That Zamfara Police Ambush

Recently, attackers ambushed a police convoy near Gidan-Giye village in Tsafe local government area of Zamfara State, killing at least five police officers and three members of the state’s Community Protection Guard. Two officers were wounded, seven others were rescued and an unconfirmed number were dragged away into the bush. According to officials, the gunmen poured fire into the bus conveying the team, destroyed it and walked away with five AK-47 rifles. The police have withheld the names of the dead pending investigation, and there is little sign that the country paused to mourn them. That silence says as much about us as the attack says about the bandits.

Reports suggest the officers were on their way to provide security for a party’s senatorial rerun primary in Zamfara North, a routine democratic errand that ended in a massacre. That detail should trouble everyone with a stake in the coming general election. In 10 weeks, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will deploy more than 700,000 ad hoc staff on each polling day, and the police will be expected to escort them and guard materials across the same terrain where officers cannot travel safely to a party primary. If the Force cannot move a single team through Zamfara without losing lives, the assumptions behind election security planning deserve urgent review.

The Zamfara attack is not an isolated tragedy. According to reports at least 98 police deaths across 21 states between January and October this year, with Zamfara and Kebbi accounting for 14 each. In August, ten officers died in a single gun battle with bandits in Kebbi State. Earlier in the year, gunmen killed three policemen in an ambush in Katsina, and bandits attacked a mobile police camp in Kwara, killing three more. Each of these incidents was reported, condemned and quickly forgotten, as if the deaths of officers were part of the weather in the North-West rather than failures for which someone must answer.

What makes the latest attack harder to bear is that the terrain was known. In October last year, bandits attacked a police checkpoint at Gidan Giye and killed five officers along with community guards. A year on, officers were again moving through the same corridor in a soft-skinned bus, and again the attackers appear to have known where to wait. Security analysts have described the attack as a calculated ambush and asked how the bandits learnt of the movement. Those questions point to two failures the police high command must confront honestly: the absence of protected vehicles and the leakage of operational information.

The question of leaked movements deserves particular attention. Communities across Zamfara have long complained that informants embedded in villages and motor parks pass information to armed groups, sometimes in exchange for their own safety. Security agencies cannot win a war in which the enemy reads their itinerary before they set out. That calls for tighter control of operational details, unannounced movements and closer cooperation with the Department of State Services and military intelligence. It also calls for steady investment in drones and surveillance along known corridors, so that teams on the road are no longer the first to discover that an ambush has been laid for them.

In our view,  a policeman sent into bandit country in an unarmoured bus is being sent to die. In parts of the North-West, the police face gangs that are often better armed and better informed than the officers sent to confront them. In such places, a convoy without armoured vehicles or advance reconnaissance is a convoy offered up as a target. The loss of five rifles also matters, because every weapon seized in an ambush returns to the forest to be turned on the next patrol and the next village. Losing men and arms in the same attack is a double defeat.

The federal government has, to its credit, approved an expansion of the army and a pay rise for the military in recent months. The police deserve the same urgency. They remain the first line of internal security, yet their equipment and welfare have trailed those of the armed forces for decades. Too often, the families of slain officers complain of long waits for death benefits and of being forgotten once the funeral is over. A Force that cannot guarantee that its dead will be honoured and their dependants cared for cannot expect its living to march willingly into ambushes.

The push for state policing, now approved by 28 state assemblies and headed to the President for assent, offers some hope of closer, community-rooted security. State police will not solve the problem on its own, however. Zamfara already has a Community Protection Guard, and three of its members died alongside the federal officers this week. Putting more men in uniform without armour and reliable intelligence will only lengthen the casualty lists. Whatever structure emerges must be funded properly from the first day, and its officers must be trained to work with the federal police and the military rather than compete against them.

The police high command owes Nigerians a full account of what happened near Gidan-Giye, including how many officers remain in captivity and what is being done to bring them home. It should also make public the findings of its investigation into how the attackers learnt of the convoy’s movement. Beyond Zamfara, the Force must stop moving personnel through known bandit corridors in unprotected vehicles. The National Assembly, for its part, must make sure that funds for armoured transport in the North-West are released before the election deployments begin in January.

The officers who died have not yet been named, but they had families waiting for them at home, and their colleagues will be asked to travel the same roads next week. The least the country can do is make sure the next team goes out better protected than the last. A nation that will not protect its protectors should not be surprised when nobody is left to protect it.