Plateau, Nigeria and the Kalashnikov challenge

Once again, there is outrage throughout Nigeria as armed men invaded communities in Plateau State over the Christmas weekend killing an estimated 200 innocent villagers and forcing tens of thousands to flee their land in search of self-preservation. For Plateau State, it has been over 20 years that such attacks have occurred regularly.   As is […]

Once again, there is outrage throughout Nigeria as armed men invaded communities in Plateau State over the Christmas weekend killing an estimated 200 innocent villagers and forcing tens of thousands to flee their land in search of self-preservation. For Plateau State, it has been over 20 years that such attacks have occurred regularly.  

As is the tradition, our President, Bola Tinubu, in a statement in Abuja by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, condemned the attacks and ordered a manhunt for the killers. Tinubu assured Nigerians that “these envoys of death, pain, and sorrow will not escape justice.” We have heard such condemnation/promise to act hundreds of times from our successive ogas that all we do is shrug our shoulders and move on until our turn comes.  

In Plateau State, there has been considerable investment in conflict resolution and peacebuilding efforts within and between communities. Too regularly, however, well-armed men will move into communities and massacre innocent people destroying the investment sank into peace building. As the state governor said, it is clear that the people are confronting terrorism orchestrated by people with the arms and logistical capacity to do it.

Nigeria has been turned into a country where bandit/terrorists kill, maim, kidnap, rape and steal as they please and the perpetual response of government over the past two decades is empty assurances of dealing with them but no outcome is ever seen in terms of making them account for their crimes. For this reason, Nigeria is tearing at the seams as the people realise that the State is either unwilling or unable to provide for the security and welfare. The people’s response increasingly is to procure their own arms. 

The reality today is that the mass circulation of small arms and light weapons among the civilian population has placed Nigeria on the path to self-destruction. Two years ago, the then minister of Defence challenged Nigerians to defend themselves against bandits wielding sophisticated weapons. He was telling Nigerians what they already knew to be true – that there is no state to defend citizens so everyone is on their own.

It is important to recall that the reason we have the state and give it the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence is to provide for our collective security. If we all have our arms, the risk is we will turn against each other in a direct march to anarchy. That is why we, citizens, unlike criminals, should not procure arms. 

Our society is confronted with the Kalashnikov Challenge, characterised by the mass use of modern rifles by civil actors with criminal orientation. In the good old days of “inter-tribal” warfare, a week of combat between two communities might produce two or three casualties. The Dane gun that was in use at that time had a quasi-democratic character. In one out of four times that the trigger is pulled, the gun explodes and the shooter is the victim. The Kalashnikov has changed all that. A young man with a single rifle could wipe out a whole village and start hate memories that the whole of previous history could never have imagined. We live in difficult times in which the destruction of community, society and ultimately the state has become too easy a pathway. 

The Fulani pastoral community has emerged with the highest agency in this regard. Over a period of three decades of serious crisis of the pastoralist mode of production due to well documented causes – population growth and expansion of agriculture, climate change and dramatic decline of the availability of pasture, as well as extortion by police and area courts, amongst others, many within the community lost all or significant parts of their herd. It was in that context that cattle rustling, an age-old practice of pastoral communities utilised in forming herds and for getting cash and meat was revived. 

 When procurement of the Kalashnikov rifles started in the late nineties and early 2000s, cattle rustling was transformed into a vicious criminal activity far beyond the quasi-cultural practice earlier observed by anthropologists. Low intensity conflicts were quickly transformed into commando like attacks with sophisticated weapons, affecting both pastoralists and large-scale farmers. The result was that the scale of loss of both herds and human beings started to escalate and the victims were mainly Fulani pastoralists in the bush, as such the stories did not make it into the legacy and social media. 

The second phase was also largely unnoticed. When security agencies initiated significant moves in the early 2000s to trace rustled cattle, the method of criminal activity changed and rather than rustle, heads of cattle owning families were kidnapped, forcing the families to sell their cattle, pay ransom and get their relations released. The forests straddling Zamfara, Kaduna and Katsina states became the ungoverned territories for these activities. Much of this was done without media attention. 

The third phase was the extension of these criminal activities to neighbouring communities who were also subjected to the malfeasance. Through the 2010s, criminal gangs composed mainly but not exclusively of Fulani youth and uniformed vigilante groups set up by communities to provide security, fought each other. The fight has always been uneven as the side with the most sophisticated weapons wins. 

Pastoralism has undergone a major transformation which has increased, rather than decreased, the potential for conflicts and discord. Traditionally, pastoralists engaged in open grazing dispersing themselves widely so as not to overgraze areas and encroach on farms. With rising insecurity, however, they started moving in large groups in smaller spaces, as they got blocked out of their traditional grazing zones. This large-scale concentration of pastoralists in limited ranges allows them to protect themselves against attacks. The paradox is that the more concentrated they are, the more damage they do to crops, which in turn fuels more violent conflict. As they spread around the country and are being chased out of many states, the conflicts have intensified. This conflict-generating trend that spread around Nigeria can only be reversed when security in rural Nigeria begins to improve. 

We are now entering a new phase in which drivers of conflict are being multiplied. Rural banditry and mass kidnapping are sapping rural communities of their resources and savings. Families are being forced to pay millions of naira in ransom, which they do not have. To pay, they have to tax themselves, sell their animals and farms to secure the release of their relations. There is a deep process of pauperisation that is ongoing in rural Nigeria today. The youth of the affected communities, therefore, have nothing to lose but their poverty. The pathway to success that has destroyed their family resources is the Kalashnikov, as such they also choose to seek it and arms thereby spreads and violence grows. It is a pathway to self-destruction. 

Nigeria’s ruling class understands the trajectory we are on but they are too irresponsible to care. Of course, they care for themselves and are busy buying houses in Dubai, United Kingdom, Ghana and other places to bolt out when the times come – just they and their nuclear families, while their relations and former compatriots fight it out. That is why they are not really making any effort to rebuild the state and create conditions for rebuilding legitimacy and state capacity to provide for the security and welfare of all citizens. Wherever they go would be a temporary abode, their destination is hell. For the rest of us who are going nowhere, our future is in our hands, do we allow the criminal elements to destroy us through conflict or do we make efforts to rebuild a political community that would serve the interests of all Nigerians