CERTAIN northern leaders seem to have taken possession of insecurity by trying to handle the perpetrators as some of their own and by so doing, the region has become a net distributor of bandits to other parts of Nigeria and in fact, Africa. The failure of leadership between the Hausa and Fulani elite has led to banditry and kidnapping in North-West and North-East Nigeria. Violence has had a far-reaching humanitarian and economic impact on the region and created a domino effect of security problems. Over the last 15 years, thousands of people have been killed – mainly in North-West and North-East states – with millions of internally displaced and thousands fleeing into Niger Republic. Livestock and crops have been decimated, further depressing human livelihood indices that were already the country’s lowest. The violence is aggravating other security challenges: it has forced more herders southward into the country’s Middle Belt, thus increasing herder-farmer tension in that region and beyond.
In May, 2024 the northern elders wrote a letter to President Bola Tinubu not to allow foreign military base in the North in order to cover up the leadership failure among northern elite. I am worried that northern elite have a hidden agenda that a foreign military base would have exposed. A foreign military base can help part of northern Nigeria to stabilize and stop it from further bandits attacks. A foreign military base would have stopped both ethnic groups, Fulani and Hausa from importing mercenaries from Chad, Niger, Mali and Southern Sudan to prosecute what in itself has assumed a life of its own and may spread to other parts of Nigeria with grievous consequences on peace and stability in Nigeria. Northern elders should have written to President Tinubu on how to restore peace and order to the north but instead they wrote about foreign military base as if they are working with the military governments in Niger Republic, Mali and Burkina Faso.
As security has deteriorated, the regions have steadily come under the renewed influence of jihadist groups, which have sometimes attacked security forces. The spike in jihadist activity in the North-West has raised fears that the region could soon become a land bridge connecting Islamic insurgencies in the central Sahel with the decade-old insurgency in the Lake Chad region of northeastern Nigeria. Security sources point to a resurgence of the long-dormant Boko Haram splinter group, Jama’atu Ansarul Muslimina Fi Biladis Sudan (Group of Partisans for Muslims in Black Africa), better known as Ansaru, which was active in north-western Nigeria between 2011 and 2014. Elements of other Boko Haram offshoots, notably the Islamic State in West Africa Province, are arriving in the area. A poorly secured international boundary, meanwhile, enables the influx of arms and facilitates the movement of jihadists to and from the Sahel, where the Islamic State has been expanding its influence.
Over the years, the northern political elite not only used the common Islamic heritage of the Hausa and the Fulani people as an instrument to construct and cement the notion of an undivided and indivisible Hausa-Fulani identity, they also encouraged other parts of the country to see them as one, undifferentiated people. In response to the rural and urban banditry by mostly Fulani brigands against Hausa people, Hausa people have formed vigilante groups called yan sakai or yan banga for self-defense, but Fulani people say the yan banga self-defense groups often indiscriminately murder innocent Fulani people who are not even remotely connected with abductions and murders. This has provoked an endless cycle of recriminations and retaliatory violence between Hausa and Fulani people and is threatening the age-old, Islam-inspired ethnic fusion between them.
A bizarre event took place in Sokoto State recently. The Emir of Gobir Isa Bawa was kidnapped. His abductors demanded N60m. The relatives were about raising the funds after making contacts with influential figures. The date for the payment of the ransom was nigh. Alas, the kidnappers murdered the Emir in cold blood. Not done, the kidnappers insisted on being paid before they released the body of the Emir of Gobir. Unknown to many observers, the murder of the Emir of Gobir was the height of the smoldering intra-ethnic clashes between the Fulani and the Hausa which observers claim has taken thousands of human lives in the past one decade even as the ruling class of both ethnic groups try to subvert and gloss over the issue. The Hausa and Fulani are distinct ethnic groups, but in Nigeria, they found a common political destiny in being referred to as Hausa-Fulani. In the past three decades, the years of misrule, poverty, hunger, exclusion and deprivation by the ruling class in the North have exposed the internal contradictions which for decades have been veiled under the cover of Islam. The kidnap and killing of the Emir of Gobir is nothing but a brutal continuation of the bitter, bloody conflict.
The crisis is already spreading to other parts of Northern Nigeria. The so-called “bandits” is essentially Hausa indigenous revolt. President Tinubu must call the Fulani and Hausa leaders together, identify the major grievances and work out short-term, middle-term and long-term solutions which would be both social, economic and political. The National Assembly must also realise that the National Question in Nigeria is real and has to be resolved before it is too late.
- Donald writes via inwalomhe.donald@yahoo.com
READ ALSO: UPDATED: Two more govs ready to pay N70,000 new minimum wage
and then