Nigeria’s guardians are fragile little things too

Sometimes, in searching for something small, one ends up exhuming more than he bargains for. That is when the Hausa would say a needle has dug up a hoe. The less humane version would be the saying that a hen, while scratching for food, had dug up the knife to be used in its slaughter.

Last week, Aliyu Mohammed, a comptroller of the Nigeria Customs Service in Katsina said that while his men went into the forest around Dustinma to hunt down rice smugglers, they unexpectedly encountered a gang of armed bandits.

The bandits were ‘friendly’ and asked for some rice, he said. From the 37 bags of rice the officers had impounded from smugglers, they offered seven to the bandits to “save their lives.”

The bandits accepted the offerings and the two groups, law enforcers and criminals, parted ways amicably. And that was how these custom officers unwittingly fed the men who would kill villagers and abduct people. However, there are other layers to this unfortunate encounter that could have had a tragic end.

It would be simplistic of course to say that the officers shirked their responsibility by not apprehending or engaging the bandits, even if technically that is not their principal responsibility.

The same temptation applies to the recent mass abductions at the Federal College of Forestry Mechanisation, Afaka, Kaduna, where a group of soldiers could have averted the kidnap that night.

The school is only a stone’s throw from the Nigerian Defence Academy, and Kaduna is sometimes called Nigeria’s military capital. When the kidnap was underway, some students escaped and informed soldiers on patrol nearby. When the soldiers mobilised and arrived at the scene, they found the school gate padlocked with no gateman in sight. Instead of forcing the gate open and taking the kidnappers by surprise, these soldiers, God bless them, created a racket by blaring their car horns for 20 long minutes before using their armoured truck to breach the gate.

Of course, by that time, the kidnappers got the noisy memo, and not being fools, avoided a confrontation by escaping into the bush with some 39 students, who, as I write, are still in captivity a week later.

Of course, the natural inclination is to accuse the military in this instance of being unprofessional in handling this situation, even if they managed, through sheer noisemaking, to curtail the hitherto unhindered hour-and-a-half operation of the kidnappers.

What has emerged in the years since daring groups like the Niger Delta militants, Boko Haram and now, these ubiquitous bandits have surfaced, is the shortage of professionalism in the military, the fourth strongest on the continent, and the other security services in the country (I am of course, especially looking at you, the Nigeria Police Force). This is not saying there has been no professionalism in the discharge of their duties, only that there simply isn’t enough for them to perform the tasks expected of them.

Of course, they remain adept at the continued violation of the fundamental human rights of Nigerians and the use of excessive force in regime protection. How often have they rolled out their arsenal to torment those who speak against the government, disappearing dissident voices like Dadiyata, who has been missing since August 2019, or even arresting, detaining without trial, people like the controversial Mubarak Bala, and disregarding court orders for their release? Not to talk of the likes of whistleblower Mahdi Shehu, and Jones Abiri the journalist?

It is true, often, that the guardians we have tasked with protecting our country and us have failed more often than they have succeeded. The question is: Why?

What would have happened if those custom officers, under-armed and probably outnumbered, had gone for a shootout with the bandits? If they had been killed what would have happened to their families? Who would make sure their children have a roof over their heads, education and the protection they would need through life?

How about those soldiers in Kaduna? Did they have the right competencies to engage the bandits in the night? Did they have the right tools? Night vision goggles, for instance.

In all this hurry to blame and shame, we forget too often that these men and women, these broken angels charged to watch over us are just as vulnerable as we are, and many of them are merely deployed as pawns while the institution fails to give them the guarantees and capacities they need to perform their jobs.

Last year alone, dozens of police officers were themselves abducted for ransom, some while on active duty, including six Assistant Superintendents of Police, who were travelling to Zamfara. Of all those police personnel kidnapped, not one was rescued. The police, like the rest of us helpless Nigerians, did karo-karo, collected money, went to the forest with their heads lowered, and said, “Ranku ya dade, shegu,” and dropped the ransom to collect their men. None of those bandits, to the best of my knowledge, has been tracked down and arrested.

At least 101 police officers were killed on duty in 2019 alone; and recently, police officers have been targeted, especially in the South-East, where they are being killed and their weapons taken. The only authority capable of ending this targeted killing of police officers is the police itself.

Sadly, there is so much rot in the police and policing system that the police would be the first to exploit and expose its officers to risk. Officers are poorly trained, poorly equipped, and when they are killed, there is only a whimsical outrage within the force before their families are evicted from their deplorable barracks. The police do not mount any serious, aggressive manhunts for cop killers. They do not ensure that no one who kills an officer gets away with it, thereby making the killing of police officers an unattractive crime as is the case in places like the US and the UK.

The Nigerian military, on the other hand, has been designed and trained to fight an enemy it had never encountered (external threats), but has ended up in gutter fights with an enemy they were neither designed nor trained for (the internal threats we now face).

The police should be dealing with these threats, but they are in no shape to do it. This has needlessly caused the lives of some of our troops and led to the incapacitation of others, like Abdullahi Mohammed of the 212 Battalion.

He and his colleagues were said to be on guard duty at their garrison commander’s house in Kaduna in June 2015 when they received a call that cattle rustlers might be prowling around their commander’s farm. They were ordered to drive out in the night and pursue these thieves; and reluctantly, they went, suffered an accident on the way in which two soldiers died.

Abdullahi survived but suffered spinal injuries that have left him incapacitated. He took to Twitter recently to appeal for help, claiming the army had abandoned him in his time of need.

These, dear reader, are some of the broken angels who should stand guard over us as we sleep. But who is standing for them? When senior government officials, military and police officers loot resources meant to equip and train personnel, they expose not only the soldiers, police officers and every security personnel out there, but they expose the country and they expose every single one of us.

There are no cutting corners here. Nigeria as a country is facing existential threats in the forms of criminal elements that are decimating lives, pissing all over the flag and every symbol of this country.

To contain and eliminate this, the security system and its personnel must reboot itself and train its personnel to efficiently and professionally tackle their responsibility. To succeed in this, they must first learn to protect themselves, look out for one another and remember that the innocent journalists, private citizens, whistleblowers and those calling on the president to resign, just as the president himself did to his predecessor, are not the enemies. We should also remember that before these men and women are soldiers, policemen and rice-gifting customs officers, they are husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons and daughters. And they too, like us, are just as vulnerable.