Remarks by Malam Nasir El-Rufai, Governor of Kaduna State, at the national conversation; The Fierce Urgency of Now: Tactics and Strategies to Pull Nigeria from the Brink, held in Lagos on Friday, 19th February 2021
It is an understatement to say that Nigeria is in one of its most difficult moments. The genuine fears for their lives and property felt by many citizens across the country need to be assuaged, along with urgent steps to stop the attacks, relieve human misery and rebuild collective trust and will to jointly confront and defeat the criminals that menace us all.
- This moment of peril is compounded by an avalanche of extreme rhetoric, ethnic profiling and fake news that only ignite passion without comforting the afflicted, nor offering a way out. Leaders and all responsible persons must show compassion to our compatriots that have been affected while calming nerves. Banditry is a national problem, with victims from all parts of the country, and we should address it with a common resolve and not further delight the felons by letting them divide us.
- It is regrettable that banditry has been allowed to develop a nationwide footprint. In 2015, we in Kaduna State inherited a crime mix of mainly rural banditry, cattle rustling and kidnapping, along with the menace of urban gangs. In parts of the southern senatorial district of the state, communal clashes with ethno-religious complications have been the norm for over three decades. Many livestock holders and farmers had abandoned their farms, either because the bandits had stolen their assets or out of fear for their lives.
- We identified the Kamuku-Kuyambana forest range, running from Niger State through Birnin-Gwari in Kaduna State and across most of the NorthWest states, as the major bandit enclave. We initiated discussions with our neighbours and the governors developed a shared appreciation of the problem and decided to try and solve it. With remarkable unanimity, the governors of the North-West states and Niger State jointly provided the funding of a military operation for which the Federal Government committed its military assets.
- The military operations in the Birnin Gwari axis decimated the bandits and heralded a massive reduction in cattle rustling. But the relief proved sadly momentary. With the military operations not becoming continuous or simultaneous in all states, the bandits regrouped and intensified kidnappings in rural communities, highways and on the fringes of major population areas. Banditry is badly hurting our rural economy, driving farmers off the land, stealing their cattle, kidnapping them and their families for ransom, and often killing them.
- About a third of our 23 local governments are affected by these crimes. The locus of banditry in the last 15 months has been in the northern and central senatorial districts of our state. Bandits have also complicated the communal clashes that blighted lives in parts of the southern Kaduna senatorial district in the latter half of 2020. Thanks to some courageous leadership at the grassroots, a community-based peace process in Zangon-Kataf and Jema’a local government areas is helping to reduce communal tensions and incline the communities towards exclusively peaceful way of resolving differences.
- I am telling the story of our experience in Kaduna State to remind everyone that our people are victims of these criminals and illustrate that we feel the pains of victims in other parts of the country. Our experience also teaches us a few things which should inform our responses:
- The Nigerian state has not jealously and consistently protected its prerogatives and status as the leviathan, the ultimate guarantor of security, the protector of rights and the promoter of the rule of law. That is why its power is being challenged, in a frighteningly sustained manner by a phalanx of armed non-state actors.
- Our national level security response to these challenges has been uncoordinated and ineffective in wiping out the threats. None of the military services nor other security agencies has been suitably expanded in numbers and equipment for over a decade since the insurgency in the North-East pushed things to a new low. This country does not have enough soldiers, uniformed police and secret police to project state power across its vast swathes, particularly the forests. The limited number of boots on the ground are not well equipped and are significantly lacking in the technology that can make their limited numbers matter a lot less.
iii. The justice system operates with ethos and at a pace that do not reflect the fragility of the situation and the urgency to demonstrate that the rule of law is meaningful. Prosecutions take so long that many citizens assume that the criminals have long been released, encouraging criminal conduct, and raising the dangerous appeal of illegal self-help.