Zamfara, our conscience
Just when you think it could not get worse for the people of Zamfara, it does. Then it does, again and again. Until the statistics mean nothing anymore. You are left with that feeling that follows intense outrage: a numb foreboding that things are not likely to get better. If you live outside Zamfara State, […]
Just when you think it could not get worse for the people of Zamfara, it does. Then it does, again and again. Until the statistics mean nothing anymore. You are left with that feeling that follows intense outrage: a numb foreboding that things are not likely to get better. If you live outside Zamfara State, you can afford the luxury of asking what could possibly be done to stop the nightmare of millions of fellow citizens living in perpetual fear. If you live in the towns and villages of Zamfara, you would have given up the hope that help will come, a long time ago. The Nigerian State has failed the people of Zamfara. No, to be clearer, the government of Governor Yari and the federal government of President Buhari have betrayed the people of Zamfara, and parts of Birnin Gwari, and Sokoto, and Katsina and and Kaduna and hundreds of villages in many parts of the North where villagers save or sell food store s and livestock for the days when they have to pay for the release of kidnapped relations or pay for protection against attacks.
The vast majority of the people of Zamfara State are peasants and herders who can barely survive an annual reproductive circle. Life has moved at a painfully slow pace for many decades, which, until recently, meant that folks could lead a fairly predictable existence on the one hand, and suffer the price of volatile demands for adjustments to challenges of new political and administrative structures and an economy that causes havoc on established patterns of existence. In most ways, Zamfara virtually mirrors the entire North: agrarian, thinly-governed, poor, desperate for high quality of governance and holding on to a fading past in the face of the questionable value of rapid change.
A few years ago, armed bandits and cattle rustlers began to make an impact on the lives of poor villagers in areas where the state bordered Kaduna State. Neighboring Birnin Gwari was bleeding almost daily from an encroaching community of rustlers and bandits that had made the vast forest transversing much of Nigeria’s portion of the savannah home. Soon, boundaries disappeared. More and more lives, freedom, villages, farmlands and livestock were lost to well-armed and highly motivated bandits and kidnappers. The industry of rustling and kidnapping grew as local leaders appealed to the state to intervene. Patchy, eye-catching responses occasionally disturbed a bit of this expanding industry. Farming suffered. Livestock disappeared. Villagers who could, relocated. Criminals gained ground. The state lost its initiative to protect rural dwellers. Villagers submitted, then fought back, then paid eve higher price for resisting.
Three years ago, the worst enemy of President Buhari would not believe that he will be facing another election with more populations in the North under the strong influence of criminals than those under Jonathan four years ago. This is the painful reality that was only whispered this time last year, but these days, screamed without fear or restraint. For most of the period that Boko Haram operated in large portions of the North, the three north western states of Sokoto, Kebbi and Zamfara were remarkably untouched directly by its mindless violence. Some said the traditional and religious structures proved too strong for Boko Haram to penetrate. Others said they provided the most fertile ground for recruitment by the insurgency and its natural setting, but it would have stretched itself too thin to target the heart of the Sultanate.
Where Boko Haram drew a line, bandits, armed robbers and rustlers found a perfect setting: populations too far removed from effective governance, indifferent or absentee governors and state security assets stretched too thin and too far in the search for the illusive defeat of Boko Haram. The epicenter of the fight against defenseless villagers moved from the shell of Birnin Gwari to Zamfara and now to Sokoto and Katsina. Identical social structures and similar vulnerability in a nation whose security assets are stretched beyond breaking points could provide natural settings for resident violence in Kano, Jigawa, Gombe, Bauchi and many other parts of the north east. Zamfara has become shorthand for the terrible and intolerable neglect of the fate of millions of our fellow citizens today. There is more noise when locals take the law into their hands to deal with the enemy than when the law is not taken into the hands of the state.
Say what you want, the people of Zamfara have been abandoned by the governments they voted into power to protect them. Their governor has shouted himself hoarse in a futile defence against accusations that he stays away from the state for far longer periods than he spends in the state. He has been embroiled in a gruesome political battle against powerful opposition, resulting in a tragic mass political suicide by his party. In all probability, his party will have no candidates contesting for elective positions next year. Other parties will have to come and attempt to restore some order and security around villagers. President Buhari may have chosen a better option of keeping his distance from even commenting or consoling villagers over the routine outrage that is visited at will almost daily on the people of Zamfara and now in many parts of Katsina and Sokoto. Every public relation deployment of security personnel with fancy names evaporates in effectiveness as banditry digs in. His minister of defence spends more time and energy seeking the ticket to contest the governorship of the state than he does overseeing security arrangements over villagers in his state. Villagers who fight back against suspected criminals, informers and indifferent officials are visited with the full weight of the state. Now villagers are rising up against agents of a state that will not protect them. It is almost certain they will be punished, and political detractors will be blamed for their action.
Zamfara is our damaged conscience as a Nation. It is the flag of failure to honour the promise by our leaders to provide us security. The only crime more serious than the terrible existence of millions of our fellow citizens is our refusal to raise our voices against it. Zamfara is not a northern problem. It is a national warning against a pattern that narrows the influence of the Nigerian state, and widens the specter of living under the order of organized, criminal violence. The forthcoming elections must be about Zamfara and all other parts of the country where hundreds of citizens die, or pay millions to retrieve relations from kidnappers every week, or raise millions to pay-off attacks from marauding bands of criminals because the state does not appear to care or show a willingness to help them. It may please President Buhari’s administration that criticisms against his failure to protect millions of villagers who voted for him in 2015 are muted, but will be a dangerous disservice to the expanding body of victims and the ultimate survival of the nation not to demand that Nigerians judge him on his records on security.
Jamila Abubakar wrote this piece from Abuja