Olaiya Phillips
On December 24, 2023, Nigeria mined new depths of degeneracy, as further evidence was provided that we are on the brink of a descent into even more dark crevices. On that day, terrorism, masquerading as banditry, descended with inexplicable savagery. Men, women and children were slaughtered in the most inhumane ways, as if they were mere points to be scored in a medieval blood sport.
In Bokkos, Mangu and Barkin-Ladi Local Government Areas of Plateau State, the cold hand of death once again settled on the Middle Belt. Altogether, 17 communities were attacked, with houses burned and babies slaughtered as they cried out on their mother’s backs. Heads were smashed in and limbs decimated. The scenes recorded before the failure of the security forces to come to the aid of the indigenes were worthy of a viewer discretion warning. As if to make the point that their mission was the very antithesis of the nation’s longing for peace, the terrorists chose the eve of the birth of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, to visit their particular brand of barbarism.
Sovereignty presupposes supreme and unrestricted sway in a defined space; it assumes the sovereign has full dominion in his domain. The Christmas massacres on the Plateau left scenes that scream to all and sundry that the abnormality of a sovereign state in which the writ of the sovereign does not run is coming close to becoming normative, at our collective peril.
Scores of marauding murderers (reports say up to 400 of them) descended on the 17 communities and spared no one as they engaged in primeval bloodletting. The ferocity of the killing spoke loudly of unspoken but well-known agendas.
Unfortunately, this is part of a long-standing pattern going back many years. Through a scorched earth policy, these acts have sought to change long standing demographic realities by rewriting the facts on the ground. The popular nomenclature of farmer-settler conflict is wholly inadequate to capture what we are witnessing. This is gerrymandering in the most vicious way possible, and more than that, it’s ethnic cleansing.
The total lack of fear or foreboding of what might happen to them on the part of the perpetuators is a damning indictment of the tepid nature of the response that has attended such outrages in the past. The president, like his predecessor, directed the security agencies to “scour every stretch of the zone and apprehend the culprits”.
He has not said what sanctions will attach to failure on the part of the security agencies, and when such sanctions will be applied. To reassure Nigerians that his government is committed to securing our territorial integrity, President Bola Tinubu must live up to his promise to secure the Badlands. If he cannot and does not, what makes him any different from President Muhammadu Buhari?
National security equates to the nation’s security. Without security across the length and breadth of the country, all President Tinubu’s laudable plans for economic and social reform and regeneration will come to nought. Why would anyone invest in a country where the writ does not run? Law and order are and must be indivisible. It is either the way our affairs are run or it is not. The government cannot cherry pick where and when it chooses to elevate fidelity to the law.
While nation states are nominally sovereign, they are not immune to regional and global imperatives: a nation’s security is rarely divorced from its geography. The facts emanating from the Sahel cannot be disregarded, they must be tackled and overcome.
A well-oiled security apparatus presupposes an intelligence service with a network that provides government with timely information to enable it act to prevent the kind of horrors witnessed on the Plateau over Christmas. We are not merely interested in apprehending the monkeys that carried out these dastardly acts; just as importantly, if not more so, we must bring the organ grinders orchestrating their dance of death from afar to book.
There is only so much a people can endure before they seek solace in forms of self-help that only serve to further undermine the suzerain’s claim to authority in the sovereign space. Without being unduly dramatic, should we not be asking ourselves if these goings presage, by stealth, a de facto state of internecine war within the country Nigeria?
After the Nigerian Civil War, we collectively determined that never again would we war among each other. Where the people cannot look to their government for day-to-day protection from egregious non-state actors, it seems to me that we are sleepwalking our way into another nationwide conflagration.
It would be simple to merely describe what we are witnessing as evidence of a religious agenda; it would also be simplistic. The issues at play are far more complex and range over numerous cleavages and nefarious agendas. What we ought to be worried about is those that would reduce this to a Christian-Muslim conflict in the hope of sparking a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There can be no excuse for knee-jerk reactions as this government and its security agencies have had more than enough time to apprise themselves of the many dimensions and nuances of this persisting problem. In addition, they have the benefit of institutional knowledge about a conflict that various governments have been contending with, to no avail, for decades.
In spite of the problems that have attended the first half-year of President Tinubu’s administration, he still has sufficient goodwill to leverage in trying to secure the nation’s territorial integrity. Difficult decisions will have to be taken and be seen to be taken. He can count on the support of men of goodwill; he cannot however expect a blank cheque.
* Mr. Phillips is the former Chairman of Northern Christian Elders Forum (NOSCEF)
