States of Emergency

President Goodluck Jonathan’s proclamation of a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States may signal a turning point in the Nigerian government’s conflict with Islamist insurgents in Northern Nigeria. The military’s deployment of more troops as well as helicopter gunships and jets has been greeted by a euphoric note of optimism in the media. The sense is that the armed forces, now unshackled from political inhibitions, are about to showcase the hitherto underestimated might of the Nigerian state and finally crush Boko Haram. Such militaristic boosterism should be tempered by more sober appraisals of events.

In imposing emergency rule, President Jonathan acted decisively if belatedly, for this was a measure that arguably should have been taken a year or two earlier instead of engaging in fruitless attempts to appease the terrorists. It had become necessary to prevent the Northeast from a descent into ungovernable chaos. The expectation now is that the escalation of force will swiftly end the insurgency but it is more realistic to think in terms of months and years rather than weeks.

Counterinsurgency campaigns take time because of the hydra-headed and often protean nature of insurgencies. The proper comparison is not, as some commentators opine, between the Nigerian situation and the recent Anglo-American military expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Nigerian army is not a foreign invading force. The more accurate comparison is with the conflicts between Sri Lanka and the Tamil Tigers, Britain and the Irish Republican Army, Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army and India and the Naxalite Maoist rebellion. All these insurgencies have lasted decades.

The current offensive may well degrade and even destroy the organization known as Boko Haram but this is unlikely to end the plague of terrorism for a number of reasons. Firstly, even though the group is probably in its death throes, it would be prudent to expect it to mount last gasp bombings, shootings and kidnappings and to attempt high profile attacks on major cities including Abuja almost as a sort of murderous final flourish. The Islamist anarchist cult Maitatsine was first “crushed” by the military in 1980 in Kano but its sporadic uprisings continued across the north, particularly the northeast, until 1985. This resilience is typical of a manifestation of terror that has evolved beyond an organizational format to become a socio-cultural phenomenon. When we think of terrorism now, we should think less of organizations and more of a subculture of violent rebellion against the state.

Beyond this, the technology of violence is now diffuse. Terrorism executed with easily accessible low tech implements will likely become a normative feature of Nigerian life for the time being. Furthermore, Boko Haram is not the only terrorist threat facing Nigeria. The first terrorist attack of the Jonathan era was carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a seasoned purveyor of bombings in the Delta.

The country’s vast pool of unschooled, unskilled, and unemployed young males of working age is a veritable incubator of anti-state aggression. This is coupled with politicians’ penchant for domesticating and co-opting violent groups for their own purposes instead of properly addressing them as criminal elements. Indeed, it is impossible to separate terrorism and insurgency from the culture of political violence that suffuses partisan politics. A presidential adviser, Kingsley Kuku and Asari Dokubo, a Niger Delta militant gang leader recently threatened violence if Jonathan is not reelected in 2015 demonstrating the complicity of politicians at the highest levels in the plague of terrorism. The politically-connected oil-stealing gangsters who call themselves “Niger Delta militants” symbolize the nexus between terrorism and politics.  

As was the case in the Niger Delta, the prolonged militarization in the North east and the complexity of combating a stealthy group hiding in the midst of a civilian population and using it as a human shield, carry the risk of human rights violations by the military. Such abuses will radicalize an embittered populace and further fuel the flames of the insurgency. The geography of the north east, which is the epicentre of this insurgency, has enabled Boko Haram to develop transnational affiliations and close links with criminal and terror networks extending from the Sahel to the Maghreb. It will take concerted and persistent action to root out these groups. In the Northeast, the veins of alienation which extremist groups tap into run deep. If Islamist terrorism was going to germinate in Nigeria, it seems logical that it would be in her much neglected northeastern frontier.

Whatever its eventual success, this military action should be understood as an ad hoc measure. A medium to long term national security strategy requires the urgent development of institutional capacities to address the new range of threats posed by low intensity conflicts such as that between the pastoralists and farmers, an essentially ecological conflict driven by climate change but with the potential to assume a broader sectarian scale. These include threats posed by insurgency, ethnic militias and privately-owned paramilitaries. Piracy in Nigeria’s coastal waters is a growing threat with international implications and could become the next major national and international security crisis.  

A revised national security strategy must surely involve an enhanced border security administration including the short-term militarization of Nigeria’s exceedingly porous borders with her Sahelian neighbours. It will also call for police reform initiatives that restore civilian policing to the front lines of security and law enforcement administration. One of the more pungent symptoms of Nigeria’s dysfunctional security architecture has been the militarization of law enforcement with an overburdened military tasked to combat everything from highway banditry to kidnapping. This, in addition to the neglect of the police, has contributed to a climate of militarism that feeds violence and in which a regard for due process of law can scarcely flower.

A pre-emptive security doctrine would blend modern, well-tooled policing with conflict resolution mechanisms and early warning systems in communities. This means leveraging civil society resources in creating mechanisms that prevent small scale altercations from flaring into all out conflict. Security and intelligence services must become more adept at tracking the evolution of ethnic and religious associations, and identifying those whose philosophies dispose them towards future radicalization and militarization.

Institutional reforms in the security establishment are much more difficult than proclaiming emergency rule. They require administrative rigour and the political will to challenge obsolete orthodoxies. They call for a shift from the establishment’s obsolete military era obsession with state capture through coup d’etat – a steadily diminishing threat since 1999 – to a broader cognizance of the perils posed by non-state actors and the intersection of politics, organized crime and terrorism. No security sector reform, for instance, is complete without reviewing the use of perverse affirmative action schemes in staffing strategic agencies. If there is any area of governance that urgently needs to be run as a meritocracy, it is the intelligence, security and law and enforcement administration. 

The Terrifying New Normal 

 

Before the 1980s, there were no religious disturbances in Northern Nigeria. From 1980, they became normative fixtures of the northern urban life. A variety of factors were responsible. The oil boom of the late 1970s had driven many youngsters from rural agrarian life to the cities in search of jobs. Deindustrialization subsequently eliminated a significant segment of the blue collar work force and provided the Maitatsine cult with fodder for its various uprisings from 1980 onwards. Other factors were the proliferation of radical Islamist groups supported by Wahhabi extremists in Saudi Arabia and Shia revolutionaries in Iran which fed on rampant socio-economic dislocation, the politicization of religion after the 1978 Constituent Assembly debates on Sharia and later, military regimes’ manipulation of religion to generate support in Northern Nigeria and mask their misrule. All of these factors coupled with the failure of the state and the deepening poverty of the region provided fertile ground for the chronic spate of urban terrorism that are frequently described as religious riots.

In much the same way that religious riots became normative after the 1980s, it is reasonable to project that Boko Haram-style terrorism will continue albeit in isolated and sporadic proportions for the time being. It will become part of the fabric of our national life. Safety measures will be out in place to adapt us to this terrifying new normal. Bomb detectors are already almost ubiquitous in public spaces. More of such devices will become customary. But the problem with a scenario in which terrorism ceases to have any impact is that terrorists will seek to carry out even more spectacular outrages to register their agenda on a desensitized public consciousness. Nigerians are already accustomed to great insecurity so terrorists might feel compelled to use more vicious tactics to breach the threshold of public outrage. Should the socio-economic conditions that incubated Boko Haram be left unaddressed, we can also expect a better armed and more organized insurgency to emerge from the ashes within a decade.

Ultimately, however efficient the military and the security forces may be, their work is only a stopgap measure. Elected politicians must actually govern and provide the developmental deliverables that will turn a teeming young population away from nihilism and anarchy. There are no foolproof guarantees against terrorism but intelligent governance can shrink the population of malcontents to the barest minimum of misanthropes that are beyond salvage. The more young Nigerians are empowered to live creative lives and achieve upward mobility, the less likely they are to be seduced by psychotic visions of paradise or careers in political thuggery. It is this failure to create social security and to provide paths to a meaningful life that is the greatest generator of terrorism and conflict in Nigeria. 

(All Images sourced online)

The Tyranny of the Majority

Since the return to civil rule in 1999, ethnic and religious conflicts across the Nigerian federation have claimed an estimated fifty thousand lives. These conflicts have not just been inter-ethnic or inter-religious; they have also been intra-ethnic and intra-religious. They include clashes between the Ife and the Modakeke in Osun State, the Aguleri and Umuleri in Anambra and the Ezza and Ezillo in Ebonyi State. Sectarian clashes between Christian and Muslim partisans dominate the headlines because they cohere with a popular mythical narrative of Nigeria as a nation embroiled in a clash of civilizations. Less reported is the intra-sectarian animosity that has seen Sunnis and Shiites clash in Zaria and Sokoto, or the war of attrition waged by Boko Haram and allied extremist sects on other Muslims who oppose them. 

The escalation of conflict suggests a correlation between democratization and violence. After the long decades of military dictatorship, democracy was supposed to inaugurate an era of peace and prosperity. Why has it led to so much strife? A major reason is the nature of democracy itself. As Claude Ake once wrote, “The military is a taut chain of command; democracy is a benign anarchy of diversity. Democracy presupposes human sociability; the military presupposes its total absence, the inhuman extremity of killing the opposition. The military demands submission, democracy enjoins participation; one is a toll of violence, the other, a means of consensus building for peaceful co-existence.” Democracy creates greater spaces for self-definition and self-understanding by various groups and interests.

Under military dictatorships, political identities are necessarily constrained by the code of totalitarian uniformity that permits only two actors – the state and the citizenry. Democracy opened the flood gates of expression and activism. Repressed identities and resentments surged to the surface. For example, during the military era, the notion of Arewa – northern Nigeria as a political monolith – was an article of faith in the media. One of the most important political developments since 1999 has been the fraying of northern identity. The ecumenical regionalism of Ahmadu Bello, and the dubious provincial cronyism propagated by some northern elites during military rule has collapsed into the chaos of self-determination and cultural and political rediscovery.

Since 1999, the previously plain canvas of northern homogeneity has fractured into sharp colours of resurgent ethnic identities. New narratives that involve the Sayawa, the Adara, the Nupe, the Berom and the Bajju have become prominent revealing the ethnically heterogeneous and fairly fractious reality of the north. Democracy offers opportunities for various flags of identity to be hoisted in the sun. This is precisely what is happening. Democracy is conducive for diversity in a way that totalitarianism cannot be. This is why Nigeria’s diversity has become troublingly thematic in recent times. It is all part of the renegotiation of political realities that is promoted by democracy.

However, the fundamental problem is that in a multi-religious and multi-ethnic polity where democracy is still primitively defined as a game of numbers rather than a contest of ideas, it is bound to generate the tyranny of the majority. Most of the conflicts in Nigeria revolve around the relational dynamics between ethnic and religious majorities and minorities. This is compounded by a rentier economy in which numbers are used to corner resources, economic advantages and social opportunities to the detriment of minority groups. This accounts for the extant apartheid system in which certain groups define themselves as indigenes and landlords and classify other citizens as settlers and tenants. Most states entertain discriminatory policies in employment practices and admission into public schools that make nonsense of Nigerian citizenship.

In such circumstances, where an illiberal democracy sustains restrictions on the civic status of citizens, the tyranny of the majority is countered by the rage of the minority. Conflict is inevitable. Where majorities can hijack the apparatus of the state and direct its machinery of coercion against perceived opponents, minorities resort to anti-state violence. The structural violence of majoritarian tyranny is equalized by the actual physical violence of minoritarian terrorism. Militancy and aggression, in this sense, constitute the eloquence of those rendered voiceless by the system.

The biggest factor in the escalation of conflicts since 1999 has been the inability or unwillingness of the federal government to act as a neutral arbiter of contending provincial passions to prevent them from erupting into interminable cycles of strife and vengeance. This governmental function includes the protection of minorities from victimization and the prosecution of sponsors and perpetrators of violence. The simple truth about cycles of violence is that they are perpetuated when crimes go unpunished. In a multi-ethnic and multi-religious polity, these derelictions of duty by the federal government constitute an invitation to communities to devise their own means of defence – which can only mean higher levels of sectarian violence. In some of our theatres of conflict, we have already witnessed ugly scenes of unpunished violence and retributive aggression. The wanton slaying of innocent Muslims has been defended as “reprisals” for the atrocities of Boko Haram and ostensibly “legitimized” by the negligence of the state. But to accept that it is permissible to target people for the sins of their supposed kin is an invitation to mutual genocide. 

Therefore, a new national security doctrine must have as its cornerstone the sanctity of citizenship. This means protecting the rights of Nigerian citizens everywhere in the federation from discrimination and violence. It also means recognizing ethno-religious violence and political terrorism as the most potent threats to the union. During the 1970s and 1980s, armed robbery assumed epidemic proportions in Nigerian cities. The federal government recognizing that it was dealing with a new security threat, established special anti-robbery squads and tribunals to speedily and decisively address the spate of violent crime. The proliferation of bomb-making technologies and the sophistication of Boko Haram, allied terror groups, and sundry militant gangs represent an escalation of violence. In addition to all other measures, special anti-terrorism tribunals should be established to deal speedily and thoroughly with these crimes against Nigerian humanity. Terrorism, in this sense, should not just be limited to Boko Haram’s outrages but expanded to include political violence and all crimes that are currently categorized as ethno-religious violence. This would also cover hate crimes and hate speech, particularly in religious, political and media rhetoric that encourage prejudice and bigotry. This is the way to restore dwindling civic faith in the state’s capacity to protect citizens’ lives and property.   

The federal government must also recognize the adverse national security implications of the majoritarian hegemonies thrown up in a young democracy. It must commit to protect ethnic and religious minorities everywhere in the federation, not merely as “minorities” or endangered species but as citizens with equal rights. Polemicists who see chronic conflicts as an opportunity to dissolve the union are wrong. The issue is not our diversity. It is how to guard against the tyranny of the majority in a democracy. And there is no possible post-Nigerian configuration in which there would be no ethnic, religious or political minorities. 


(All images sourced from Google Images)

Why Appeasing Terrorists is A Recipe for Disaster

The decision of the federal government to dialogue with Boko Haram has to be situated against a collage of tragedy – two thousand dead; men, women and children; Christians and Muslims; foreigners and locals; civilians and military and paramilitary personnel; innocent bystanders and agents of the state – all sacrificed on the pyre of nihilistic violence. There is something fundamentally immoral about negotiating with a band of murderers. It is the final violation of the memory of those whose lives they so brazenly cut short. What does it say to serving police officers, soldiers and intelligence agents that the lives of their fallen comrades have been bartered for the political legitimization of a terrorist group? It suggests dangerously that political outcomes can be determined by access to bombs and guns and is an open invitation to diverse assortments of criminals to seek political relevance by demonstrating a willingness to engage in mass murder.

Advocates of dialogue have argued that the federal government should negotiate with Boko Haram, understand its grouse and then offer what sops it can to end the carnage. There is one word for this –“appeasement” – and the spectacle of a government cajoling criminals to the table for “peace talks” raises questions about assumptions of a social contract, state capacity or national sovereignty. It suggests that for all the vainglorious pomp that attends governance in Nigeria, the public realm is a lawless frontier where citizens would be well advised to devise their own means of self defence. The word for describing this state of affairs is “anarchy.” Negotiating with terrorists is a bottomless abyss. Where does the state draw the line? How should it respond to the next band of terrorist gangsters that assault our way of life? Why, after negotiating with Boko Haram, should it suddenly refuse to do so with the next gang of murderers who demand a seat at the table? A state that so easily succumbs to the whims and caprices of every group that takes up arms against it is participating in the demise of its statehood and enthroning the rule of gangs in its stead.

To be fair, this crisis did not begin with Boko Haram. It is permissible to argue that the Nigerian state has a policy of negotiating with terrorists. We can look back at the Obasanjo administration’s handling of the Odua Peoples’ Congress (OPC) and the Odua Liberation Movement (OLM) which in the early 2000s attacked police stations and police officers in the southwest. We can also cite the Yar’Adua administration’s handling of militant gangs in the Niger Delta which included a sweeping amnesty program for militants and under President Goodluck Jonathan, significant influence for erstwhile militant chieftains, including the scandalous outsourcing of maritime security functions to a company owned by Government Ekpumopolo a.k.a. Tompolo, a key figure in the Niger Delta insurgency.

Several pundits have insisted that the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) is not a terrorist group like Boko Haram. They have through semantic contortions tried to place MEND on a higher moral plane where it enjoys a greater legitimacy than other insurgent groups. This effort is demonstrated by the readiness to label Boko Haram as “terrorists,” while describing their peers in the Niger Delta and elsewhere, somewhat ambiguously as “militants.” MEND, they say, fought for resource control while Boko Haram’s goals are either indeterminate or non-negotiable, for example, the “Islamization” of a section of the country. This summation is rather spurious. It derives from the selective discernment of pundits who only observe evils that emanate from cultures other than their own. They fail to see moral equivalence in the fact that violence as a means of extracting political and economic concessions did not begin with Boko Haram.

To begin with, terrorism is a description of means, not ends. Wanting Sharia or resource control does not make one a terrorist; taking up arms and violently threatening public safety to attain those goals is terrorism. Boko Haram, MEND, OLM, to the extent to which they deploy violence in fulfilling their objectives, are terrorist groups. MEND militants killed soldiers, police officers and attacked government bases and oil company installations. Its methods were remorselessly violent. Recall that the first terrorist attack on Abuja in the Jonathan era, the 2010 Independence Day bombing at Eagle Square, was carried out by MEND. On that occasion, President Jonathan committed the faux pas of publicly absolving MEND, contradicting available evidence before any investigation had been initiated. He fired Kayode Are as national security adviser and replaced him with General Andrew Owoye Azazi. In a July 2006 interview with Tell magazine, Azazi, then Chief of Army Staff had argued that the Niger Delta conflict is a political crisis that requires a political solution rather than a military one. It is easy to see why some polemicists would insist on applying the same standards of judgment to Boko Haram.

There is no better argument against appeasing terrorists than the evidence of recent history. The amnesty program has not ended violence in the Niger Delta. Arguably, it has incentivized gangsterism. By the end of 2012, the program would have gulped over N200 billion since its inception in 2009. Unemployed youths who want in on the bonanza have formed their own gangs to press their claims to the largesse. Piracy has surged since 2008 making Nigerian waters dangerously similar to those of Somalia. The fundamental issue in the Niger Delta is not federal largesse but good governance which politicians have been loath to deliver.

Even if the federal government did negotiate with Boko Haram, there is no reason to expect an end to violence in the North. The expanding footprint of gangsterism across the region which includes bank heists, cross-border banditry and violent religious extremists are not all the work of one organization as is popularly imagined. Boko Haram itself has splintered and its factions may not be easily accommodated by one accord. It is unlikely that gangs that have indulged so wantonly in sating their bloodlust can relinquish their murderous instincts and suddenly abandon the addictive ‘thrill of the kill.’ It is more likely that insurgency and crime will coalesce in a region already flush with guns and the technologies of violence. As in the Niger Delta, the failure of governance rather than the paucity of federal funds is the real problem.

To compound matters, the Nigerian state all too often acts like a terrorist entity. According to a 2011 report by the Centre for Victims of Extra-judicial Killings and Torture (CVEKT), Nigeria recorded a total of 7,198 extra-judicial killings by the police between 2007 and 2011. Police officers are notoriously trigger-happy and their conduct often invites comparison with men of the underworld. Recall that the extra-judicial slaughter of Mohammed Yusuf and scores of the group’s members by the police in 2009 was to form an important justificatory narrative in Boko Haram’s campaign. The state’s legitimacy is anchored to its methods and the relationship between its means and ends in its quest to establish justice.

Thus, it can also be argued that anti-state violence has emerged as a dialectical necessity to counter the official terrorism of the state. We usually define chronic violence as extremism, terrorism and militancy but risk missing the larger context that makes them inevitable and symptomatic. That context is a colonially-oriented state piloted by a kleptocratic political class whose outsized privileges are guaranteed by their control of the instruments of official violence.  The Nigerian state must change its ways and its politics must be rescued from the abyss of feral aggression. A greater regard for human rights and human life should inform its security operations.  

To resolve chronic violence, we must move away from the idea that murderers can justify their crimes by claiming that they committed them in the name of their ethnicity or religion. The right to life must remain sacred and be promoted as such by the state in word and deed. To this end, the federal government should consider the establishment of an anti-terrorism tribunal to adjudicate a wide range of matters under the rubric of terrorism including, the use of private militias by politicians during elections, hate speech and hate crimes. It is impossible to separate the plague of terrorism from the supervening culture of political violence. The thoughts and words that make it permissible to kill people in the name of creed or tribe, whether propounded by religious clerics, politicians or journalists, must themselves be stridently punished. The Jonathan administration must show greater resolve in apprehending the political sponsors of violence. And it must speedily develop the capacity to confront anti-state violence – something that it has been distressingly slow to do, even with the billions of naira voted for security.

It is, of course, conceivable that terrorists can have worthy ends and deploy terroristic means. The intelligent government must address the ends, the legitimate grievances that feed extremism; but it must punish the means of violence used to achieve them, lest we promote terrorism as a brand of politics. If not, it would be paving the surest path to a state of anomie. 

All images sourced online

Beyond Ballots and Bullets

Hopes that Nigeria’s 2011 elections would proceed peacefully and without incident have since vanished, replaced by trepidation as to what the electioneering and post-electioneering period hold. Arson, murders, abductions, terrorism, bomb attacks and other acts of violence have marked the electioneering campaign. Well-meaning Nigerians have dutifully expressed the usual mix of outrage and concern but the violence should have been expected. The very nature of Nigerian politics makes violence a necessary component. Nigerian politics is a quest to privatize the enormous fiscal resources disproportionately invested in public office. An investigation of electoral violence should take into account the huge amounts of petrodollars used to subsidize official sloth.

Simply put, the excessively high financial reward for political office incentivizes the violence that marks the scramble for Abuja. And we are talking about the legal remunerations that politicians take home every month, not even the quantum of public funds which is stolen. The stakes involved in electoral competition are so high as to discourage fair play. Consider that the chance of becoming a federal legislator is the opportunity to become a multimillionaire. Nigerian legislators are among the highest paid in the world and are among the top earners in one of the world’s biggest kleptocracies. Combine the scale of poverty and inequality with the fact that politics now offers the surest route of upward mobility, transforming middle class strugglers into members of a super class, and we begin to understand why politicians cannot approach elections with the bonhomie of the golf course or a tea party. 

Political office offers an irresistible level of social security in a realm where life has become terrifyingly arbitrary and uncertain. Hoards of youths have plunged into politics to participate in the putrescent dream of astronomical returns for little or no labour that characterizes high office. But as more and more people flood the system in search of its outsized rewards, the cost of sating the hungry, pacifying the angry and indulging the greedy is making our democracy ultimately unsustainable. There are far too many people to be settled; the scale of avarice is beyond what the system can reasonably accommodate. And the ranks of restive outsiders excluded from the fest who are willing to violently pull down the temple of sleaze have swelled.

However, we must also look beyond the polls to a larger context. We live in an age of deregulated violence. Militant non-state actors like MEND and Boko Haram have demonstrated their ability to wage asymmetrical warfare against the Nigerian federation. Too often, we focus on episodes of subjective violence – the recurring bouts of sectarian strife in Jos, the occasional shooting at a rally, clashes between rival party supporters, etc. – and we miss the framework of objective violence, the supervening dynamic of repression and strife that makes conflict recurrent. Objective violence is institutional, invisible and thus difficult to spot but its portents are discernible. Any society in which 70 percent of the prison population is incarcerated without trial is a violent society. A realm in which politicians in sirened convoys can whip and run other citizens off the road is a violent society. A realm that permits extrajudicial homicides by state agents is a violent society. Our kleptocracy is a classic embodiment of objective violence. Official graft is depriving millions of healthcare, food security, employment and education – with catastrophic humanitarian consequences that rival the casualties of any deployment of guns and bombs. I argue that the objective violence of this kleptocracy fuels the subjective violence that we see around us.

There are three other dimensions of objective violence which lubricate the engines of conflict. Prebendalism, the personalization and privatization of governance and the transformation of offices into economic resources to be invested in communal allegiances, negates meritocracy and subverts the state’s capacity to deliver good governance. Over the years, prebendal politics has been institutionalized as the quest for strategic parity among ethnicities and regions in terms of control of federal resources. This quest informs the use of quotas, zoning and “federal character” in everything from determining admissions into public schools to staffing government agencies. In fact, these devices have created a bloated government bureaucracy and nurtured the cult of equal opportunity embezzlers that run Abuja.

Secondly, there is the electoral fraud which nullifies the civic will and generates unaccountable state power. The direct result of this is the culture of impunity that marks elite behaviour. Election rigging is, in effect, a stealth coup d’état and displays similar pathologies of violence as military rule. The third dimension of objective violence is the framework of legalized apartheid that we describe in blithely colloquial understatement as the “indigene-settler dichotomy.” It is basically a discriminatory regime that creates cadres of citizenship based on the lowest common denominators of kinship. In the lexicon of power, the term “settler” denotes the categorical exclusion of whole communities from civic life and political representation based on a calculus of identity, blood ties, ethnic and geographical origins. This regime sustains bloody ethno-communal conflict across the federation.

The chain of causality is clear. Kleptocracy triggers political violence. Due to the high stakes of electoral contest, elites adopt extreme measures to slither up the totem pole of political relevance and economic security. When these politicians recruit youths and arm them with cash and guns to execute electoral heists, they create the next generation of militants and terrorists. When these politicians take power, their impunity creates the material conditions that gestate yet more delinquency.

            

Because political offices are also seen as resources, the competition to occupy them rapidly moves from the personal to the ethno-communal terrain, pitting ethnic and religious groups against each other. This is how kleptocracy and prebendalism sire ethno-religious conflict. The “indigene-settler” dynamic kicks in as rival politicians use apartheid in a bid to divide the opposition and to monopolize power. The more conflict spots there are, the greater the number of guns in circulation. Yet once there is a lull in political violence or ethno-religious conflict those guns remain in circulation, often finding their way into the armouries of urban gangsters and thus escalating urban crime. Just as armed robbery spiked after the civil war when hoards of youths proficient in the use of arms streamed into urban areas, political and sectarian violence are similarly fuelling urban insecurity, with former political thugs and hired muscle striking out on their own as independent gangsters.

Violence organically feeds itself. The Umuleri-Aguleri communal conflict in Anambra during the late 1990s created a generation of combatants who, after the war ended, moved to Onitsha where they promptly inaugurated a reign of terror as gangsters. Following the abject failure of the police to contain them, Anambra retained the services of the Bakassi Boys, an ultraviolent vigilante group that used terror to cast out terror. Beginning from 2001, they executed over 3000 suspected criminals over a period of eighteen months in an orgy of public lynching. The group was disbanded after they had evidently been co-opted by unscrupulous local politicians and turned into enforcers for special interests. The subsequent proliferation of gangs of ransom kidnappers in the southeast led to the deployment of the army to Aba in 2010.  

Similarly, homicides have spiked dramatically in Jos, the once serene city now sundered by sectarian tensions. Because the police force is woefully ill-equipped to address the new gangsterism and terrorism, the military has been deployed to police the city. Across the federation, the escalation of urban crime has led to the creation of joint military-police task forces. This militarization of constabulary functions is a recipe for disaster. It is doubtful that democracy can be nurtured in the presence of tanks and guns. Similar militarization of the Niger Delta in the 1990s led to the growth of militancy in that region and will most likely produce similar outcomes in this instance. Even so, as more citizens realize that the state can no longer provide security, the cardinal commodity of governance, they will take to self-help. We will see a continued increase in the spread of firearms as families undertake to protect themselves, as well as a rise in vigilantism.   

How do we stop this cycle of violence? Presidential assurances of free and fair elections are inconsequential as long as the kleptocracy remains in place. De-escalating the armed scramble for Abuja calls for the drastic reduction of the entitlements of public functionaries. The costs of government must be scaled down and the culture of extravagance that accompanies high office abolished. This should be the basis of government that is truly accountable to the people.

In the mid to long term, we should demolish the framework of racist identity politics by abolishing the indigene-settler dichotomy and affirming an inclusive and unconditional citizenship. We should also seek to decentralize governance by distributing more resources and responsibilities away from Abuja to rejuvenated local government authorities. Political and sectarian violence have intensified over the decades in tandem with the centralization of power in the unitary command and control system of military rule. As power shifted from regions and local authorities to the centre, the scramble for Abuja came into being with politicians jostling for one centralized power source. If the locus of power is restored to municipalities, creating multiple centres of democratic authority, it would not only restore the relationship between power and the public, but also reduce political hostilities.

These mid- to long-term measures are goals for the near future around which a political consensus should form. In the meantime, as the terrifying outcomes of objective violence manifest, there is a need for vigilance, for voices of reason to stridently highlight structural injustices and root causes rather than flail at mere symptoms. Politicians must show uncommon resolve and statesmanship to defuse a building incendiary discontent. And people of faith are perfectly entitled to be prayerful. Difficult days lie ahead.