a major coup when Google launched its first African
product development centre there after having set up an AI and research centre
in Ghana in 2019. Financial giant, Visa, has also set up an innovation centre
in Nairobi.
It
gets more interesting when you realise that even non-African cities are in the
competition to be the major African hub with Dubai being a major competitor. More
than 21,000 African companies are registered in Dubai. 45 multinationals that
group their Middle East and African operations jointly have also placed their
regional headquarters for these zones in Dubai.
Dubai
becoming the hub of African Business for decision-makers is not that strange an
idea when you consider that it’s really about a location having the proper mix
of proximity, infrastructure, political connections, comfort, safety, capital,
structure and accessibility. Miami, Florida is in the USA but it serves this
same purpose for Latin America for pretty much the same reasons that Nigerian
cities are losing out: insecurity and infrastructure. Miami is a three-hour
flight away from Colombia, a six-hour flight away from Brazil and a two-hour
flight away from Puerto Rico. It has become a key hub for Latin America with
more than 1,200 multinational corporations setting up the headquarters of their
Latin American operations in Florida.
Dubai’s excellent flight connections, ICT
infrastructure and tourist-friendly structure have made it appealing to a lot
of African and non-African power-brokers looking for a hub to connect and do
business. Abuja being seen as unsafe at a time when Nigeria needs an annual
foreign direct investment inflow of $90 billion but gets only $698.7 million of
FDI in 2021 is not helpful. Hopefully, this teaches us the economic value of
abiding by the principle of justice and equity regardless of the ethnic or
religious affiliations of the victims or the aggressors. Best Practice tends to
make for the best outcomes.
*Nwanze is a partner in SBM Intelligence
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