‘Guns for cows’ deal backfires as Nigerian crims turn to kidnapping

As a gangster, arms dealer and kidnapper extraordinaire, Awwalun Daudawa looked beyond reform. Last December, he masterminded one of Nigeria’s biggest school kidnappings, abducting more than 300 boys in Katsina, the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari.

A week later, the boys were freed, amid rumours Daudawa had been paid a hefty ransom. But having carried out the kidnapping on the president’s home turf, many expected him to then be hunted down with a vengeance.

Instead, last month, he took advantage of a controversial “guns for cows” amnesty scheme, handing his weapons in to officials in nearby Zamfara state and pledging to renounce violence.

“I am a changed person now and my plan is to go back to school and become a normal person,” he declared to local journalists, as he and four fellow bandits swore a public oath on the Quran.

The amnesty is one of several rolled out recently across northwest Nigeria, with local governors arguing they are the only way to stem a wave of banditry that has seen 8000 people killed and kidnapped in a decade.

But critics claim they are emboldening bandits. A fortnight after Daudawa vowed to mend his ways, gunmen kidnapped 279 schoolgirls from a boarding school in Jangebe, also in Zamfara state.

The hostages were released last Wednesday, with Bello Matawalle, Zamfara’s governor, saying he “thanked Allah”. Again, though, many believe it was not the hand of God, but the handover of money, that secured the girls’ liberty.

“No matter what the government says, there are ransoms that are paid and these kidnappings have become lucrative,” said Yan St Pierre, of the Berlin-based Modern Security Consulting Group, which operates in Nigeria. He said amnesties “only encourage gangs to commit such crimes, because there is a total absence of sanction”.

The spate of school kidnappings — 27 students were also taken from a school in Niger state last month — has echoes of the Chibok kidnapping of 2014, when 276 girls were abducted by Boko Haram, Islamist terrorists.

Ransom of about € 3 million bought the freedom of about 100 of the Chibok girls, which some say alerted other Nigerian armed groups to the rewards of kidnapping.