The recent Amnesty International report on “Fulani herdsmen-farmers clashes” and the culpable failure of the Nigerian state to stop them attracted more than the usual knee-jerk denial from the military. By stamping its global imprimatur on the serial failure and culpability of the political and military authorities in the Fulani rampage, AI disconcerted a leadership that often operates in self-denial even when the country’s corporate existence is threatened. President Muhammadu Buhari must rouse and shake up the security system to immediately deter and punish murderers and marauders.
So far, the Amnesty report on Three Years of Bloody Clashes Between Farmers and Herders in Nigeria has only triggered frenzied threats and media attacks on AI and aid agencies. We are amazed that such energy has not been directed at disarming the marauders and prosecuting them for their atrocities across the country that many commentators, including the Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka, and Taraba State Governor, Darius Ishaku, have variously likened to ethnic cleansing and genocide.
The military further sullied their reputation by briefly banning the activities of UNICEF, the United Nations aid agency, in the North-East region, the epicentre of the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency.
True, in reporting alleged exuberances of the military in their operations against terrorists, AI’s dispatches have sometimes raised eyebrows for painting seemingly implausible scenarios and uncanny release at the very time that the Army are gaining the upper hand. However, the missive on the so-called herdsmen-farmers’ clashes is right on target in its unequivocal indictment of the Federal Government for its failure “in fulfilling its constitutional responsibility of protection of lives and property by refusing to investigate, arrest and prosecute perpetrators of attacks.” These are indisputable facts on the ground, repeatedly witnessed by victims of attacks, particularly in the North-Central states of Benue, Plateau, Nasarawa; Taraba and Gombe in the North-East and Kaduna in the North-West. Ishaku and his Benue State counterpart, Samuel Ortom, have made the same complaints directly to the President, just as the afflicted communities, groups and local and international media.
Impunity therefore reigns, reinforced by repeated endorsement of the claims of Fulani herdsmen, their supporters and Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association by Buhari, some northern elites, Defence Minister, Mansur Dan-Ali; Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris; Interior Minister, Abdurahman Dambazau, of a “divine” right to field their flocks on “grazing routes and grazing reserves.” According to this provocative narrative, owners of the land must give way for herdsmen and their cattle. They have been enforcing that mythical right in bloody attacks and brigandage seen only in wartime. Amnesty’s estimate of 3,641 persons killed between January 2016 and October 2018 is viewed by locals as understated: Ortom said in August that, in eight months, Fulani herdsmen attacks had produced 180,000 persons in eight internally displaced persons’ camps in Benue with homes, schools, churches and health centres destroyed and hundreds of lives lost. So proficient have the Fulani militants become that the International Crisis Group credited them with killing six times more people than Boko Haram in the first six months of this year, aligning with the Fulani militants’ rating as the world’s fourth most deadly terrorist group in the Global Terrorism Index.
The crux of the matter is the responsibility of the state to protect the lives and property of all citizens. By all accounts, save its own, the Federal Government has failed woefully. As AI reported, not only do the security agencies fail to act on credible intelligence on impending attacks, they are also slow to intervene during attacks that last hours, sometimes days. The government has also been insufferably tardy in disarming Fulani militants and prosecuting offenders, recurring allegations promptly denied by the government. Soyinka, however, voiced the exasperation of Nigerians when a Fulani delegation once attended a supposed peace meeting brandishing AK 47 carbines amid police, intelligence and military officers and departed cockily with their arms intact! Such behaviour is baffling.
In its defence, the government, through the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said it was acting decisively. He said 947 suspects had been arrested in 11 states; 841 were facing trials with 68 convicted. His report that military units and task forces had been set up in response to the “herdsmen-farmers” clashes, however, fails to stem accusations that the units fail to protect farming communities or respond promptly to their distress calls.
It is time to stop playing politics with lives and Nigeria’s corporate existence: Buhari needs to erase the public perception of him as sectional and insensitive to the pains of those outside his narrow ethnic circle. AI’s call for full investigation of all allegations of “wilful negligence, complicity and other failures of the security forces…” tallies with our long-running advocacy for a total rethink of the government’s security strategy and handling of the Fulani herdsmen menace.
Buhari and his government must immediately drop its justifications of environmental factors, grazing routes and reserves they make in tandem with Miyetti Allah. Immediate short term response should be deterring and punishing crime. There can be no excuse under the sun for non-state actors to maraud across the country, bearing arms and pillaging. Long term solutions demand treating cattle rearing as just another business venture. Where climate conditions change, it is purely the responsibility of the business operator and states that view the sector as crucial to their economy to adapt by switching to ranching, away from the primitive nomadism and negotiating for land from willing legal owners while reclaiming land and battling desert encroachment.
The official excuse that killer herdsmen are foreigners is particularly galling: any government that tolerates foreign marauders on its territory is simply irresponsible.
The police should be strengthened to free the military for their traditional role of deterring external aggression. Their impatience, translating to harassment of civil rights groups and NGOs, places Nigeria in a notorious group of unsavoury dictatorships; such ill-temper is alien to a liberal democracy. Targeting UNICEF and other aid agencies is imprudent, not only because of the life-saving assistance they provide to the IDPs, but also because of their legitimising cover where they operate.
