Banditry
Jibrin Ibrahim
The Brutality of Bandit Terrorism
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 23rd August 2024
This week is yet another terrible one marked by the circulation of a video showing the blood-soaked image of the kidnapped Emir of Sabon Birni in Sokoto State, Isa Bawa, begging for his rescue. The message from the bandit terrorists was clear, they will continue to kidnap, torture and kill as they please because the Nigerian State cannot or maybe, will not stop them. The most chilling part of the message is that no one is safe, they can pick any one they want. To prove their point, they killed him and insisted on a ransom as a precondition to release his son. We have all been living in terror for a long time given our knowledge that no one will rescue us when the bandit terrorists pick us up. It is little comfort that our president will always say he will deal with them but do nothing. Sigh.
Meanwhile, his people at Sabon Birni yesterday performed a funeral prayer, known as Salat al-Gha’ib, for the murdered emir. The prayer is usually performed in absentia for a Muslim who died where there are no Muslims to pray for them. The prayer was performed after a report that the emir had been killed and buried by his abductors in the bush. The state government has neither confirmed nor denied the report that the emir was killed Wednesday afternoon by the bandits. As Premium Times reported, the state’s commissioner for information, Sambo Danchadi, did not respond to multiple phone calls and text messages on Wednesday and Thursday morning for comment on the incident. No statement was issued by government. The police spokesperson in the state, Ahmad Rufa’i, said he was yet to be briefed on the incident and declined further comments. As there is no State to protect us, I guess we will have to continue to suffer as it pleases those terrifying us while those who run our governments will continue to enjoy our resources until the bandits catch up with them. Meanwhile, the bandits continue to commit atrocities all over the country with concentrated actions in Zamfara, Katsina, Niger and Kaduna States.
I worry for this country because for years we have had successive leaderships that have basically abdicated their responsibility to govern and work for the security and welfare of citizens. When the governing class has utter disregard for the people, their brutality to the people is deeper than that of the bandit terrorists we are all complaining about. The Tinubu Administration is clearly worse than the bad Buhari Administration. It is difficult to disagree with the candidate of the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) in the last election and former vice president of Nigeria, Atiku Abubakar when he said this week that the future of Nigerians is being mortgaged by President Bola Tinubu, his family, and associates. Atiku compares Mr Tinubu’s integration of his business interests into Lagos’s public enterprises to his efforts at the federal level:
“Just as Alpha Beta, Primero, and others act as Tinubu’s proxies in Lagos, managing critical sectors and generating revenue for him and his family, he has begun to replicate this at the federal level,” he said. He expressed astonishment at the operations of the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPC Ltd) and how the government-owned oil company had put its retail arm under the control of OVH, a company in which Oando, led by Wale Tinubu, a relative of the president, owns 49 per cent. As more reports appear, it is clear that this is just the tip of the iceberg as the President and his family are laser focused on privatizing Nigeria’s assets. His friends need to draw his attention to the dangers of this pathway at a difficult moment when the majority of Nigerians are hungry and angry at the misery that has befallen them due to bad governance. Commenting on the recent revelation that the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway project is under litigation, Atiku explained that the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), a global network of investigative journalists, reported that the coastal highway project has been taken to court and revealed a close relationship between Tinubu’s son, Seyi, and Gilbert Chagoury, who was awarded the contract without competitive bidding. The welfare and security of the population, and not one family, should be the primary focus of government.
There is a deep belief within Nigeria’s political class that the acquisition of massive fortunes is a guarantee of remaining in power because everybody is supposed to have a price at which they could be bought. What is not known is that the proceeds of corruption reach only a tiny fraction of Nigerians and that most people are in deep penury and misery. The masses cannot be bought because the political class has never sought to reach them and because the majority is not in the circuit, they have nothing to lose if they revolt. I believe this element of political risk should be a major consideration for Nigeria’s political class.
cornelius...@gmail.com
This is no “sour grapes” matter.
Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s charges are serious and should be taken most seriously. President Tinubu himself ought not to dismiss or shrug off these serious charges with silence - leaving the rest of us with the impression that his disdainful silence means consent , agreement , that in effect he is disdainfully and silently pleading guilty to the charges : “ that the future of Nigerians is being mortgaged by President Bola Tinubu, his family, and associates.” etc etc, ad nauseam, as detailed and quoted in Prof Jibrin Ibrahim’s heartrending concern about the state of insecurity and the banditry of corruption that is writ large in today’s Nigeria
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu assumed office on 21 August 2023, but before that, whilst on the campaign trail he did declare in December 2022, “I'll be a fair, just President to all Nigerians”.
Surely, he could not have changed his mind or lost his capacity to be fair and just to all Nigerians since assuming office ?
It’s a fair question because Professor Jibrin Ibrahim has raised the alarm about what is apparently common knowledge concerning the fact that The brutality of bandit-terrorism resulting in so many people being killed by armed gangs in Nigeria -that, coupled with poverty and great suffering is turning the country into a cemetery
Re - ” Meanwhile, the bandits continue to commit atrocities all over the country, with concentrated actions in Zamfara, Katsina, Niger and Kaduna states.”
Zamfara : Banditry // Banditry in Zamfara
Katsina : Banditry // Banditry in Katsina - Katsina , the home state of former President Muhammadu Buhari
Niger State : Banditry // Banditry in Niger State
Kaduna State : Banditry // Banditry in Kaduna State
Because Zamfara, Katsina, Niger and Kaduna are four of the twelve Sharia States in Nigeria , one wonders who the bandits are and where the fitna is coming from…
Taking into account the political reality that President Tinubu is Muslim, and that he garnered considerable support from the Muslim majority states in Nigeria, shouldn’t it be an added duty for him to also ensure more protection for the blighted citizens in those most affected areas in Nigeria ?
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Powerful writing.
But, should we not also examine the roots of this problem in the politicization of Fulani militia terrorism, in alliance with violent Fulani herdsmen as enabled by Miyetti Allah Fulani Sociocultural Organization during the Buhari era?
That problem later degenerated further into banditry, which, having been de-escalated in the South through self help initiatives in defiance of the complicity of the Buhari govt, concentrated itself in the North, where the political context of the crisis dis-empowered the govt from eliminating criminals whose location is known to everyone, whom prominent Muslim cleric Sheikh Gumi has openly visited a no of times, whom the governor of Katsina openly visited and took pictures with in an effort to reach an understanding with them, until he declared them to be ideologically empty brigands, who should be summarily dealt with, though they are Fulani and Muslim like himself, a view also expressed by El Rufai in the later years of his tenure as Kaduna state governor.
Lets all keep pretending we dont know these facts, pointing to the problem as more political than otherwise and why the govt is unable to wipe out the problem.
How can you wipe out a problem you helped nurture by such initiatives as the decision to gift a huge sum of money to Fulani herdsmen so they will not go into kidnapping and terrorism, as the govt/MACBAN negotiations went in the Buhari era, but those who want to go have gone anyway, as El Rufai indicated.
"How can a person who has tasted kidnapping money return to cattle herding?" the governor asked?
This was also how the 2011 Boko Haram escalation started, with key segments of the Muslim North whitewashing them until they had dug deep into the body politic.
There is an urgent need for identity delineation in the Muslim North and its Fulani entrenchments, seeing as supporting destructive elements from these constituencies in the name of religious and ethnic identity comes back to bite hardest those doing the supporting, as the criminal elements feed on their host communities.
Thanks
Toyin
Toyin
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cornelius...@gmail.com
Back in December 2022 Bola Ahmed Tinubu “Vows to overcome banditry if elected president”
By today, August 2024 things have got much worse and it’s Bola Ahmed Tinubu vs banditry
If it would be of any help , I suppose Ojogbon Falola would write letters of recommendation recommending among others, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim and Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju the Independent Scholar as advisers to the Tinubu Government on these matters , but when it comes to the banditry in question, I think that President Tinubu, the chief of the bandits, the bandit chief, the bandit chiefs and the bandit thieves of high crimes and misdemeanours know what you are talking about in toto, they are real experts, and there’s nothing new that you can tell them. ( As Tom Ikimi told Tim Sebastian on BBC Hardtalk, blaming it all on colonialism, “Corruption”, he said, is an English word, found in the English dictionary, they "invented" it. Today, we use, we wield and we abuse the English word “corruption” with precision. It’s an important word in the legal vocabulary of the law courts and in many of our post-colonial & post-Independence African countries there are many Commissions of Inquiry into allegations of corruption, white collar crimes and white collar banditry .
In Sierra Leone for example, there have been many Commissions of Inquiry into Corruption , especially in the last twenty years or so .
True, corruption is an English word, and by definition, white lies are said to be the kind of lies that White people tell. Black lies on the other hand, straight from the sermon in James Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man “ : “Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke.”
And the inmates of Hell? You want to know?
“ They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?
In today’s Nigeria, Mr. President, his government, his think tanks, his aides, his advisers, his military chiefs and law enforcement officers are aware of all of the dimensions of poverty, aware of phenomena such child beggars and the Almajiri system in Northern Nigeria and that when the child becomes a man, if still shackled in the same poverty, is that system not a good recruiting ground for insecurity, a call to arms, Boko Haram terrorism, banditry, ransom-kidnapping?
When the rule of law / crime and punishment abdicates, does not survival “by any means necessary”, therefore definitely include banditry and ransom-kidnapping as a necessary means of solving problems arising out of personal poverty?
According to children’s heroic literature on which some of the Labour Party wannabes were weaned, it’s this kind of situation social injustice) that gave rise to the saga of Robin Hood & His Merry Men vs the Sheriff of Nottingham
Other climes produced Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves
Worst case scenario : To be saddled with President I-will-fight-Corruption & his henchmen in the 419 Government
There’s the full monty , but here’s a short excerpt from the Sermon in James Joyce’s “Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man” , more pungent that what you ‘find in the Holy Quran, and perchance hearing which the bandits and those of the lootocracy committing crimes and spiritual wickedness in high places might repent and desist from all types of banditry :
“The preacher's voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:
-- Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.
-- They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?
-- The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.
-- But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.
-- Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.
-- And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.
-- Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned - there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.
-- Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.
-- O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!
He came down the aisle of the chapel, his legs shaking and the scalp of his head trembling as though it had been touched by ghostly fingers. He passed up the staircase and into the corridor along the walls of which the overcoats and waterproofs hung like gibbeted malefactors, headless and dripping and shapeless. And at every step he feared that he had already died, that his soul had been wrenched forth of the sheath of his body, that he was plunging headlong through space.
He could not grip the floor with his feet and sat heavily at his desk, opening one of his books at random and poring over it. Every word for him. It was true. God was almighty. God could call him now, call him as he sat at his desk, before he had time to be conscious of the summons. God had called him. Yes? What? Yes? His flesh shrank together as it felt the approach of the ravenous tongues of flames, dried up as it felt about it the swirl of stifling air. He had died. Yes. He was judged. A wave of fire swept through his body: the first. Again a wave. His brain began to glow. Another. His brain was simmering and bubbling within the cracking tenement of the skull. Flames burst forth from his skull like a corolla, shrieking like voices:
-- Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell! Hell!