Engagements with Chidi Amuta
The raging insecurity all over Nigeria has altered our reality. We now count our lives in days, weeks and months. At the beginning of each month these days, most of us receive these silly “Happy New month” greetings and prayers. We now celebrate our lives in bits and pieces, not knowing what the future holds. Those who set out from home to work or to the next destination never arrive till they really get there in one piece. Some arrive in unplanned destinations like forests and other ungoverned spaces while total strangers randomly phone relations and friends asking for impossible ransoms. Those caught in the hideouts of bandits and transactional bad people have lost every sense of belonging to a nation.
In our search for a more secure reality and some freedom, something more fundamental has tragically changed. The bulging community of criminals, terrorists and bandits have overcome an ancient limitation. They have conquered the fear of the uniform as a symbol of the authority and supreme power of the state. The uniform of the soldier, the policeman and the other armed forces used to frighten the civil populace and deter bad people because they represented the supreme coercion and licensed ferocity of the state. Not anymore. The presence of uniformed government security agents has become a joke, more or less. The defeat of the uniform is what lies at the core of the hopeless insecurity we are now facing.
It was late Afrobeat musician, Fela Ransome-Kuti, who innocently heralded the demystification of uniforms in the public mind. He had this famous song which stripped the uniform of the mystique of fear and aura of authorized violence: “Uniform na cloth, Na tailor dey sow am…”. Thereafter, common street urchins began to reduce their fear of uniforms and perhaps developed the courage to confront people in government uniforms. That was perhaps the unconscious beginning of the reign of defiance of the state and its uniformed messengers and agents. But demystification of the uniform was only a sign of the defiance of the authoritarian state. Present disregard of the uniform of government force is a sign of something more dangerous. It is the face to face affront of the Nigerian state as an overriding sovereign authority.
In the multiple recent encounters between our security forces and the growing army of criminals and outlaws, people in uniform have become targets of choice. In fact, soldiers and security forces are not just targets of forces arrayed against the state. They have become prime targets. In recent times, even army generals have fallen on the swords of terrorists, insurgents, bandits and other armed rascals.
The logic is of course simple: when you humiliate the most decorated and trained armed and uniformed emissaries of the state, you have cowed the state and the civil populace is a sitting duck. Men, women and children become soft targets for abductions, kidnappings and senseless killings. When you have frightened the soldiers and policemen, you casually invade schools, churches and other public places and take hostages.
In the last two years, countless military contingents have been ambushed and liquidated. Military formations have been besieged, attacked and overrun by bandit and terrorist squads who have killed people in uniform and looted their weapons to reinforce an ever burgeoning army of non-state trouble makers. The situation is worse. An increasing number of senior military officers have been targeted and either killed or captured in the battle fields of insurgency or abducted by bandits on patrol on highways or urban neighbourhoods.
There are hardly any reliable statistics of ‘active duty casualties’ in our encounter with insecurity. Recent assessments reveal that between 2016 and 2026, a total of 16 senior military officers have been killed by terrorists: 3 Brigadier Generals, 2 colonels, 10 lieutenant colonels and one major. A few of these made major headlines like the case of General Ubah who was captured by jihadist terrorists and executed in full camera view by Boko Haram/ISWAP. Just last week, former Defense spokesman General Rabe Abubakar who was abducted by terrorists in Katsina state along with his wife was reported dead in captivity before his injured wife was released by their captors.
In my view, what is emerging is a conscious strategy by terrorists and bandits to target the military in order to demonstrate their match -up with the state. In a number of the operations, terrorists have attacked strategic security institutions to further drive home their strategic focus and increasing advantage. Clearly, we are dealing with an adversary with a clear strategic compass and well defined geo strategic aim.
A rough head count of casualties that have been inflicted by the adversarial forces as against those that have been sustained by government’s security forces is an unsettling equation that shows the state in very unflattering light. Government seems to be playing ping -pong with the non-state actors and criminals. Clearly, it seems that the Nigerian state is increasingly being outgunned by forces audacious enough to challenge the authority of the state. The state’s presumed monopoly of violence and coercion has long been punctured. What is now being contested in various theatres across the national space is the control of the state over the territory of the nation. Sovereign authority without absolute territorial control and integrity is a caricature.
An incremental loss of territorial control seems to be in progress and is following a disturbing strategic pattern. What began in the North Eastern zone and fringe border states of Borno, Yobe and Zamfara has stridently spread to the mid section states of Niger, Kwara, Kogi, Plateau, Benue and Nasarawa states. The previously impenetrable forests of the South West have witnessed terrorist attacks in Ondo and now Oyo States with attacks targeted at Churches and schools. The recent terror attacks especially in the South West have tended to be sectarian and doctrinal (religious and educational).
There have of course been sporadic attacks on individuals and residential locations in the Abuja capital area. These are red flag attacks possibly designed to send the message that as parts of the federation totter under instability and insecurity, the power base in Abuja cannot afford to sleep easy.
It is therefore, naïve and simplistic for the Nigerian government to continue feeding on the foolish narrative that what we are witnessing is just a wave of insecurity that will go away with increased budget spending on security. Even more foolish is the thinking that, after all, ‘every nation faces different forms of insecurity at one point or the other’.
What confronts Nigeria is a real existential threat. Our unity is in jeopardy. Jihadists are waging a sectarian onslaught on what unites us. Our prospects of development are threatened as educational institutions are being invaded. Our survival as a secular republic is at stake as pressures are mounting to introduce theocratic elements into our judicial systems. Our future as a democracy is at stake. Democracy without freedom is a farce. Rhetorical freedom without security of lives and property is a joke. Democracy in a state where violence restricts the freedom of individuals to move about is the enthronement of a state of nature.
Those politicians who are ignoring the security of the nation and fixating on the ritual of elections need urgent attention. When national security comes into neck-to-neck competition with democratic ritual, statecraft is challenged to make a wise choice.
