Security is too important to be left in the hands of security agencies and their political principals alone. That much is clear to every Nigerian now. Most of us are mere sitting ducks, unsure of whether we shall someday fall victim to the kidnapping gale terrorising the country from the desert to the coast.
When Muhammed Yusuf founded Boko Haram in 2002, the Nigerian government arrogantly thought that a mere police action would be adequate to stamp out the extremists and consign their madness to the trash bin of history. Two decades later, the fire of insecurity ignited by the terrorists has birthed new franchises across the length and breadth of Nigeria.
Collective War
The choice before Nigerians and their government is simple: We either join hands together to collectively fight the war against the various manifestations of insecurity or continue acting in our various tribal silos and perish together. Self preservation is the first law of nature. We must, therefore, cast aside the luxury of political partisanship and assist the authorities with ideas on how to defeat our collective foe.
In my view, there is no difference between Boko Haram terrorists and their cousins-in-crime, euphemistically called kidnappers or bandits. Anyone who unjustifiably takes the life of another person does not deserve to live. If we had applied that simple rule to the problem instead of speaking from both sides of the mouth and lionising the criminals, perhaps we wouldn’t have been supplicating on our knees today.
Our lethargy has emboldened the criminals to the extent that each gang now digs deep into its book of horrors to enact new ways of inflicting physical and psychological pain. Take the gut-wrenching case of Nabeeha Al-Kadriyar, a 400-level student of Biological Sciences at Ahmadu Bello University, who was kidnapped with her father and five sisters. The criminals released her father to go and arrange the payment of the ransom of N60 million demanded. While the man was still running from pillar to post in search of donors or benefactors, the bandits became impatient and killed Nabeeha with a promise to continue executing the other sisters one by one if the ransom was not promptly paid. She has since been buried.
The family and well wishers took to social media to try and raise the ransom. As usual, the traditional official statements and assurances by security agencies rent the air. The police are always “on top of the situation” while other security agencies always claim to be “on the trail of the fleeing criminals”.
If we have any respect for ourselves at all, it is about time we stopped our habitual perambulation. Enough of those heartfelt nonsenses we parrot instead of taking concrete action to ensure that parents won’t have to be burying their children again. During the Buhari years, a circus was always made of every tragedy— “Mr. President has held a closed door meeting with service chiefs” — as if the holding of the meeting was in itself a great achievement.
No Ransom
The Minister of Defence, Alhaji Abubakar Badaru, recently frowned at ransom payment. “We all know there’s an existing law against payment of ransom”, he said. “So, it is very sad for people to go over the internet and radio asking for donations to pay ransom. This will only worsen the situation; it will not help. If we stop, over time the kidnapping will not be profitable and they will stop. It is not easy though but that is the law,” he said.
The minister’s statement was not well received by the grieving public. And that is putting it politely.
Let’s do things differently henceforth. As I have stated above, security is not an exclusively esoteric matter on which ‘bloody civilians’ are not allowed to comment. If I was the president of Nigeria, I would make use of as many patriots in the creative industry as possible. We first have to out-think the bandits before we can rout them. Agatha Christie, the English crime novelist, short-story writer and playwright, was never a ‘security expert’; but I wager she would have given any security chief a run for his money in scenario planning. If the government opens the space, they’d be surprised at how resourceful some ‘non-experts’ currently being overlooked could be.
Many knowledgeable people who have spoken out have wondered how kidnappers always manage to collect ransom without being detected by the police. In other cases where money is wired to the kidnapper’s bank account, why are the authorities still unable to lay ambush for the criminals or trace the owners of such accounts? It doesn’t take much thinking to come to the conclusion that there is collusion in some of the cases. It is not impossible that the terrorists share part of their loot with officers of the law.
In the dying days of the Buhari administration, the United Arab Emirate (UAE) handed over a list of over 200 sponsors of terrorism to the Nigerian government. That list is still being kept under wraps because, as some officials explained, investigations are still ongoing. President Tinubu has to read the riot act to those in custody of that list so that they can be made to face the law.
Also, those romancing terrorism under the guise of religion have to be told in unmistakable terms that the state can no longer tolerate their duplicity.
Mercenaries
Extreme diseases deserve extreme treatment. We must not close our minds to the plan rolled out during the Jonathan presidency to engage some foreign entities to assist in winning the anti-terror war. The truth is that there are several mercenary groups now called private military companies (PMCs) which play an ever-increasing role in armed conflicts. They are not so anonymous anymore. And some are bigger than the combined armed forces of many countries.
Mercenaries are hired professional soldiers who fight for any state or nation without regard to political interests or issues. Employment of mercenaries could be politically dangerous as well as expensive. Nevertheless, the outsourcing of a number of basic functions which traditionally were carried out by national armies or police forces— known as the top-down privatisation— has blurred the borderlines between the public services of the State and the private commercial sector creating a dangerous “grey zone”.
PMC Wagner Group is a Russian state-funded private military company (PMC) controlled until 2023 by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a former close ally of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin. Evidence suggests that Wagner has been used as a proxy by the Russian government, allowing it to have plausible deniability for military operations abroad, and hiding the true casualties of Russia’s foreign interventions.
Whether acting individually, or in the employ of contemporary multi-purpose security companies, the mercenary is generally present as a violator of human rights. On occasion he acts as a professional agent in terrorist operations; he takes part in illicit trafficking; he commits acts of sabotage, among others. But, most times, he gets the job done because as far as he’s concerned, he’s executing a contract. In our peculiar situation, mercenary operations are best supervised by the office of the National Security Adviser while policing is democratised to include state police and even local government police services.
Shields
In Iraq, the number of “private contractors” fulfilling a number of military and quasi-military tasks varies according to different sources and the manner they are counted, ranging between 20,000 and 100,000 persons working for PMSCs. The US uses contractors in order to shield its normal forces from the atrocities which inevitably attend such assignments.
So, President Tinubu can take his hard decision now. The goal is clear: rid our land of terrorists, bandits, kidnappers or other violent criminal elements by whatever name called. Anyone who routinely commoditises Nigerian lives and makes money from hostage taking or cold-blooded murder does not deserve to live.
