How informants, other collaborators fuel banditry

When security men stormed her home in Malumfashi, Indo Abdullahi (not real name), was terrified. The aged widow was puzzled…

When security men stormed her home in Malumfashi, Indo Abdullahi (not real name), was terrified. The aged widow was puzzled as to what could have been the reason for this welcomed visit by a detachment of armed personnel. With no time spent on offering answers, she was hurried into a waiting vehicle and driven for an hour to Katsina town, the capital of Katsina State.

While at a security facility in Katsina, the woman, still in shock, could not fathom why she was of interest to not just local leaders in her community but to the ‘big men’ in Katsina. But the phone in her possession tallied with the one tracked for weeks by security personnel working out of a new centre established to use phone-tapping technology to track bandits and their collaborators in the state.

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Recalling the operation, a source told Daily Trust operatives were confused on finally nabbing the woman in Malumfashi. Could she be the one? The question was asked repeatedly among those involved in the operation.

As part of the interrogation process, the woman was asked if anyone else was using her phone. She answered in the negative. “You don’t give anyone your phone?” She was asked again. It took a while to have the traumatised woman calm down and search for the answer. She remembered a young woman from the neighbourhood who often would come and beg to use her phone. 

The woman in question would sometimes plead to use her own SIM card on the woman’s phone, or recharge the old woman’s line and make her calls. There was an incentive–she would always leave behind the remaining units for the phone’s owner.

Immediately the woman mentioned the young woman’s name, the operatives jumped into their vans and headed back to Malumfashi where they arrested what turned out to be a big catch. With a bandit boyfriend, the young woman had by then become a major clearing house for information on logistics and operational needs for a bandits’ gang. She was also identified as the link between suppliers of all manner of items and the bandits–collecting deliveries and dispatching same to the forest.

“The young woman has helped a lot with information leading to the arrest of many criminals she was relating with,” our source said.

Katsina is one of the states worst by banditry ravaging Zamfara, Sokoto, Kaduna, Kebbi and Niger states. Authorities in these states and the federal government’s security forces are battling to rescue the people–mostly impoverished villagers –from the bandits who are superintending a reign of terror in communities in the intersection of these states.

However, it is a consensus that to resolve the banditry puzzle, there is the need to first unbundle the knot around roles played by informants and other collaborators. Untying the knot, however, requires more than just a passive look at the issue or blanket statements and policies on the issues, experts warn.

When this reporter interviewed notorious bandit, Auwal Daudawa, he said something striking about life in the forests for bandits like him, which also highlighted the roles collaborators in the outside world play. “There is nothing that you can buy in the city which I cannot get if desire it from the bush,” he had said. This points to the jauntiness provided by the chains of collaborators who make brisk ‘business’ from serving the needs of the marauding gunmen.

Almost all of the bandits’ needs for survival are in the hands of these agents who, as Kaduna State Commissioner for Home Affairs and Internal Security, Samuel Aruwan, said, serve as “couriers through whom bandits access foods and other logistics like fuel, medicines, phone chargers and SIM cards. Furthermore, informants serve as guides to relations of kidnapped victims in delivering ransom.”

The collaborators: How they differ

“To be able to deal with the bandits simultaneously with the challenges posed by these collaborators has not been easy,” admitted Katsina State Commissioner of Police Sanusi Buba, in a recent interview with Daily Trust. This was because, as locals and security sources said, the informants and local collaborators have been the fuel keeping the banditry flame alive.

While informants give information on potential victims and any impending threat, other collaborators like suppliers’ daily need of the gunmen also act as informants by ensuring that their clients remain safe and prosperous. “They derive enormous benefits,” Buba said of the collaborators and informants.  

From the formative stage of the banditry menace, key players have cultivated local residents from settled communities who supply them information on potential targets and movement of strangers and travellers. The phenomenon and its contribution to worsening the problem are so widespread that the Katsina police chief and the Sokoto State Commissioner for Security and Career, Col Garba Moyi (rtd), identified the informants as the major hindrance to a successful campaign against the bandits.  

Investigation by Daily Trust showed that informants differ according to the function they perform and reasons for their involvement with the bandits. While some engage in the act for purely economic gain, others do it as a way of being relevant or in exchange for safety.

Alhaji Hassan Ali, a resident of Mayanci, in Maru Local Government, Zamfara State, had his house under the watch of bandits for many months. Though he was still using the house, the family stopped sleeping there for fear of abduction.

“They came to the house from a wedding, around 10pm. It was late, so they decided to sleep. In about two hours, the gunmen came and went away with them. Evidently, someone must have informed them,” he said while recounting the abduction of his two wives in late February.

Informants like those who spied on Ali’s house are often those who have economic gain out of the criminal conduct.  

Others recruited to spy on the movement of security personnel and report plans by members of the community on any action against the bandits are seen as the main stumbling blocks against any move to weed out the gunmen from the affected areas. 

Commenting on this hindrance, Katsina State Governor Aminu Bello Masari, told Daily Trust that the “informants greatly affected the performance of our security agencies by giving information to bandits.”

“And this relationship,” said CP Buba, “is consequent upon the fact that they gain materially from these notorious activities. Most of these kidnapping incidents are direct functions of the activities of these informants living among the people. That is not to say sometimes they don’t get out of their ways to block the road and make some incidental kidnap of any unfortunate passers-by”.

Though a historian and close watcher of banditry in the region, Dr Murtala Ahmad Rufa’i of Usumanu Danfodio University, Sokoto, argues that informants are no longer key to bandits on account of the increasing power of the gunmen, others say the informants remain an important factor in the equation.

“Bandits relied heavily on informants in the past because they needed them before going for attacks. They needed to have information, but right now you find out that in most places the bandits are bold enough to move and operate without much challenge. It, therefore, makes little sense for them to keep the retinue of informants which they would have to service through payment and other patronage systems,” he said.

Dr Rufai however said with cutting off of telecommunication network informants are back reckoning.

Some residents in affected communities said informants are still relevant as bandits rely on them to know plans by communities and warn them of impending attacks.

In September, bandits wrote a letter to Shinkafi community in Zamfara State, at the onset of the government’s restrictions on telecommunication, sale of fuel in jerry cans and suspension on markets–measures put in place to obstruct the operation of the rampaging gangs. In the letter, which first indicated a new working relationship between two gangs; that of Halilu Sububu and the one led by Kachalla Turji, the bandits boasted that they had up to 85 informants in the community. While this could be hyperbolic, some residents spoken to by Daily Trust confirmed the existence of the informants in the area and the roles they play in letting out to the bandits everything discussed at community meetings.

Merchants and other agents

As old as the banditry itself is the place of collaborators–traders and merchants who either supply articles of need to the bandits or act as agents in the disposal of stolen items, especially rustled cattle.  

Daily Trust gathered that merchants of fortune have, for a long time latched on limited opportunity of movements by the bandits to make brisk business on all manner of things; from vehicles and fuel to foodstuff, mobile phones and other gadgets, clothes and food. Though some foot soldiers are sometimes sent on errands to purchase some needed items, the bulk of the logistics, according to sources familiar with operations of the bandits, come from such merchants.

This class of people, though not directly involved in operations of the bandits, help keep the flame aglow, security experts say. They benefit from it because they deliver logistics to the bandits at prices multiple times higher than the market price. While those who sell to the bandits do so at a high price, Daily Trust gathered that those who buy from them, mainly cattle dealers who buy rustled cattle, do so at a beat-down price.

When this reporter interviewed the late Auwalun Daudawa, a notorious bandit behind the abduction of schoolboys in Kankara, Katsina State, he boasted that there was nothing he would want as a bandit in the forest that he could not get. A similar line was repeated, in a recent telephone conversation, by another kingpin, Shehu Rekeb, who bragged that he could get anything he wanted from his hideouts in the Sububu Forest.

On cattle rustling, Daudawa had mentioned the role of merchants, largely from Hausa communities, in aiding the bandits. “We act in cahoots with the Hausa people. Have you ever seen a Fulani man butchering a cow? Anywhere you see stolen cows it is the Hausa who brought them out to the towns,” he told this reporter. This much was re-echoed by Adamu Na-Marai, a 50-year-old arrested bandit interviewed while in Katsina police custody. Recalling one cattle rustling he was involved in at a community near Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State, Na-Marai said he sold the small cows he was given as proceed of the operation for N80,000 – each at N20,000. He said the buyers usually priced the cows according to the range of their sizes. “My own were not good ones because I was just a foot soldier so they bought the four for N80,000,” he said.  

Because of the lucrative nature of trading with bandits, those involved employ all avenues to beat security checks. When security agencies banned Boxer and Honda ACE 125 motorcycles, mostly preferred by the bandits, the suppliers devised means to beat the watch of the security men, including by changing the packaging. 

The Katsina police commissioner, Buba, said the police had also uncovered instances where bandits bought commercial vehicles which they gave to drivers to deliver a certain number of passengers to them in exchange for the vehicle.

According to the police chief, “So many people, even so-called religious, and some people that have a relationship with all the village heads and what have you, have been involved one way or the other in this kind of dastardly acts,”

There are also reports of increasing role of marabouts who provide bandits with luck charms and spiritual directions. The bandits are said to be reliant on them for direction on where to attack and when.

Merchants of ‘death’

By far the biggest beneficiaries of the ravaging banditry, according to security analysts, are the gunrunners who explore corruption and the porosity of the Nigerian border to move weapons from across the border in Niger Republic to villages in Sokoto, Zamfara, Katisian, Kaduna, Niger and Taraba states. There are also suppliers, according to sources familiar with the illicit trade, who bring the contraband from the southern part of the country.

Alluding to the accessibility of arms, Daudawa had said getting guns for bandits like himself was as easy as “you going to buy bread”. The arms, he said “come from all over. It is just like cars that come from all over the world. Arms come from all angles; from Niger, here in Nigeria from the South, it is everywhere.”

Banditry warlords define their strength by the amount of arms they possess and this makes the race for more weapons unending. 

Surajo Mamman, had spent years operating as a cattle rustler in villages of Safana Local Government in Katsina State, but, he said, getting a gun changed the story for him. “I bought the gun for N850,000 some six years ago. Initially, it was to take revenge over the killing of my son, which I did. Afterwards, I also joined the gang,” he said, disclosing that he could not count the number of persons he killed or kidnapped using the lethal weapon.

“The guns were supplied to us by Tuaregs coming from Libya using camels,” Mamman said, adding that the supply strategy had since evolved away from the more tortuous method to a more free and sophisticated gun running cartel.

How bandits recruit informants, others

Muhammad Danjuma, a journalist in Katsina who has followed the security challenges in the state closely, said bandits employ many tactics in wooing and recruiting informants into their fold.

“Sometimes they choose from hostages they pick in communities and release the person on the condition he will be supplying them information. In other instances, they would make a call and threaten a particular person and make him submit to work for them in exchange for peace. But there is a third category who are in it for money, while some others actually reach out to the bandits to give information out of malice against someone,” he said.

According to Mamman, who was recently arrested by the police, they get contacted by informants willing to give information on potential kidnap targets. “They come to us with information. People come to you, we don’t even need to go looking for it (information),” he told Daily Trust.

A member of the Sokoto State House of Assembly, representing Sabon-Birni, one of the areas worst affected by banditry in Sokoto State, Hon Aminu Al-Mustapha Gobir, aka Boza, said the bandits are cashing in on the endemic poverty and unemployment in rural areas to recruit young people into their fold using paltry financial incentives.

“I know a young man who is now there with them. They pay him only N3,000. Every time he collects the money he would buy a sack of doum palm which he sends home to his mother. That is what they live on,” he said.

Historian and close watcher of the banditry crisis Dr Rufa’i pointed out that bandits have lately developed a survival strategy by sending some of the low ranking members of their gangs to shop for them in major towns.

“In villages neighbouring forests where they have camps, the bandits also get and stock shops which serve as a point of recharge for them – they stock the shops and get items they need from there. You will find out that such shops are the best in such villages, and most residents know about it. It is the same with pharmacies,” he said.

Speaking to Daily Trust, Na-Marai said he was wooed into banditry through enticement by bandits who patronised his handmade beddings. “They would buy and pay me much more than the price. They started telling me that I would make more money if I joined them,” he said.

Routing out the informants

As identified livewires aiding the menacing banditry, informants and other collaborators have been on the radar of both the security agents and communities, with the latter often handing down jungle justice on persons thought to be helping the bandits.

Within the last one week, two different attacks happened on families suspected to be collaborating with bandits in Kaduna and Niger states. In Kaduna, a man was killed along with his wife and kid in Zangon Aya community of Igabi Local Government by an irate mob that suspected them of supplying information to bandits. A day later, vigilantes from Maza-kuka village in Mashegu Local Government Area of Niger State killed the village head of the neighbouring village of Adogon Malam, Alhaji Saidu Abubakar, and his brother on similar suspicion following bandits’ attack on their village.

Experts and authorities however warn that jungle justice like the case in Zangon Aya and Adogon Mallam, especially on persons whose roles were not clearly established, may be exacerbating, rather than ameliorating the situation.  

Besides, findings by Daily Trust show that bandits often give stout protection to their sources and collaborators and would in many cases visit with retaliatory attacks. The outing of an informant in Sabuwa Local Government in Katsina State a few months ago drew the ire of the bandits who attacked a village in retaliation, warning residents to desist from blowing the cover of their ‘friends’.

Findings by Daily Trust however showed that security agents in most of the affected states, supported by state governments, are working hard to cut off the tube feeding banditry through the informants and collaborators. In places like Katsina and Kaduna, tracking technology is employed to tap communication between known bandits and the people that supply them information. It was gathered that combined teams of security agents were deployed to man cyber rooms where intercepted communications are analysed and shared with the leadership of security organisations in the states.

“So many people have been arrested by the DSS and police here, some of them well-known persons in the state,” said a security source in Katsina. In Kaduna, Aruwan said the government uses both human and technology to obtain intelligence in its fight against the bandits and their collaborators. He gave credit for the successes he said the state was recording in the anti-banditry campaign to this combined mechanism, and the security forces for “prompt utilisation of the information we receive”.

In Sokoto, Moyi said they have arrested hundreds of informants and suppliers working with bandits, though he could not give the number of either the persons or the arrests. But he said he was upbeat the crackdown would help the state in cracking the banditry nut.

This report is produced in partnership with the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) with support from the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO)