Nigeria’s Defence Minister, Bashir Salihi Magashi, was quoted as telling Nigerians to start defending themselves against the ubiquitous Fulani killer-herdsmen, bandits, kidnappers and other criminals who appear to have taken over Nigeria’s landscape and have been having a field day in unleashing atrocities on innocent Nigerians in recent years. In the last five years that their heinous activities had risen to a worrisome crescendo, they had created more widows, widowers, orphans and homeless Nigerians more than any other period in the history of the nation.
The minister’s advice is no doubt an allusion to the unprecedented level of insecurity in Nigeria today. Farmers don’t feel secure anymore, either on the way or on their farms which can be seen as an express letter to famine in the country. Many traders whose business involves travelling had suspended their business activities in most cases until God knows when that something will be done about the menacing killer-herdsmen who also kidnap innocent people to extort money from their families, probably to purchase more weapons of death and intimidation.
But the minister’s advice was greeted with different levels of criticism. Many argued that the minister as an appointee of the present government is being paid with tax payers’ money to co-ordinate the defence of not only the territorial boundaries of Nigeria, but also to ensure the safety of everyone living in the country. Magashi did not deny this. Some are even asking: “with what are we to defend ourselves against the criminals who are fully armed with sophisticated weapons?”
Rather than flay the minister, we must accept that the man knows better than many of us outside the government circles when it comes to the ability of the government on the issue of security. If he is telling us to be ready to defend ourselves rather than submitting sheepishly to the killer Fulani herdsmen and their comrades in terrorism who now see kidnapping as the most lucrative venture in today’s Nigeria, we must take the man seriously.
As an insider of the present government, the minister is aware that, with the exception of the ubiquitous AK 47–wielding Fulani terrorists who exclusively enjoy the instrument of compulsion (outside the security forces), every Nigerian who possessed light guns for self-defence had earlier been ordered by the same government under which he is serving to surrender them to the Police. So the minister is not unaware that Nigerians at present have nothing with which to defend themselves. The killer-Fulani and other terrorists are also very much aware of this, hence their heinous operations against the hapless Nigerians with unreserved impunity.
Moreover, some northern elites including an Islamic leader, Sheikh Abubakar Gumi, are defending and justifying the Fulani herdsmen and other bandits in carrying about sophisticated weapons which they see as their right among defenceless Nigerians.
There are some logical inferences from Minister Magashi’s admonition to Nigerians. Although the minister did not expressly tell Nigerians that we are already in a state of anarchy where everyone is left to fend for and defend himself/herself even at the expense of others without caution from anywhere, Magashi’s statement is loaded with this inference. In other words, we must logically infer from the minister’s admonition that the prevailing situation is beyond government’s ability or willingness to tackle it. We must also assume that Magashi is preparing us for a situation of the survival of the fittest ( part of the characteristics of anarchism) if we are not in it yet. We must therefore assume that Minister Magashi is sympathetic to the plight of defenceless Nigerians who are being assaulted and now live in daily fear of survival. I don’t want to believe that the minister was trying to mock defenceless Nigerians as cowards. He has no justification to do that under any guise. Rather, I prefer to believe that the man was just being sympathetic with Nigerians who are defenceless in a state of near anarchy.
This is a situation in which the Fulani herdsmen and their comrades in criminality are enjoying what some political philosophers see as negative freedom. Negative freedom is a situation in which the state overtly or covertly permits an individual or groups to operate the way they like even at the expense (or even to the perils) of others without any inhibition. The Fulani terrorists and their comrades in criminality are today in Nigeria like what the Chicago gangs of the 1930s and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) were in the United States in those days.
What we must therefore humbly request from our caring and sympathetic minister is how to make available the weapons with which Nigerians could defend themselves since majority of Nigerians cannot afford the simplest weapon on their own without assistance.
In the alternative, to officially declare everyone free to possess and carry arms like the Fulani. Also, since most Nigerians don’t know how to handle weapons like the Fulani terrorists, they must be trained in how to handle weapons like their attackers until the nation is free from anarchism.
- Adesua is a former MD/E-I-C, Nigerian Tribune.
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