The President, Masari and Operation ‘Harbin Kunama’

Leaders are dealers in hope – Napoleon Bonaparte These are definitely very challenging times for the nation, and for some states, it has been so for quite a while with consistent severity. On a sunny day in March 2013, a day that was supposed to be a day of celebration and joy in Katsina State, […]

Leaders are dealers in hope – Napoleon Bonaparte

These are definitely very challenging times for the nation, and for some states, it has been so for quite a while with consistent severity.
On a sunny day in March 2013, a day that was supposed to be a day of celebration and joy in Katsina State, a band of ruthless and daring bandits visited calamity and anguish on a peaceful community in the southern end of the state. Armed with sophisticated weapons, including AK 47s, the bandits, riding on tens of Toyota Hilux vans and motorcycles, swarmed Sabon Layin Galadima, a community juxtaposed between Faskari and Sabuwa Local Government areas, in an operation that lasted about five hours unchallenged, shooting everyone and everything in sight with maniacal abandon. Instant death for over 114 people, and various degrees of injuries, fatal in some cases, to scores of others, was the gory outcome of that madness. Plus permanent flight away from the community by some of the survivors, scared by the persistence, daring and viciousness of the bandits and the seeming indifference of the authorities to their oft recurring predicament, because that was not the first time, just the most vicious.
That was a day when the political leadership of the state was hosting then President Goodluck Jonathan and the cream of the ruling Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) to a lavish reception at the Katsina Government House in celebration of some putative achievements.
In Katsina State still, farming and related activities, the mainstay of the state’s economy, had come under serious threat as a large percentage of the farming community had abandoned the farm for the urban centers as a result of the activities of those referred to by Katsina’s Governor Aminu Bello Masari as ‘Yan Kiwo Haram’, a.k.a. cattle rustlers.  With their dastardly pastime of forcefully depriving herders and farmers of their cattle and other livestock, and often in the process, dealing with extreme bias any attempt at resistance, the bandits had become authority unto themselves, stealing and killing with impunity.
Thus, with the state of insecurity in Katsina state at an all-time high at that time, cattle rustling and other forms of banditry became a campaign issue in the run up to the 2015 general elections, and which then APC’s gubernatorial candidate Rt. Hon. Aminu Bello Masari prioritised as one of the key issues he would aggressively address once in office.
In keeping faith with that promise, one of Masari’s first moves as elected governor was to mobilise his colleagues from Zamfara, Sokoto, Kebbi, Kaduna, Kano, Jigawa, and Niger, being the states most affected by the activities of cattle rustlers and bandits, to form a united front to confront the menace. For that, he was made the permanent Chairman of the group.
And severally he has led the group to meetings with President Muhammadu Buhari and as well with security chiefs, notably the Chief of Army Staff, the Chief of Air Staff, the Inspector General of Police and the Director General of the Department of State Service, lying the ground for ‘Operation Harbin Kunama’, the grand military onslaught recently launched by the President at Kuyen Bana Forest in Zamfara State against cattle rustlers and bandits terrorising the seven north west states and Niger.
To boot, Governor Masari made an exclusuve arrangement with the Military, the
Police, the Civil Defence Corps and the Department of State Security for extra security measures, singly bankrolled by the state government to the tune of N50million monthly, under which additional forces were deployed by these services to the seven local government areas in Katsina state most affected by the activities of the bandits.
These efforts and more soon began to yield result in Katsina State noticeable in the sharp reduction in the frequency of the activities of the bandits, even as more and more rustled animals are regularly recovered and returned to genuine owners.
With the full onset of the wet season in the North West, Operation Harbin Kunama could not have come at a more opportuned time when farmers can’t wait to go back to the farm, in sharp contrast to previous seasons when the activities of cattle rustlers, bandits and kidnappers had almost made farming well neigh impossible in the region.

Malumfashi is SSA Media to the Katsina State Governor.