Bello Turji’s audacious order

IT is no understatement to say that Bello Turji is the face of contemporary banditry in Nigeria. In the past couple of years, Turji, 31, and his associates have mounted a campaign of terror in the Sokoto-Zamfara axis, sacking entire communities, destroying farmlands and displacing untold numbers of people. Over the same period, the Nigerian military has declared him wanted and army senior officers have repeatedly assured frustrated Nigerians that they are close to apprehending him. Yet, the killing of his son this January after troops attacked a stronghold of his in the Fakai high ground area of Zamfara appears to be the closest that the military has got to bringing in the unrepentant outlaw. 

Indications that Turji may in fact be getting stronger emerged last week following credible reports that he had ordered 5,000 residents from more than a dozen rural communities in Sokoto State to evacuate their homes. Habibu Halilu Modachi, a member of the Sokoto State House of Assembly representing Isa Constituency, confirmed the news to reporters, adding that “Turji sent his men to these communities and asked them to leave by Sunday afternoon or risk being killed.” The order to evacuate appears to be Turji’s retaliation against the communities for presumably giving intelligence to the military about the whereabouts of him and his men.

Formerly a herder, Turji turned to the far more lucrative cattle rustling and kidnapping-for-ransom in 2011, fleeing his town of Shinkafi in Zamfara State for Sokoto State where he set up a base. Although he would go on to enter into several peace agreements with the Zamfara State authorities, Turji typically reneged on those deals as quickly as he signed them. As his legend has grown, he has taken control of districts where he imposes levies on communities and conducts deadly raids on those that fail to pay, sparing no one, including women and children, according to residents. In February 2021, he appeared in a widely circulated video in which he threatened to invite foreign gangs to destabilise the country.

The question of why it has been difficult to bring to justice someone who has openly toyed with the armed forces summarises the dilemma of the country as it struggles to rein in an Islamist insurgency that is now well into its second decade. True, Turji is no Islamist so far as we can tell, but it goes without saying that he would not have emerged on the scene if not for the chaos created by the operations of Boko Haram. Banditry in northern Nigeria is an outgrowth of Jihadism, and the failure to accept the fundamental connection between the two, treating them as though they were separate phenomena, is one of the signal failures of the campaign to restore sanity to the region.

The failure is also not a good look for the federal and state governments across the region. For some time now, helpless Nigerians have been subjected to a barrage of government mandates importuning them to register for the National Identification Number (NIN) and the Bank Verification Number (BVN), ostensibly to tackle security issues like terrorism and kidnapping. Yet, for all that, the government has barely laid a glove on outlaws like Turji, and the security situation across the country has grown remarkably worse. It is puzzling how the same government that otherwise controls immense resources can allow itself to be outwitted by ragtag bandits.

Every day that passes with Turji and his fellow outlaws still at large is a day in which the government undermines its own authority.

READ ALSO: Wanted bandit leader, Bello Turji, kills 11 farmers in Sokoto