President Bola Tinubu hosted a section of religious leaders at the State House of late. The guests made their case about how violent attacks happened in parts of the nation. Of course, they spoke for their constituency, the body of religionists they led. One complaint that is well known by now is that their followers are targeted in these attacks.
It was how many of those concerned across the country had been putting it since the spike in armed attacks on farms and communities happened over a decade ago. So, it was clear that the guests believed one thing regarding the attacks, while their host was convinced of another. The President said he believed that was basically about insecurity, not a plan to exterminate a specific body of religionists. The scene in that room makes me wonder how many across the nation believe the President’s explanation among those who have already been sold the idea that there is a grand religious programme to exterminate them.
A somewhat similar claim was made against the backdrop of the 2015 presidential election campaign, and it has resurfaced now regarding the surge in violent attacks. Sometimes, I am baffled by any Nigerian who believes such a narrative in a country where over two hundred schoolgirls in Chibok were abducted and the nation’s security system neither responded in real-time nor could trace them years after.
The President’s kind of explanation was what I had been giving on this page for over a decade, and I made many enemies. This convinces me that even among government officials those who believe the President’s side of the story are rare. It is a challenge when officials should act based on facts, but they act based on emotion. Recently, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs released a press statement similar to what the President said to his guests and I wondered if the officials who drafted it believed what they drafted.
Apart from MoFA’s press statement released in response to a campaign to demarket Nigeria to foreigners, I could not recall any government agency that had ever voluntarily explained what the President explained to his guests. It’s because people in government offices already have their minds made up. Meanwhile, in the first six paragraphs of the press statement from the MoFA, everything stated was what I had explained here for over a decade. I also stated that if we improved security such that perpetrators of crime were easily rounded up and prosecuted, then attacks would stop. My travels across the North-East, North-West and North-Central zones of the country show me what the situation is on the ground in each attack. Attacks may appear similar but why each happens has its specific local dynamics. Locals know. The intelligence agencies know, and they bring such to the attention of every president.
Significantly, I noticed that only a handful of journalists who travelled well said what the President was saying on this matter. Others just went emotive, using their platforms to promote a narrative about how members of their religions were being exterminated. They never talk about the attacks on people of the other major religions. To them, this national challenge is only about their people and their religion. I know facts that I have as a well-travelled journalist who relates with locals across tribes and religions. I know there are different motives for some of the attacks experienced in the North-Central, North-East, And North-West. What is similar is the narrative that security agencies hardly respond on time or arrest perpetrators when crimes are committed in Kaduna, Kebbi, Sokoto, Katsina, Benue, etc. When these attacks happen in certain parts of the North though, it is given colourful tags, such as “ethnic cleansing”.
Losing lives and property is an emotive matter, so hardly can we stop people from categorising attacks as they choose. Therefore, how to solve what the President says is the problem should be the focus. He believes it’s insecurity, so let’s attend to it. For context on insecurity. The farmer-herder issues that have now become a national crisis were once largely limited to parts of the far North although it did not get national press coverage. In the North-East under military administration in the 1990s, herders came in from the Niger Republic at specific times of the year, passed through farms and left stories of woes. In northern parts of Gombe State, for instance, farmers would leave their harvested watermelons on the farm, but overnight herders passed through and sliced the watermelons or other crops for their herds to eat.
Before morning, the herders were gone. The then-state military government had to deploy soldiers to stop these herders until all crops were removed from the farms. A local who was a town Fulani, a Muslim, and a farm owner told me this. I understood that each time herders carried out the same act in southern parts of Gombe that had people of the other major religion, the cry was that there was an agenda to exterminate them when actually nothing of such was planned by anyone. The extent of the crisis that northerners belonging to the other major religions have is huge but this is not often reported nationally. Locals everywhere go through a lot. A few years ago, I witnessed how a non-Fulani young adult behaved in a hostile manner to two Fulani boys on the road. I asked him why. He said herders attacked communities in remote parts of Kebbi State. He said his family was therefore compelled to relocate to Katsina State. They left their farmlands out of fear of further attacks, while he came to the North-Central zone to fend for himself. While I was in Zaria, Kaduna State, violent attacks on Giwa LGA just a few kilometres away from Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru, Zaria, were a regular occurrence.
Tension was there to be seen in the Samaru community once bandits attacked in Giwa. Motorists travelling to Katsina stopped during the night in Zaria because the roads were not safe. I had told the story here of how a series of interviews I was to have with Giwa LGA officials had to be rescheduled following an unexpected gruesome attack on communities overnight. Recently, the Kaduna State government offered amnesty to bandits operating in Giwa. No one has called these attacks an attempt to exterminate members of the religion prevalent in this area. Still, in Kaduna State, official enquiries established that reprisal attacks following herder-farmer incidents that happened on farmlands in the past were common since 2013. Sometimes, it was an incident over a herder’s cattle eating crops and then killings happened.
The subsequent reprisals spiral and are sometimes categorised as unprovoked, which does not reflect the reality of the situation. Close observation shows that there are clear cases where no party to these attacks can come out as a saint and the other as a demon. It is not the kind of logic anyone whose emotions are high over this matter would buy though. But it is important to remember that these are the kinds of ears and hearts the President was trying to persuade in that room and across the nation. As I have maintained over the years, especially for those of us who believe these attacks are fallouts of the nation’s challenge of inadequate security, it is providing adequate security we should focus on. The President is saying, not for the first time, exactly what the source of this challenge is. For me it is a relief he does this because I believe clearly identifying the reason for a problem is paramount, otherwise we will be using the wrong medication for the wrong illness.
He is saying what I have also found out in the field as a journalist, who once lived in each of the three geopolitical zones in the North. So, what should follow what the President says he believes? How could he persuade his guests and their followers across the country of his views? I think it is by ensuring that security architecture, which effectively curbs armed attacks at the community level, is put in place. This needs to be pursued because I imagine the President’s guests come to him to find solutions rather than trade accusations. And of course, when the violent attacks stop emotion-driven narratives of conspiracy to exterminate will fizzle out among those who promote it.