Mr President, we are at war

We were hit with the sad news of the massacre of scores of people by Boko Haram in Mafa, a village in Tarmuwa local government area of Yobe state. Mafa is close to Shekau, the town that was unfortunate to be the birthplace of Abubakar Shekau, the notorious murderer in the name of religion.

Surrounded in the mosque by the bandits just after the Asr (four o’clock) prayer, all those, save a few, were executed. Sources said it was because some villagers were instrumental to some successes in defeating the terrorists through sharing privileged information on the insurgents to security agencies, hence the reprisal attack.

On Saturday, November 28, 2020, over 40 people were slaughtered by the same Boko Haram in Zabarmari village, a rice-producing community in Northern Borno state, in a reprisal attack because some villagers arrested a Boko Haram member and handed him over to security operatives.

While the security forces, including the DSS, have done wonderfully well in decimating the threat of the insurgents, it is pertinent that any individual or community that divulges information leading to the country’s stability must be accorded full protection. That will encourage more people to come forward to help in the fight to secure the country.

Perhaps this, and other reasons, made the Yobe state governor Mai Mala Buni, who was abroad to woo investors, cut short his trip and return to the country. He went straight to the chief of defence staff, Gen. Christopher Musa, and extracted a commitment to deploy more military personnel and new strategies to end the movements of, and attacks by, the insurgents in the state.

He could not rush to the scene because of security advice, as the military was scouting and engaging the perpetrators and their remnants.

This brings us to the current administration’s commitment to fighting terror, terrorism, and terrorists by ordering service chiefs and the minister of defence—who will not be on the battlefront—to go anywhere to safeguard the country’s sovereignty. This, especially to a state that other states export criminals to it, is not the solution. Moreover, Nigerians have witnessed this result in less drama many times over in the past.

And we should avoid the recourse to the now trite and hollow wordings of “I condemn in strong terms”. You can only condemn people who recognise you and would feel your condemnation.

What the government must do is act decisively by taking the fight to them and, this time, it must not brook any offers of peace by terrorists who resort to that when the heat is on them.

Apart from the remnants of Boko Haram terrorists in the north-east, there are terrorists in the north-west and south-east of the country, and Sokoto is nowhere near the epicentre. While Zamfara is the hub of the north-west marauders, competing with Niger and Kaduna states, for instance, Borno was the hub of Boko Haram with Geidam now threatening to be their axis.

In Niger sptate, for instance, no fewer than eight local governments are dominated by bandits who are Boko Haram in another garb. In Shiroro local government, residents of Allawa and surrounding communities are crying that the terrorists have enslaved them, making them work on their farms. It was in the same Niger that the terrorist shot down an airforce jet and also killed dozens of soldiers in an ambush.

There are reports that bandits have imposed hefty taxes and levies on communities in Zamfara, Niger, Katsina, Kaduna and Benue states before they could access their farms or harvest their crops. This was the case in some parts of Borno.

On March 26, 2018, I wrote a piece with almost the same title as this, “Mr President, Nigeria is at War!” I wrote it when the Dapchi Secondary School girls were returned after being abducted by Boko Haram. I will copiously copy some portions of it.

“Nigeria is in a state of war, but it looks as if we are taking things lightly. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a state of war as (1) a. state of actual armed hostilities regardless of a formal declaration of war and (1) b. the legal state created and ended by official declaration regardless of actual armed hostilities and usually characterized by the operation of the rules of war.

“We have been at war for quite a long time, but it became all the more apparent with the return of the Dapchi girls. There was a real ceasefire when the girls were returned, the type we see in areas that are in a state of war like Syria and Colombia, with the FARC rebels and parts of Congo and Uganda, where the Lord’s Resistance Army operates.

“It is real war when a militant organisation can ‘force’ the Nigerian government to sit with it and reach an agreement brokered by international bodies under the international Law of Armed Conflict.

“But the president was quoted as ordering his service chiefs not to allow the abductions of girls again. A citizen, in the first place, would expect the president to tell his service chiefs not to allow the abduction of any citizen, not only schoolgirls. All citizens are citizens and want to feel equal before the law or before the eyes of their president.

“Farmers and voiceless Nigerians are being abducted by those who have declared war on Nigeria, but we have allowed them to play the music while we dance to the tunes. And it is this thinking by governments that makes the militants strong. The ordinary citizen sees them as strong and sees that his government cannot protect him. It makes the ordinary citizen lose confidence in the country. Little wonder some abducted Nigerians have switched allegiance or are hailing the terrorists (as happened in Dapchi) as ‘saviours’ because the people of Dapchi and elsewhere saw the kind of power that should reside with their government being exercised by enemies of the state.”

Hassan Gimba, anipr, is the publisher and editor-in-chief of Neptune Prime. He can be contacted via [email protected]