“The more you spend on peace, the less you spend on war”.– African proverb.
Debates on rising cases of agreements involving communities, on the one hand, and organised and armed criminal gangs(popularly known as bandits) on the other, are reaching new levels of bitterness and concerns. The bitterness comes from victims of bandits who are accused of cowardly betrayal by others who are either uninvolved and unaffected, as well as those who have failed in their duties to defend them. The concerns come from people who have an idea of the implications of the spreading collapse of the Nigerian state as more citizens submit to the powers of non-state actors and criminals who now decide how they live and die.
Virtually every state in the country now has one type or another armed group. These operate entirely outside any, or at best a wobbly legal framework. Many exist as extensions of powers of state-level politicians or communities that arm and kit them to pursue goals that will offend the poorest standards of legality or social justice. Katsina State government recently announced that it is buying what looks like a large quantity of ammunition for the State Vigilante. In all probability, many state governments and communities are arming their vigilante from the same sources criminal gangs do. Our Constitution which gives the Nigerian state monopoly over the legitimate use of violence, and the Federal Government monopoly over the military and policing now has less than an academic status.
Fuelling the debates around propriety or legality of engaging armed criminals is an insidious argument with potentially devastating consequences for many Northern communities. There is an emerging opinion which insists that to encourage negotiations and ‘settlement’ with particularly Fulani bandits is subversive and self-defeating. It argues that only those who have no sympathies for the Hausa, currently engaged in a historic struggle with the Fulani for freedom from centuries of oppression by Fulani usurpers will make a case for the slightest sympathy or concession to Fulani bandits. This position rules out any option outside an emphatic elimination of all Fulani criminality and a restoration of the confidence and dignity of Hausa peasantry and powers of its ruling elite. Banditry, it argues, represents the modern manifestation of the domination of the Hausa by the Fulani usurper. Its defeat will expose the underbelly of the beast: the two centuries of oppression of the Hausa by Fulani who, two centuries ago, had no roots in what is modern Nigeria.
The Fulani bandit versus Hausa peasantry narrative has meaning only in the fact that much of the trigger to this spreading disaster was failure of time-tested mechanisms for resolving peasant-herder conflicts in most of Northern Nigeria. The rest is crude fiction and contrived falsehood that insults history and contemporary realities about what makes up the vast territory of Northern Nigeria. It is a blunt political tool which diverts attention from the search for genuine solutions, and merely seeks to achieve an impossible political goal of creating another fault line in the North. It ignores the reality that it is practically impossible to distinguish the Hausa from the Fulani by any meaningful criteria, but it is content with marginal genealogy and cultural differences. In any case, this particular type of criminality has sucked in many Hausa and members of other ethnic groups as collaborators and beneficiaries, such that it is only its face that is substantially Fulani.
There are many victims of this conflict, the Hausa peasant being among the most prominent. There are also many Fulani victims ranging from dispossessed herders to displaced pastoralists; a profiled, targeted and stigmatised population and a category pushed even further down the human development index than it was 20 years ago. In numerical terms there are likely to be a lot less Fulani victims than Hausa peasantry, but this will only reflect relative populations. In real terms a dispossessed herder loses everything. He becomes a threat to the entire population. When he is victim and target of widespread hostility, his choices are reduced to one. He becomes a bandit and swells the rank of the aggrieved and aggressor all in one. He hurts those closest to him, the Hausa who are justifiably aggrieved.
There is another developing division which has greater potential to frustrate the potential for the search for a genuine and lasting solution. This is the disagreement within the influential Muslim clergy over strategy. Very strong religious opinions register an abhorrence to even the idea of contemplating a resolution which involves concessions to the armed criminal. It is reward for wrong killings, theft, rape and kidnapping; a new foundation for further conflict when justice is sacrificed for expediency; a risky gamble not supported by faith or facts and a weakening of the state’s duty to punish wrong and uphold the law.
Equally strong voices argue that the failure of the state to defeat the Fulani bandit is reason enough to seek for options to continuous and unproductive armed engagement with the bandit. It argues that compromise is not alien to Islam. It argues that there is evidence that the Muslim Fulani, ignored and neglected by the Nigerian state and society for so long (leading substantially to the virtual rebellion by some of his kins), can be turned around by an enlightened strategy which combines a non-kinetic engagement, comprehensive accommodation by non-Fulani communities, restitution and substantial investment into social and economic lives in Fulani and victim communities.
Significantly, this position makes the case for a comprehensive strategy that prevents the conflict from migrating around; the values of investing in Islamic and Western education among the Muslim young in particular and a comprehensive review of bottlenecks which create sources of friction between the Fulani herder and his sympathisers on the one hand, and communities that were either victims of the criminal Fulani or who will insist that any concession to the criminal Fulani is injustice that will make a weak foundation for lasting security.
As things stand, the evidence on the ground is that the Nigerian state is not winning the war against the bandit. The insinuations that much of the insecurity crippling the North is related to illegal mining of the massive quantities of solid mineral wealth over which the region sits should worry government. Every time a community submits to the criminal, the state loses credibility and respect. Its current strategy of throwing ineffective force against armed criminals is severely defective.
This is the time when Tinubu’s administration should widen its search for ideas and initiatives that should free citizens from the criminal and restore peace and security in the North. This may be just what the North needs to feel it has a place in the scheme of things in Nigeria. If the administration will not do this, elders and the considerable number of concerned, influential and knowledgeable Northerners should pool their resources together to chart a political course that will stop the bleeding in the region.
The post Fight, surrender or make peace, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed appeared first on Vanguard News.
