Nobody cares about Plateau

In no country in the world is the cold-blooded massacre of 52 people merely a matter to be “condemned” in the strongest terms; it could and should cause cataclysmic changes to the system. Nigeria is ripe for this change. In Plateau State, we have experienced not one but two large-scale massacres in the space of […]

In no country in the world is the cold-blooded massacre of 52 people merely a matter to be “condemned” in the strongest terms; it could and should cause cataclysmic changes to the system. Nigeria is ripe for this change.

In Plateau State, we have experienced not one but two large-scale massacres in the space of weeks: 42 this time in Zikke and Kimakpa villages of Bokkos, and 48 a fortnight ago in Bassa. Three hundred since the Christmas Day massacre of 2023. The numbers over the last 24 years since the violence in Plateau State began in 2001, if totalled, will be staggering, with estimates ranging in the thousands. The fact that we do not have a definitive figure is symptomatic of our nonchalance towards the recurrent loss of life we have been experiencing in the state. At this point, we must face the honest truth and accept that no one who truly should care does.

If the deaths of the 52 people, including women and children, mattered, their murderers, who are certainly not spirits, would have been tracked down by now. If we had done the same with the killers of the Bassa 48, this latest massacre would certainly not have happened. If the killers of those before that had been found and justice served, the later ones would not have occurred.

If justice had been done and been seen to be done after the killings of September 7, 2001, perhaps Plateau would not have become the killing field it is today. The failure to deliver justice for a minor crime invites a more serious one. If one were to ask the murderers, they would most likely claim retaliation for an injustice done to them—an injustice the justice system failed to address.

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When villagers strike down a herdsman and corral his cattle, or waylay a random traveller and lynch him, their justification lies in retaliation for an injustice done to them. By this, we have managed to trap ourselves in a vicious circle of hate, violence and barbaric killings.

We have mastered the art of public condemnation of these “heinous acts,” as our presidential statements have called them over the years, but we have never mastered the art of stopping them. It would seem we have never truly cared to stop them. Not even our most extreme measure—Obasanjo’s 2004 declaration of a state of emergency in the state—was designed with any enduring goal in mind. It didn’t achieve any long-term objectives.

We have had hundreds of orders for “the perpetrators of these evil acts” to be apprehended, but not once have these arrests been made; not once have the masterminds of these attacks, be they against Muslims or Christians, been identified. Following these recent killings, we have not seen any massive manhunt for the killers of the latest victims. The absence of consequences for these terrorists is an invitation to do it again.

Our government and security operatives have spent almost a generation twiddling their thumbs while murderers have continued to perfect their genocidal acts. We have kept trying to use the same methods—mounting checkpoints, setting up isolated military bases—to stop the madness. What we are effectively doing is sitting and waiting and “showing face.” Yet time and again, we have seen how these strategies have failed in unacceptable ways—because if the massacre of 52 people without a single arrest is not a massive security failure, then what is? Over the years, we have seen how easy it is for the killers to circumvent these stationed soldiers and take hours leisurely killing off communities.

While the knee-jerk reaction is to blame the military for these lapses, the reality is that the problem is more comprehensive. First, the military was not designed to function as a vigilante group. Despite our best efforts over two decades to have them function as such, we must realise that the assignment has failed because policing communities is not the function of the military but of the police.

Our police force has been handicapped for decades, largely by the intervention of the military in the political space (as I argued in my May 13, 2021, article titled “The military is paying today for undermining the police yesterday.” Google it if you wish.) Apart from the chronic shortage of professionalism in the police force and lack of equipment, it is simply baffling that in the decades of civil violence we have been experiencing, the government has not deemed it fit to expand the police force and train them to handle this situation. How is it possible that we still have between 300,000 and 400,000 police officers to secure the country’s 250 million population across 923,769 square kilometres?

What the government should have done is expand the police force by recruiting widely, funding them, and training them to secure the population and communities, thereby allowing the military to focus on special operations to take out terrorist cells and criminal gangs before, not after, they could strike. The approach must be well-coordinated and proactive.

These are all within the purview of the federal government, which must go beyond the usual rhetoric that will soon be forgotten once the media attention turns to the next flavour-of-the-week news item.

For its part, the state government must be genuinely committed to peaceful coexistence in the state with law-abiding citizens. The discourse that a succession of governments in the state has advanced has deepened the divisions among the people and conferred a second-class status on some of the populace; such narratives must change. Those who live in the state within the ambit of the law should be treated with fairness and should be afforded justice whenever transgressions are made against them. The occasional murder of certain communities or individuals must not be aided and abetted because they are not indigenes, only for the government to cry out when massacres like these are perpetrated as retaliation.

Having said this, we must categorically call out the Fulani militia and the leadership of the Fulani clan. The Miyetti Allah has, over the years, argued that people of Fulani stock have been attacked and killed and their cattle rustled, inferring that the killings, such as those in Bassa and Bokkos, are retaliations. I say inferred because they have never directly stated this.

Rhetoric aside, Nigeria must address the Fulani quandary. It makes no sense that the herders are involved in most of the violence happening in various parts of the country, from the farmers and herders conflict in the North Central to banditry and kidnappings in the North West and other regions. Each time, the justification that Miyetti gives for these transgressions is that the Fulani and their cattle are sacrosanct.

While every tribe should be free to enjoy the rights provided for them in the constitution, such as the right to life, the right to free movement, and the right to reside in any part of the country, these rights must be exercised within the law. The Fulani way of life, we must say, is no longer compatible with the realities of today. The system of indiscriminate grazing on people’s farmlands, which is sometimes done with absolute malice, is no longer tenable.

Something must change, and the criminalities that have arisen on the basis of protecting this way of life, which have now morphed into kidnapping and trading humans like cattle, and butchering them as such, must be curtailed. The lives of cattle, valuable as they are, should not cost us the lives and livelihoods of humans. If Miyetti will not actively work to end the rampages of the Fulani militia and bandits terrorising the country, the authorities must take measures to prevent conflicts between farmers and herders and the massacres of people by ethnic militias.

Whatever the government decides to do, it must start with finding the perpetrators of these crimes and making an example of them. Many things need to change, and President Tinubu must have the courage to take tough measures to end the bloodshed. It is enough. If anyone truly cares about Plateau and the lives of innocent Nigerians everywhere, now is the time to act.