Getting down to kidnapping business
It is noticeable; kidnapping has led to the loss of lives and money in Nigeria. Many of victims have been killed in the course of their custody, abduction or release. Many more have been injured. It’s most unfortunate. This is in addition to huge amounts of money lost to ransom takers. Alas, Nigeria should never have got here!
However, the kidnapping business in Nigeria has been mostly perpetrated by criminal gangs and violent groups, usually pursuing political agendas. The underlying logic of the kidnapping enterprise is that the victim is worth a ransom value and they or their proxy have the capacity to pay. It’s sometimes, the government that waters the garden of the crime, by paying the ransom. What a recipe for disaster. Whenever there is an abduction of students, the government gets several hundred millions out of its account and negotiates a deal with the abductors, and then the officials of the state take their shares. They (the state officials) would be in two advantageous positions – the Nigerians would be in celebration with them and establish a diplomatic link with the abductors. Do you think anyone who runs a business like this would let it collapse? Negative.
Nigeria, has the world’s highest rates of kidnap-for-ransom cases. Other countries high up on the list included Venezuela, Mexico, Yemen, Syria, the Philippines, Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. This, by and large, happens owing the involvement of organized violent groups such as militants, bandits and Boko Haram insurgents who use kidnapping to make their insurgency stay afloat. The insurgents engage in single or group kidnapping as a means of generating money to fund their activities.
Nothing changes, if some state officials are in the business and the government does not provide stricter measures, such as life imprisonment or the death penalty for the offenders. Chukwudi Dumee Onuamadike, popularly known as Evans, for instance, is a Nigerian alleged kidnapper who is a native of Nnewi, Anambra State. He is sometimes referred to as “The Billionaire Kidnapper” because the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) believe he is one of the richest criminals in the kidnapping business in Nigeria. In some of his operations, he made amounts of up to 1 million dollars.
Professor Usman Yusuf, former executive secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme, granted The Sun newspaper an interview sometime in December last year in which he warned that the 2023 general elections, for which our politicians are already positioning themselves for elective offices, might not hold especially in the north because of the increasing insecurity in the land. The politicians, from President Buhari down to local government chairmen, can pretend all they want but they cannot in truth deny that where the next president comes from is less important than the survival of this nation itself. You have to have Nigeria before you can have a Nigerian president. I thought that was pretty elementary.
I have had to quote part of his interview elsewhere to help me make some important points about the country’s dire security situation. I am quoting him at some length here again, to make the same points in a different context, to wit: this country is on fire but those who are constitutionally entrusted with putting out the fire prefer to adorn themselves in expensive babar riga and strut the land like colossus. Nero did not do half of what our political leaders are doing to ensure his place in world history as an example of how a leader must not respond to existential threats to his country.
We watch helplessly as criminals take over large swathes of our country while the politicians are blissfully engaged in the unproductive labour of bickering over which geo-political zone should produce the next president. In spite of the looming shadow over the nation, the politicians refuse to pause in their primitive struggle for power and collectively commit to rescuing the nation from the myriads of criminals roaming and controlling much of the land. It is beyond pathetic that the Nigerian state with all the military arsenal at its disposal is reduced to negotiating with these criminals and non-state actors from the position of apparent and abject weakness.
Here is part of what Yusuf said: “There is insecurity all over the country and what have the politicians who are very selfish been talking about all these times – restructuring, 2023 presidency, where the president will come from. At a time when Nigeria is facing the worst insecurity of its lifetime even since the civil war; at a time when the ship of state is drifting; at a time when our people are facing the most excruciating poverty and hunger, our politicians are thinking of who will be handed over power in 2023, instead of how to get us out of the pit.”
“If this insecurity continues towards 2023, there may not be a country to restructure, there may not be a presidency to rotate and 2023 may just be dream.”
There is an ominous storm gathering over the land. The security situation is much worse today than as at December 2020 when Yusuf spoke to the newspaper. More and more people have issued a similar warning and urged the president to end the reign of his silence and take on the first constitutional duty of making the country and its citizens safe and secure. Still, there is no anxiety on the part of the president and the state governors to rise to the challenge and give the people’s country back to the people.
After years of dithering in the face of public clamour for him to rejig the security architecture, Buhari eventually changed the service chiefs. It would appear, however, that he thinks that rejigging the security architecture began and ended with the change of service chiefs. After all, he can argue that that was what the Nigerian public wanted. As thank you gift to the former service chiefs, they will represent him as ambassadors. How nice.
However, while bringing in new men with new thinking to the helm of affairs is necessary, the fundamentals of a new security architecture go far beyond who command the army, the navy and the air force. As a general in the Nigerian Army, the president does not need any tutoring in that. What the public expected to see along with the change of service chiefs is a new and clear road map towards making our nation and us secure. Still, there is no motion. We are still waiting for Godot.
What is happening in the north-west geo-political zone is a huge shame for the giant of Africa. Kaduna, Katsina and Zamfara states are at the mercy of a new group of criminals known as bandits. The north-central zone is at the mercy of killer herdsmen. And with the north-east controlled more or less by Boko Haram, the north is encircled by criminals. The bandits and killer herdsmen reign but the state governors rule. They kill and kidnap at will and vanish into thin air. Not one of them has ever been arrested.
Yet, interestingly, they are not faceless criminals. The leaders of the bandits are known to the state authorities. Indeed, they are so powerful that each time they strike, terrified state governors rush to negotiate with them from a position of weakness. They get paid the negotiated settlement and they release their kidnap victims. I am sure you have heard of loose talks about granting them amnesty by the federal government. Do not be hard on those who offered this as a viable approach to ending their reign. They spoke in desperation and a desire to be heard offering some assistance to the government that seems so clueless as to what it could do to end its own shame.
It bears repeating: things are getting worse. It would be a disservice to the nation for our political leaders to sit on their haunches and entertain themselves to the hollowness of their self-delusion that everything is all right because they fear to face the profoundly disturbing facts that we are once more dancing on the edge. Ethnic tension exacerbated by ethnic attacks in some parts of the country has added fat to the fire of criminality and compounded the situation further. Last week the former head of state, General Abdulsalami Abubakar warned that if nothing was done to address the growing tension in the country, “it might lead to a point of no return.” He said the ethnic attacks had added to the embers of disunity and anarchy and that the country’s cup is already filled with incidences of insurgency, kidnapping and armed banditry and robbery.
We have never it so bad. Not even Abuja is a safe island. The Daily Trust of February 13 reported that more than 30 people were kidnapped in the FCT in one month. Some of the residents told the newspaper they were living in fear. They could say that again.
To save Nigeria from criminals and ethnic champions is a task that must be done – and urgently too. Our country needs to be secure and peaceful to meet the challenges of modern nation-building unencumbered by the menace of poverty in the midst of plenty.
When governors of northern states began to consider amnesty for bandits, it seemed like a noble programme to neutralize a threat that had destroyed too many lives and livelihoods. Of course, this formula, once tested by the Umaru Yar’adua government to resolve militancy in the Niger-Delta region, never sat well with the public. It was chiefly the idea of the political class, and the implementation of this shadowy scheme has left the people even more confused.
At first, the negotiations to stabilize the North centred around cattle rustling, and before the politicians could praise their genius, the pampered bandits moved to “rustling” human beings. You can’t blame them. They saw through the naïveté and fear of those elected to terminate them and realised their disadvantage amidst Nigeria’s security compromise. It really doesn’t make sense that the political class are expecting a sustained victory in negotiating with those in the know of their weaknesses.
In the past few weeks, these politicians also gave the bandits more reason to stay in the business. Last Wednesday, addressing journalists after a meeting with the President in Abuja, Governor Bello Matawalle, made a case for the bandits. He said, “If you investigate what is happening, and what made them take the law into their hands, some of them, sometimes, were cheated by the so-called vigilante groups.” This public legitimization of bandits by an official elected to stop them is radicalizing, even if unintentional.
Governor Matawalle has been a leading frontman of the campaign to end banditry in the North, and his enthusiasm as a chief security officer with neither Police nor Army was impressive. In just a few weeks in power, he established ties with various syndicates operating in the region. When 340 schoolboys were kidnapped at a boarding school in Kankara, Katsina, he was quick to reach out to his Katsina state counterpart to intervene, but what was scarier was his claim that no ransom was paid to secure the release of the boys.
In a February 20 interview with Daily Trust, the mastermind of the Kankara mass kidnap, Auwal Daudawa, revealed why he took the boys: “I did that to demonstrate that I had the capacity to do it and I was not afraid of anybody other than Allah” This emphasis on their religiosity in the course of an unmistakably criminal life calls to mind the doctrine of the Boko Haram who must also find amusing Daudawa’s outburst that “We were also conscious of God despite all we were doing. It was even the fear of God that restrained us from doing other things.”
The confession of Daudawa, a product of Governor Matawalle’s amnesty programme, is a warning to reassess this process that has kept a few bandits smiling to the bank, and with bandits growing, in size, audacity and notoriety, across the country. A bandit who isn’t in the business for money is definitely not a bandit, that’s a terrorist—a dyed-inthe-wool terrorist. The government must take a step back to properly profile the cast of character they invite to dine with them.
The repeat of Kankara abduction in the relatively peaceful Niger state, at an allboys science college in Kagara, appeared as a demonstration of the daringness that Daudawa spoke about. The mass abduction, of which release or rescue is still in progress, has exposed our collective vulnerabilities. It’s introduced Nigerians to the national security risk that is Niger state, which, by landmass, is the largest of all the states in the country and the FCT. The spillover of
But, as sad as it is, the Kagara kidnap is going to play to the advantage of the people of Niger State. The world is finally going to scrutinize and acknowledge the dysfunctions of that mostly misgoverned wasteland that seems like Nigeria’s abandoned project.
this terrorism to the state with the largest ungoverned areas in the country should alarm us.
One of the reasons Borno state has been hard to protect from the rampaging Boko Haram is its vast expanse of land, and Niger state is bigger. With a landmass more than that of the Republic of Ireland, two and a half times the size of the Southeast region, four times the size of Kano state and over twenty times that of Lagos state, any security compromise in Niger state would be a nightmare. So, we must begin to ask ourselves whether we are prepared for an intensified version of the Borno experience.
That Niger state, a fertile ground for criminal operations, hasn’t been overrun by terrorists, isn’t out of sheer luck. It’s the legacy of proactive governance, especially of the past government. Despite his many undoings, Governor Mu’azu Babangida Aliyu was spectacularly determined in preventing the Boko Haram from securing a base Niger state. His sensitivity to the activities of violent extremist and potentially extreme groups was a virtue even the harshest critics of his administration had to commend. His sacking of seclusive religious groups, which some considered a breach of freedom of worship, including the invidious Darul Islam, a religious group that inhabited an area around Mokwa, might be controversial, as the group was seen as “peaceful” - and so was the earlier Boko Haram - but there’s something condescendingly sinister about a group refusing to integrate with the society that fails to practise their ideals or sign up to their moral creeds.
But, as sad as it is, the Kagara kidnap is going to play to the advantage of the people of Niger State. The world is finally going to scrutinize and acknowledge the dysfunctions of that mostly misgoverned wasteland that seems like Nigeria’s abandoned project. The last time the state attracted such national attention was between 1998 and 1999, when one of its indigene, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, was leading Nigeria and also between 1985 and 1993, when we gave Nigeria a political dribbler—the polarizing General Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida.
The analyses of Niger’s socio-economic misfortunes can come later. Now, there are terrorists with RPG launchers in the country’s most ungoverned areas, and they also have our boys hostage. It’s also ironic that the Minister of Defence, Bashir Magashi, asked people to “stand to fight” the very “bandits” bankrolled by the programmes of the same government through dubious amnesty, ransoms and failed negotiations. We are dealing with state-sponsored terrorism.