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Anytime any member of the government of President Muhammadu Buhari talks about the killings going on in North-Central Nigeria, the person usually describes it as a clash between herdsmen and farmers. But what has been happening has no relationship with a clash.
What is a clash? A clash is a violent confrontation between two armies or groups. No two groups are fighting in states like Benue, Taraba, Nasarawa, Kogi, Kaduna for many months now.
One group (the herdsmen’s group) has been attacking the host communities, killing the locals, burning their homes and destroying their crops and animals. It has been systematic. It has been consistent. The killers arrive at night and commit their heinous act and disappear. The killers do not officially identify themselves. It is by comments and revelations from others that they are found out to be herdsmen of Fulani extraction.
The killers do not share boundaries with the victims. The victims never know when next they will come or which area they will attack next. There is no portion of land or river or mountain or cave that both parties are laying claim to. There has been no time the killers arrived and engaged in a fight with the hosts. It has been a one-sided massacre of the host communities.
From state to state, it has been one attack after the other, killings upon killings. The persistence and gravity of the attacks have given rise to claims that the long-term aim is to wipe out the host communities or kill so many people them to instil fear in the people and make them abandon their homes for the herdsmen to take over and use as they wish.
The attitude of this administration towards the killings helps to strengthen the narrative that it is not sincerely committed to stopping them. Different personalities, including Lt. Gen. Theophilus Danjuma (retd.), former chief of army staff and defence minister, had accused the security agents of aiding the killings, while urging the locals to defend themselves to avoid extermination.
The herdsmen’s crisis may be a tough nut to crack, but it cannot be as difficult as the Boko Haram terrorism, Niger Delta militancy, or kidnapping for ransom. Religious-based suicide bombing is the most difficult to deal with because it is based on indoctrination. The Boko Haram insurgents are ready to die, even more determined to die for their cause than the security agents that are sent to repel them. What worse can one do to a man who is already on a mission to kill himself? Because of the religious ideology behind Boko Haram, security agents fighting against them may not even know if some of their colleagues are members of Boko Haram or sympathetic to their cause. And there have been such accusations of sabotage.
The Niger Delta militants are difficult to deal with because of the unusual marine terrain they operate from and the fact that they believe that their cause is a fight for justice. They do not usually target human beings but oil facilities. Their aim is to sabotage the Federal Government’s earnings to draw attention to what they see as the exploitation of their land to feed the nation without adequately taking care of the oil-producing areas. They also have the tacit support of many Nigerians who are not even from the Niger Delta areas.
Kidnapping for ransom is difficult because of the fear of killing the hostages if the kidnappers are attacked. Even when the hideouts of the kidnappers are known, it is usually not advisable to attempt to free the hostages. Secondly, the people whose relative has been kidnapped are more concerned about getting their relative freed than getting the kidnappers arrested. Therefore, they are eager to pay the ransom. The huge amount of money demanded and paid as ransom also makes kidnapping attractive. Those who engage in it see as “business:” collecting some money from the rich.
If the government were fighting any of the above three crimes without much success, the shock would not be as high as it is on this herdsmen’s issue. The reason is that the herdsmen’s menace is easier to tackle if the government is committed to ending it. The killer herdsmen don’t use bombs. They don’t wish to be killed during operations. They don’t live within the neighbourhoods they attack. They are not really herdsmen in the true sense of the word, but fighters contracted to attack communities that are viewed as unfriendly to herdsmen. They are mobilised from different states of the federation. After their attack, they return to their bases.
The reason the attacks by killer herdsmen are worrisome is that there is no instance where there was an attempt to repel them in any of the locations they have attacked. The security forces are usually nowhere to be found when they are operating, no matter how many hours their operation lasts. Secondly, there has been an effort to ensure that the locals are not equipped to defend themselves. It was reported in the news recently that in Ussa Local Government Area of Taraba State, for example, that the locals were lamenting that soldiers and policemen combed their houses and removed all that were presumed to be “weapons,” including the machetes they use for farming.
If the government cannot defend the locals from this ethnic cleansing, why stop them from defending themselves? In the Northeast, one factor that helped to boost the fight against Boko Haram was the support the government gave to the “Civilian JTF”: a group of youths that joined in patrolling the streets to forestall Boko Haram attacks. In Ekiti State, when the killer herdsmen struck and killed some indigenes of the state, Governor Ayo Fayose equipped the local hunters and charged them to defend the state. Since then, no attack by herdsmen has been recorded in the state.
If the government is sincere about stopping the herdsmen’s attacks, the answer lies in empowering the locals to form neighbourhood guards and work in concert with the security agents. The police and soldiers cannot be every community in Nigeria. It is the local people that can start the act of defending their community until reinforcement comes from the army or police. Secondly, when killer herdsmen or other criminals know that a community has people who are ready to protect it, they usually are not keen on attacking such a community.
Beyond the press statements released each time people are massacred in their sleep, this administration must show that it genuinely wants to see an end to these herdsmen’s killings by taking clear steps to achieve that. Until such a step is taken, there will be doubts in the minds of the people about the stand of the government on these killings.
Twitter @BrandAzuka
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