WHEN Undertow wrote on April 13, 2019 that Katsina and Zamfara States had become the poster boys of insecurity in the North, not even he was aware that Katsina would a few weeks later become the cynosure of all eyes as bandits successfully abducted President Muhammadu Buhari’s in-law and traditional title holder in Daura Emirate Council in Katsina State, Alhaji Musa Umar Uba. He is, according to a report, married to Hajiya Bilki, a niece to the president. This is probably the nearest the abduction craze has come to the president. Of course the president knows that banditry and all sorts of criminalities, particularly in the North, have reached epidemic proportions. What he may not know is whether his ‘law and order’ approach to combating the crisis, assuming that that approach is even well thought out, is the right panacea.
Undertow had on that referenced day in a piece entitled “Zamfara tells Nigeria something far deeper” drawn attention to the widespread reports of abductions and banditry in Zamfara and Katsina States and alerte the federal and state governments to begin reappraising their understanding of the huge crisis threatening to engulf the entire North, if not the entire nation. The panaceas so far put forward, Undertow counselled, were generally ineffective and too restricted by stale orthodoxies to tackle the growing menace. The column was, however, not too hopeful that anyone would listen, considering that nearly everyone in government and the security services jealously holds on to old but futile interpretations of the extraordinarily hostile phenomena that have grown to become an albatross around the neck of Nigeria.
The column added that the ineffectiveness of previous measures to tackle the mushrooming crime crisis was predisposing the country to far more cataclysmic problems. Said Undertow: “But because these measures have been applied in past years with immeasurable severity, but have failed woefully to have any major or lasting impact on the situation in those beleaguered states, there is nothing to suggest that they will work, having worked in fits and starts every time security forces were mobilised or deployed. With a little exaggeration, it is safe to say that the country is sitting on a powder keg. In fact, a little more indolence on the part of the governing elite might see the country careening into the ravine. The widespread attacks in nearly all parts of the country and the superficial impact the deployment of the security services have had on the problem suggest that the political elite have missed all the signals indicating the kind of trouble the country is contending with. But their misdiagnosis is unfortunately accompanied by the failure of rationality and character. The government has stuck to the use of overwhelming counter-force; and the rest of the country seems willing to sermonise over the problem, believing it is an attitudinal problem. Neither force nor sermon will work.”
Undertow was even more unsettled by the desultory approach to the monumental crisis. It said: “If military and police interventions have proved only partially effective so far, and are in the long run ineffective; and money does not answer to a cancer that is fast metastasizing, then it may be time for the government to examine other ways of running the country, no matter how badly the new ways war against their ethnic sensibilities and stale orthodoxies. The National Assembly early this week angrily suggested state policing as a way out because, as they put it, all crime is local. But deployed in isolation, even this measure will fail to have the desired impact. What the political elite do not want to hear is that the existing structure of the country is fraying at the edges, and rupturing very badly in the middle. It is time, more than ever before, to reconsider the foundations of the country and initiate a total reworking of its structure under a new and more effective arrangement. Tinkering will not mitigate a crisis that is fast building up into a critical and explosive mass.”
And finally, reflecting its frustrations with the government’s jaded and almost casual approach to the problem of widespread insecurity in the North, Undertow denounced the government’s insouciance in the face of what is building into a catastrophe. The column then concluded: “The population of young, angry and alienated Nigerians is growing at an alarming rate, resources are shrinking, economic growth is unable to match the rise in population, attitudes and values are shifting or even morphing dangerously, ethnic and religious relations are fraying, and the political elite insensibly and obstinately operates a costly, contradictory, ponderous and ineffective political system. There can be no worse recipe for disaster than what Nigeria is contending with today. Either the government does not know this, or it is too proud to acknowledge or care about it.” This conclusion may be apocalyptic and the problem resistant to any cure, but all that is needed is for the government to expand its brain trust, meet minds the proper and scientific way, and design useful remedies before it is too late. There are of course no guarantees — no guarantee that the government will humble itself and look for fresh ideas, and no guarantee that even the right remedies will not now prove too little too late. But since it is the business of government to constantly find ways of solving problems, they cannot afford to give up.
The banditry and abductions have come despairingly too close for comfort for the president to stick stubbornly to whatever sure cures he had preferred. Those sure cures are anything but sure. His law and order option is proving inadequate and overstretched. He simply cannot muster the funds to overwhelm what is essentially not a financial problem. The scale of alienation is also abominably imponderable. The imponderability of the problem leaves the government precious little time to reflect, let alone devise solutions, and little elbow room to manoeuvre. Decades of financial malfeasance by Nigeria’s leadership elite, particularly and obviously the northern elite, have created a dangerous critical mass of angry, implacable, insatiable and unforgiving young and alienated people. They have tasted blood through bandit actions and abductions, have become resistant to police and military counterattacks, and may have begun to sense victory approaching if they can stay their nihilistic course.
This column will say it once again that the Buhari presidency’s understanding of the national crisis manifesting dangerously in the North, especially its underlying reasons and scale, is monumentally defective. Current orthodoxies will not work, for they are based on the wrong perceptions and observations of a problem that has ossified along its multidimensional variants. Social scientists and other analysts have long feared that this day would come as a result of the country’s reluctance to honestly and courageously grapple with the fundamental problems afflicting the body politic. They knew long ago that the country’s political structure, its unitary system disingenuously touted as federal, lack of social justice, and the appalling and undisciplined approach to the rule of law would one day combine in a lethal mix and explode in everybody’s face. That day, alas, is either here or near.
The Buhari presidency has not expertly handled the crisis well. They can, however, begin to find ways of correctly interpreting the issues at stake and the restiveness of alienated youths. They can also begin to weigh options which, to their leading lights, seem like political heresies but which really, like restructuring, may in fact be the only revolutionary way out. And the presidency must produce the right attitude to both the crisis and its solution without which little can be achieved. Sadly, for a government quite reconciled to excessive dithering, they do not have the time or luxury to continue the dangerous pussyfooting that has led them and the country to this terrible pass. Out of desperation, they may of course consider the declaration of a state of emergency or outright emergency rule in those troubled areas. They will, however, discover what other failed states have long realised: that no one plays his last card so casually.
The solution to the North’s, and Nigeria’s, problem requires brilliance to conceive and courage to execute. This government has shown neither. But the time to take the bull by the horns is now. Let them take it scientifically and deliberately, not with the reckless bravado of a proud but faded and enervated bullfighter but with the suavity and nimbleness of a young and accomplished prize-winning bullfighter at his most impressive prime. There is no question that the genie of anarchy is out of the bottle. What is in doubt is whether it is completely out or whether it can be piped back into the bottle. Only the Buhari presidency can answer that question. The country will hope that they will eschew all encumbrances — ethnic, religious or ideological — to give the most appropriate answer to the puzzle.
No comments:
Post a Comment