By Lasisi Olagunju

I always wonder why it appears difficult for President Bola Tinubu to defeat banditry in Nigeria. The president’s most popular chieftaincy title is Jagaban Borgu. Jagaba means chief warrior in Hausa – one of the two dominant languages in Borgu of Niger State. It would translate to either Balogun or Aare Ona Kakanfo in Yoruba. There was a time in the 19th century when plundering was ‘trade’ where the president got his Jagaba title. They called banditry ‘swadibu’ and the bandits themselves ‘swadio’, a psychedelic term which means “somebody who eats on the road.” Olayemi Akinwumi’s ‘Princes as Highway Men’ digs deep into this. I take my title from Ray Kea’s 1986 work on banditry in 19th century Gold Coast. His title is: ‘I am here to Plunder on the General Road.’

Mid last week, respected journalist, Jaafar Jaafar, wrote and had this posted online: “A friend from a prominent northern family yesterday narrated a painful story of how his family paid through the nose to secure the release of a relative from bandits. Apart from payment of N35m cash as ransom, they also delivered – as demanded – the following: six brand new motorcyles; four cartons of whiskey; 10 packets of Tramadol; 1(one) bag of Indian Hemp; 1(one) carton of Aspen cigarette; 12 bags of rice (50kg); 10 bags of maize (100kg); 5 bags of beans (100kg); 1(one) 25-litre jerry can of groundnut oil; 1(one) 25-litre jerry can of palm oil; 1 (one) carton of seasoning; 10 packets of paracetamol; 10 packets of chloroquine. While preparing to deliver the foregoing items, the bandits called and ordered them to service the motorcycles and fill up the tanks. Allah Ya kawo ƙarshen wannan masifa.”

Do governments sometimes lose control at night and regain it during the day? The late Professor of History, Ali Mazrui, asked that question twenty-nine years ago. I asked the question again after reading Jaafar. Where did those bandits get the courage to ask for so much without the fear of being followed and busted by the state? A super-thief craved the king’s flute but told his gang that he just couldn’t go for it. Surprised, petty thieves around him asked the boss why. He told them that stealing the king’s bugle is not the problem; the problem is finding where to blow it. I have always thought that saying to be wisdom unimpeachable, time-tested. But, I am no longer sure after reading the post above and the items demanded by the bandits. You need, at least, a trailer to carry those offerings of ransom, yet, the abductors felt unthreatened by the risk in their demands. And, if what the journalist posted is true, the bandits got everything they demanded without consequences. Where was the government when all this was happening?

In a myth of the Greek, Alcestis “appears to die in winter and to come back to life again in the spring.” On Saturday, the president praised the military for achieving what he described as strings of successes in the war against banditry in the North-West. He mentioned the killing of a wanted bandit leader, Halilu Sububu, “who had been unleashing terror on citizens in Zamfara, Sokoto, and other parts of north-western Nigeria.” The president danced and danced while noting further that “troops also killed another terrorist, Sani Wala Burki, in a joint operation in Katsina and busted a terrorist enclave in Kaduna where 13 kidnapped students were freed.” I also clap and stand at attention for our gallant forces. Commendable feats. But they must be tired of killing the killers who come in inexhaustible numbers. Every day, the security forces announce the ‘neutralization’ of bandits and terrorists. Yet, the forest remains infested from one end to the other. Could it be that the neutralized have also mastered the art of neutralizing death? For, the more killed of the bandits by our troops, the more the bandits troop back to abduct and kill. Or, has death been cosseting bad men who hunt men, women and children, while claiming their liquidation? Where a load rejects the rafters and won’t sit on the floor, our elders will always find a place to sit it. What else should we do? The innocent are tired of life.

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We will continue to support our security forces and their troops. But for them, the present darkness would have been total. Terror roams everywhere. A very senior former editor of a national newspaper who hails from, and lives in Oyo State sent me his own local experience some time ago: “They are taking over our towns and villages in Oke-Ogun. I’m afraid to go to Igbeti as it is. They’re in every nook and cranny of the town. This was not so a few years ago. And they walk about armed with swords and daggers. The last time I was at the mosque for Juma’ah prayers, they all came to the mosque with their swords which they laid down in front of them while praying. And it was like that in the three major mosques in the town. Imagine how they will massacre the indigenous people in case of any altercation. I have not been able to get the issue out of my mind since then and I can’t roam our mountains again when next I go home as I had done for decades. I called the attention of a few stakeholders to the issue even though I knew there’s little they could do. Nigeria is such a mess.” The former editor was a great supporter of President Bola Tinubu. He was. But in the message, he sounded utterly disappointed and despondent. “I thought he would make a difference. It is a shame,” he said, while asking how we could “have back our country.”

Nigeria is an interesting country of many ‘presidents’. I pity President Tinubu who rules from the Villa in Abuja – or from abroad. He daily contends with forest felons who contest the cockpit with him. But what has he done with his implements as chief warrior? You cannot be made a kite and be afraid of chickens. There are hard men everywhere who do not answer to any title but who wield powers that degrade the state and cancel the powers that inhere in the real president. One of them is a felon fellow called Bello Turji who reigns in Nigeria’s primary zone of terror. He rules the forests, controls the villages, and commands the towns of Nigeria’s north-west. A report last week reconfirmed this bandit leader’s worth as the classic antinomian. The report said Turji imposed a N50 million levy on a Zamfara village called Moriki. “Yes, you are right. We imposed a N50 million levy on Moriki,” Turji owned the heist in a video posted online. He gave reasons which further delegitimized a broken sovereign.

To be helpless is to be “lacking in protection or support; defenseless.” That is what my dictionary says it is. The Nigerian state is at this moment helpless – even, hopeless. Before you ask why, ask first why anyone would expect awkward crab to teach its children how to walk straight. Why should bandits act freely dictating who lives and who dies; who is free and who is held? And there is a government. “Successful bandits inspire fear and respect” …they are hard men “who make themselves respected.” That is from the late Dutch anthropologist, Anton Blok, author of ‘The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered.’ Blok explored the “varieties and complexities” of banditry. He hypothesised that “the more successful a man is as a bandit, the more extensive the protection granted him.” I am tempted to say that Nigeria is a country of successful banditry.

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Nigeria validates Blok’s proposition. Turji, for instance, inspires fear more than the law. He commands greater ‘respect’ in his spheres of influence than those we elected there. He receives obeisance from big and small men in the terrorized zone and gets propitiated. Like devotees of Shango, the people prostrate before the small god of banditry with one lone prayer: Do not fight fight me, I do not have money for offerings at home. The law wisely cowers where he reigns. The result is anomie writ large. Because of bandit lords, big men in the North-West have learnt the wisdom of detaining themselves in Abuja and in their state capitals. The poor who could afford the swiftness of the eagle have dragged their tired bodies and souls across the boarder into Niger Republic. The flightless ones, in their millions, work the fields for protection from the bandit leaders. The situation shames the law, ridicules the constitution and all its creations, including our executive presidency.

The horror we saw last week in the collapsed dam of Maiduguri perfectly illustrates the criminal cisterns of Nigeria bursting at the seams. In the South-West are showy, shadowy felons whose terrorism is in shrines of the occult. They inflict an epidemic of ritual killings on the land, abducting the young and the old. There is a migration from, or a convergence of, Yahoo Yahoo and money ritual. They abduct, murder and pound the very promising into pulps of nonsense. Parents are breathless at noon, and sleepless at night. For many, safety of their children from marauding priests and occult clerics dominate prayers at family talks. We no longer know who truly worships God and whom to trust.

The Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) held “a special meeting of elders and top-level leaders” from all parts of Northern Nigeria on Wednesday, 4 September, 2024. A very thoughtful communique came out of the gathering. The ACF said the north was ready “for a review of Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution as well as the restructuring of the administrative structure of Nigeria.” It said it was not afraid of both. I read that part and clapped for them. But can I say the same of the hypocritical Yoruba who have dropped the ball of restructuring and are busy protecting a pot of soup that is really not theirs? The ACF said in the communique that it reviewed the state of the nation and expressed deep concerns on Nigeria’s intractable problems – economic and security. It proffered solutions: “The current approaches to fighting the insurgents and bandits are not yielding the desired results. Other measures, even unconventional ones, need to be considered and tried.” The northern leaders counseled government and suggested to it “community-driven models of defence, such as the Civilian JTF.” Thoughtful north did not make that case for itself alone. It suggested that “similar or modified models” of that security management “be authorized in other parts of the country.” I agree with them. I wish the president and his government listen to the ACF.

In the days before the white man came with his peace, law and order, my part of this country had security structures that must either ship in or ship out. There was Aare Ona Kakanfo whose existence was tied to fighting and defeating the enemy. “You do not become the Aare and lament that there is no war to fight. If the enemy refuses to charge at you, go out and take the war to his doorstep. Or you provoke a rebellion at home and crush it without mercy. That is the raw meaning of Kakanfo — patriotic (sometimes), rebellious, courageous, heady, merciless, merciful, tough, warlike, bloody, unyielding.”

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The quoted clauses above belong to me. It was the introductory paragraph to my piece published on January 15, 2018 – two days after Gani Adams was installed as the Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland. I went back to read the piece again after I read Adams’ open letter to President Tinubu last week. Adams, in the letter, was frontal in his choice of language and in the allusions he drew. He said the nation had failed and the president a big disappointment. He said (without saying it) that the circumciser who was employed to beautify the Nigerian baby had allowed it to die right in his hands. I found it quite daring. His suggestions on the economy and security appeared to be on all fours with the ACF’s. But, the Kakanfo missed out on one key point that would have made his letter truly revolutionary. His missive miserably lacked the front teeth- which is his people’s demand for a reexamination of the structure of the Nigerian nation. Adams himself had been consistent in asking for restructuring of Nigeria from all predecessors of Tinubu. But in his letter of 1,258 words, spread across 52 paragraphs, Adams’ mantra was not there. Was it a genuine error of omission or an abdication of a cause he had consistently pursued before now? Or what? His subsequent newspaper interviews filled that void.

My Kakanfo offering of 2018 was a steamboat; it rowed us through the dark, treacherous canals of the imperiled existence of the past, and their various (un)predictable harbours of turbulence. Gani Adams’ skull took 201 incisions stuffed with 201 unknown stuffs. I don’t think he made his head available for that ordeal because he enjoyed it. Adams was in the news last week. He wrote about bandits ravaging Nigeria “from the north to the south, east to the west.” He then queried the competence of the commander-in-chief and the commitment of his commanders. I think Tinubu should read Adams’s letter, pick whatever is good in it and implement. Perching precariously on the head of my 2018 article is the title: ‘Eni Ogun in Times of War.’ ‘Eni ogun’ means man of war; if you add another letter ‘o’ to the ‘ogun’, the salutation becomes problematic. He will then be called ‘eni oògùn’ – man of magical powers, or, ‘eni òógùn’, man of perspiration. Whichever mark you put on the ‘ogun’ or ‘oogun’ will be right and applicable to the man who took a 19th century title in the 21st century and is demanding to act the antiquated status in a republic. I thought Adams would deny the authorship of the letter. He didn’t. Indeed, his subsequent press interviews were even more damning. The incisions are truly working.

How many ‘presidents’ can a nation have at a point in time? Has Nigeria failed? Or has it not failed? In 1995, Ali Mazrui assessed state failure. He cited a country that had “lost sovereign control over a large proportion of the country, with the result that it has also lost control of resources, infrastructure, revenue, social services, and governance.” He wrote about another country in which the cities were “under the control of the authorities during the day and under the control of militants at night.”

Nigeria of 1995 was bad, but it was not among those so agonized over by Mazrui. If he were alive today, Mazrui would, with very heavy heart, not hesitate to put Nigeria of 2024 at the top of his list of the failed. Under the roof of their present husband, Nigerians are losing on all fronts: they are broke, they are hungry, they are terribly terrorized. Kidnappers are breaking their doors and dragging them into captivity. The supreme commander of our own troops would rather move from one world capital to the other fulfilling childhood dreams of shaking stockinged hands of imperial kings and queens. They are here to plunder.