The phantom Fulani herdsmen

Our constitution imposes on the governments of the federation the fundamental duty of making the country secure and its people safe. Section 14 subsection (b) of the constitution states as follows: “The security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose (emphasis added) of government.”

The legitimacy of government is hinged on its capacity to fully discharge this critical and admittedly heavy constitutional responsibility. With one federal government, 36 state governments and 774 local governments (the largest collection of governments in Africa), keeping us secure and safe should be a piece of cake. It isn’t.

Insecurity is our number one problem. It makes nonsense of our economic planning and dries up direct foreign investments. Governments seem both confused and utterly helpless in responding adequately to this challenge. Name them: Boko Haram, armed robberies, pipe line vandalisation, kidnappings and the killings that go on almost everywhere without rhyme or reason.

Now we have the phantom killers known as Fulani herdsmen. They go where they choose and lay waste entire communities with which they have no quarrel. They operate with impunity. Ask the Agatu people in Benue State.

Late in December last year they struck in Southern Kaduna in an orgy of killings and destruction. The Vicar-General of the Catholic Diocese of Kafanchan, the epicentre of the killings, Rev Ibrahim Yakubu, furnished the world with these grim statistics in the wake of the killings: 880 people killed; 53 villages destroyed; 1,422 houses torched, 18 churches burnt down and one primary school destroyed.

Makes your stomach churn. The pattern of killings and the attack on Christian places of worship would invariably suggest that the perpetrators intended to create the impression that the attack was either directed at Christians or it was calculated to provoke the Christians to seek revenge. In burying our heads in the sand we are playing with fire.

The term, Fulani herdsmen, has become a franchise. When a state government is unable to properly respond to such killings and destruction, it feels safe to attribute them to Fulani herdsmen. These phantom killers must have been created for the expressed purpose of excusing government failure to arrest the deteriorating security situation in various parts of the country.

A week or so ago as of this writing, the members of the Nigerian Bar Association, NBA, paid what was reported as a solidarity visit to the governor of Kaduna State, Malam Nasir El-Rufai. The governor made a surprising confession. He told his learned visitors: “Since 1980, about 10,000 to 20,000 (people) were killed in Kaduna State during crisis and government did not prosecute anybody.”

There can be no better telling evidence of government’s unwillingness or inability to face this problem squarely. The killings and the destruction go on year after year because governments treat those who perpetrate them as sacred cows. The phantom killers enjoy an uncommon freedom to deprive the rest of us of our God-given as well as our constitutional rights.

I admire El-Rufai for his courage and outspokenness. I believe he has the guts and the gumption to define a new style of leadership worth emulating by his more establishmentarian colleagues. But I fear that something might have slipped from that persona. I found his response to the killings in the southern parts of his state tardy and lacking in empathy. By the time he and President Buhari reluctantly woke up to and decided to ‘do something’ about it, the violence had more or less run its course.

He has promised that those arrested for their part in the orgy of violence would be tried. Ah, we are about to see the faces of the phantoms unveiled.

The guns have fallen silent. The slaughter swords and knives have been put away. The dead - men, women, boys and girls - rest in mass graves. They throb our collective conscience but only as mere faceless statistics. The military presence in Southern Kaduna has imposed a semblance of peace on that troubled part of the country. This is a palliative, not the solution.

There is something profoundly sad about this standard official reaction. I put it down to government ineptitude or insouciance. All problems, be they religious, ethnic or political, have their roots. Sometimes you do not even need to dig deep to get at the roots. Our governments are reluctant to dig for the root cause or causes in order not to expose the big and powerful men behind them. Sad, very sad.

Even when, to mollify public anger and frustrations, they condescend to set up judicial or administrative commissions of enquiry to establish the facts about the crisis and recommend the guilty for appropriate deterrent punishment, they choose to do obeisance to hypocrisy. They let the reports and the recommendations gather dust on the shelves It is a telling evidence of irresponsibility on the part of the federal and state governments. This is a greater pity than you might suppose.

We, the people, seem complicit in the complacency of the governments to make us feel secure and safe in our own country. The irony is that all the governments have handsome security votes they spend as the spirit of profligacy moves them and for which they account to no one.

Something must give. Northern political leaders and traditional rulers assembled in Kaduna last week to jaw-jaw on the security challenges that face them individually and collectively. Seems like a good step but we have to wait and see what happens post the well-crafted speeches delivered in Kaduna.

I was intrigued by the analysis of the crises by chairman of the Northern Governors Forum and governor of Borno State, Alhaji Kashim Shettima. He said: “Northern Nigeria today is blighted by a deadly…insurgency, rural armed banditry, cattle rustling, ethnic and religious conflicts, the underlying cause of which are poverty, illiteracy, social exclusivity and severely limited economic opportunities.”

Let us not lose hope because at least the governors know what went wrong. Let us see what treatment they apply to the problem. Can they give our once peaceful region back to us? And do we have to wait for Godot or until Rip Van Winkle wakes up from his long sleep?

Something has to give. We must demand that the security votes be used in our security interests. Each governor must be personally held responsible for serious security breaches in his state. If a governor proves incompetent in response to such breaches, he must be removed from office. Stupid immunity or not.

The state has sufficient security manpower to arrest the perpetrators of mayhems. There can be no credible excuse for our governments to feel so helpless and blame the so-called Fulani herdsmen for these heinous acts. We are tired of excuses by our rulers. We must demand to be made safe and secure in our country. It is not too much to ask of governments with such large free fund in the name of security votes.