Finland court sends Simon Ekpa to prison for ‘inciting terror in Nigeria’

By Femi Orebe

Northern Nigeria is not developing its human capital. It also does not have the time to do so anymore. Therefore, it is now ill-equipped to fit into either the knowledge-driven world of today or the new world of tomorrow. It needs at least 20 years to become significant in any way. But, rather than wake up to this benumbing fact, there is the pursuit of the illusion of dominance. Meanwhile the people of the region lack the skills for tomorrow, as majority of its youth lack everything that could make them part of a 21st century world. I think we are not doing ourselves much good by the way we are living, and by refusing to educate our children. We rather produce and send them to the streets to beg for what they will eat, neglecting their character and learning.” – the highly regarded elder statesman, Ahmed Joda in: ‘Attitudes North Must Change to Develop’ -There’s no way reverred Ahmed Joda could have attributed the spate of insecurity in the North to unemployment, as former President Olusegun Obasanjo recently did, because he knew what proportion of Northern youths is actually employable.

What is happening in the North today was foretold. Rather than act, successive governments, state and federal( North – dominated) preferred to treat crimes with levity with no criminal ever made to have his day in court as long as he was a Northerner. Now the chick’s have come home to roost.

This piece, substantially an old article, details the beginnings of banditry and other crimes which went unpunished in the North. It is aimed at correcting those lapses in the hope that sanity can still be restored, lest the North self – destructs.

But more importantly, it should inform Northern leaders, now pointing an accusing finger at PBAT, that the remaining four point directly at them. It is a story of how ‘absence of government’ and preferential treatment of Northerner offenders by federal security agencies, especially the police, enabled killing and kidnappings on industrial scale, to boom and blossom.

In addition to their menace, some Northern politicians were alleged to have, in 2015, brought into the country some foreign Fulanis who exponentially increased insecurity in Nigeria. The article, captioned as above, and published 20 December, 2020, reads as follows, with slight additions, here and there:

“There were a few people who foresaw what we are going through today in Nigeria with regards to insecurity, especially in Northern Nigeria where, in the last three weeks, 300 persons, mostly school children, were kidnapped.

One such person was Chief Obafemi Awolowo who severally warned that by denying western education to a large proportion of their people, the North was sowing the wind, and was certain to reap the whirlwind. But prescient as he always was, not even Awo could have foreseen the present level of horrendous insecurity. 

Below is Professor Adebayo Williams on Awo’s capacity for such clairvoyance. He wrote in ‘The Titan and The Titanic: Awolowo in and through History’: “This is a man we thought we bade a final goodbye 17 years ago. If it is so, it must be the longest goodbye in history. For at every tragic turn, at every miscue, be it at the level of the structural deformities of this unfortunate nation, its suffocating and stifling unitarism, its economic malaise, its educational collapse, its spiritual bankruptcy, its corrupt and thieving political class(budgeting N193M as cost of a single borehole in 2024), and its gradual descent into the anomie of ungovernability, we are confronted by the figure of the man with the horn-rimmed glasses. And until we come to terms with many of his ideas, either by transcending them through superior political engineering or working through them through a more rigorous intellectual engagement, the piercing eyes behind the lens will continue to haunt us, reminding us of our inadequacies as intellectuals, as philosophers, as politicians and as a nation”.

But Awo was not alone in drawing the attention of Northern leaders to the ugly grass that was growing under their feet. Another person who was uniquely positioned to do so, being a Northerner, was Dr Abubakar Siddique Mohammed, the Director, Centre for Democratic Development Research and Training, Sango Shanu, Zaria who, together with his team, did such stupendous research work on the subject of insecurity in the North that were successive Northern governments alive to their responsibilities, insecurity there would most probably have become history by now.

Let me quote, at some length, from a thoroughly illuminating interview Dr Mohammed granted in 2019 on what has since become ‘the Nigerian nightmare’, accounting for a total of no less than 17,469 Nigerians, according to the Civil Society Joint Action Group, kidnapped between 2019 , and now.

 Four years ago, you warned that unless urgent steps were taken to stop the crisis in Zamfara, the whole country could be consumed. With what is happening now, it seems you were prophetic. We are 20 years into democracy and Nigerians are wondering why insecurity has become such a big issue.

Four years ago when we first did our studies, it was farmer/herders conflict. What I am going to talk to you about is what is happening today in the North-West, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto and Zamfara, which is the epicentre of insecurity in the North. This conflict has been on for more than four years. It started as farmers/herders conflict but it degenerated into something else. Some years ago, there were armed robberies in the North-West. In the Zamfara area, some Fulani boys were alleged to be the major culprits.

In the areas we studied, there were so many ungoverned spaces: No electricity, telecommunication and local governments existed only in name. You could hardly see anybody when you go there. Over a long period of time, traditional leaders and Islamic teachers were the ones dealing with the crisis. There was no presence of the state. (Yet, every month, Northern states harvested billions of Naira from the Federation account in the name of Land Mass). The roads were extremely bad and the people left to their fate. So when the armed robberies persisted, people took it upon themselves to bring about law and order, they formed vigilante groups.The vigilante groups were quite often not trained. So they went beyond their limits whenever they went on operations. In the Dansadau area of Zamfara, they identified some boys, who also happened to be of Fulani stock. They attacked some of them and killed them. They were very brutal. They wanted to stamp out armed robbery in the area. They were the police, the prosecutor and judge. They did not stop in the towns and semi-urban centres. They pursued the Fulani deep into the forest and, in the process, killed so many innocent people. This was the immediate cause of the conflict.

 Ethnic coloration

Those who organised the killings happened to be Hausa and those who were killed were the Fulani. When the attacks on the Fulani became generalised, some of them withdrew, went and re-organised and came back to those localities where they were attacked, identified those who organised the attacks and sought revenge. Those whose kids were of fighting age were forced to donate their kids or provide money.

In all the areas we visited, there were no banks. People kept money at home. These bandits will break into a man’s house and insist that he gives them all his money. In some cases, they will rape his wife and daughters in his presence. It was a terrible situation. 

 What was government’s reaction to the worsening security situation?

M. The government in Zamfara was not serious about the challenge, ab initio. From fighting rural banditry by the vigilantes to the retaliation by the Fulani, the challenge morphed into generalised rural banditry. At this stage, the farmers and pastoralists became victims of a superior force. The pastoralists lost their herds because some other forces had come in and subjugated both the pastoralists and farmers.

A third force then emerged which dispossessed the pastoralists of their cows, dispossessed the farmers of their savings which they kept at home, and drove them away from their lands.

In the areas we studied, virtually all the cattle had been rustled by bandits. From rustling the cattle, they moved to kidnapping. When the crisis degenerated between the bandits and the vigilante groups, it escalated. In one town in Zamfara, the vigilante group there was meeting to discuss how they could deal with the rural banditry. The bandits heard about the meeting, they attacked the town on a market day and killed about 200 people. When we got to the town shortly after, it was like a ghost town. There were no human beings in sight. When these youths lost their cattle, they had nothing to do anymore. But, surprisingly, they started seeing some of their rustled cows with some of the rich people around the area and that is what triggered the kidnappings. They could not get to some of the rich people because they had their own security guards armed with AK 47 rifles or police protection. So what the criminals did was to also acquire AK 47 rifles as a balance of terror. I have not spoken about land.

All that time, there was a Zamfara state governor who was, more or less, operating from Abuja. And as at that time, no Emir remembered to send alarm bells to Abuja claiming that they could no longer control their youths.

 The crisis in Zamfara is multi-dimensional.

Some years back, the Zamfara government, under Sani Yerima, decided to drive the Fulani out of their ancestral land to pave the way for big farmers. These were people who had lived there for over five hundred years. Overnight, they were pushed out and their land given out to the rich, with many of the Fulanis having to relocate to other parts of Nigeria or other parts of Zamfara which, in turn, heightened conflict with farmers.

The Fulani were dispossessed, first of land, and later of their cattle. Violence was used in both instances. Many of the boys operating around the Abuja-Kaduna highway are from Zamfara.

 Q. What was government reaction to your study which was made public four years ago?

M.We made it known four years ago that this thing will get out of control. We recommended that concerted efforts should be made to stop the crisis.

You cannot solve the problems in Kaduna, Katsina and Sokoto without dealing with the situation in Zamfara. (Only last week, the school pupils kidnapped in Kaduna state were ‘warehoused’ in Zamfara and the state governor, Dauda Lawal, has not stopped shouting about his helplessness with no Northern leader offering a helping hand. They would rather blame Tinubu.)

 Q.How can the situation in Zamfara be tackled?

M. The Zamfara situation has gotten out of control. The security architecture we have in the country cannot deal with the crisis. It is going to be with us for some time to come. Take for instance the police. Let us say we have 370,000 policemen. How can they effectively cover the 774 local government areas and tackle the different security challenges in the country? We are certainly under-policed. The police cannot deal with the situation. They can only do their best but they cannot deal with the situation.

Everywhere you go in the country, there is one form of crisis or the other; so the police are overstretched. Same goes for the army. They have also been overstretched. We need to expand the armed forces and the police”.

The above tells the story of how the North socialised insecurity in Nigeria and turned the country into a no man’s land where killers roam, anyhow, raping, kidnapping and killing at will.

As a result Nigeria is now ccomparable only to the likes of Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya where there is no discernible head of state.

Being in your house, or on your rice farm, in school or on the Abuja – Kaduna, anywhere in Birnin-Gwari, or on the Lagos – Ibadan expressway, no longer guarantees your safety, even your life.

As things stand in our country today, it is everybody for himself and God for us all.

It is hoped that everybody or agency concerned with security in Nigeria – the Feds in particular – will have some take aways from the article and go on to do the needful, such as creating state police and substantially increasing the number of our armed forces personnel, far beyond what we presently have.