‘The Kankara abduction was so belligerently orchestrated that it happened the day Mr President arrived Katsina State on a private visit… It smites the face of the Commander-In-Chief and further proves what we once said that the bandits rule in many communities and do as they wish with impunity”.
-Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III. The Sokoto Tracker, Monday, December 14, 2020
Widely reported and discussed is the statement by the Sultan of Sokoto, Sa’ad Abubakar III, quoted above, that the sensational mass abduction of hundreds of students of Government Science Secondary School, Kankara is a slap on the face of the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), who had just begun a private visit to his home state of Katsina. The metaphor of administering slaps on the face of a General and war hero is audacious, but it seeks to capture the daring, effrontery and calibrated savagery of bandits who chose to affront Buhari and the nation with the abduction of schoolboys right under the nose of the country’s Chief Security Officer.
Naturally, questions have been raised as to the logistics of spiriting away hundreds of schoolboys through the rudimentary transport of motor bikes and machines, in contrast, for example to the 2014 abductors of the Chibok schoolgirls who arrived in buses. Firm answers are hard to come by to this and other questions such as the apparent apathy of the surrounding community, as an unmitigated disaster was being organised and executed in a raw, hand- to-mouth manner. If the claim by Boko Haram terrorists that they masterminded the abduction is true, then it suggests that an earlier warning given by the United States that banditry in the North-West has been complicated by Boko Haram coming in through porous borders is genuine.
It will also imply that a certain level of preparation equivalent to the anti-insurgency war in the North-East is required to deal with the issue. Several commentators have highlighted the failure of intelligence gathering, considering that the bandits caught our security institutions unawares appearing to have beaten them to the security game. There is much glib talk about intelligence-led policing and the beefing up of intelligence generally but we never seem to get down to the nitty-gritty of what this really requires. This columnist has consistently lamented the disconnect between intelligence gathering and academic analysis, strengthened by scenario building which are perhaps the soul of intelligence gathering and analysis. For example, some Northern-based academics after years of research on banditry in Zamfara, pointed out that there was distinct disinterest in the outcome of their research among state officials. Is what we call intelligence so weak that it does not interest itself in scholarly research on hot zones of insecurity? Several years ago, the intelligence community in one of the Latin American countries, conducted a study on deepening poverty and inequality in that country. Interestingly, they arrived at the same conclusions that a left wing think-tank had come up with in the course of their own scholarly research. The resulting reform agenda, provided ammunition for a left wing government which came to power some years later.
The point here is that true intelligence gathering and scenario planning cannot be divorced from academic research and intellectual activity. In the opinion of this columnist, it is bad enough that our intelligence institutions hardly carry out independent scholarly investigation, regarding rising insecurity, it is even worse that they do not sufficiently engage themselves with scholarly output from other sources. For instance, some commentators observed how terrific it would have been if through intelligence forecast, our security institutions had rounded up the bandits as they embarked upon their destructive and cowardly adventure. Yet another dimension of the problem is the divorce between the state and the local communities with each of them viewing the other with distrust if not outright cynicism.
I had broached this systemic issue in a previous article, entitled, “Masari, banditry and the crisis of governance” (The PUNCH, Friday, August 7, 2020). This was in the wake of Masari’s revelation that “local communities are aware of the hideouts and identities of the bandits but are not ready to provide credible information to security agencies” (The Guardian, Tuesday, August 4, 2020). This raises the larger question of the character of a state that stands above the society it seemingly governs, without any enduring roots in or contact with it. Much in the same manner, as colonial District Officers descended from their splendid isolation in Government Reservation Areas typically located uphill as in Jeba town, to communicate orders to the natives the post-colonial state even in its so-called democratic garb lives a different reality from the people which it relates to only for the purpose of vote-harvesting at election times. What we call democracy today, is embellished electoral chicanery in which abandoned and deprived communities come alive during elections only to be abandoned when elections are fought and won.
So, what we have on our hands are ungoverned spaces morphing into outlaw republics, giving rise to insurgent governance in which bandits, and outlaw groups provide services which the state in its sleep-walking status has failed to provide. Of course, there is a military dimension to the contest but in an age where soft power is so important, nationally, and globally, it matters a great deal that, whether in Chibok, Dapchi, and now Kankara, what we have are little more than captive communities, bereft of civilised amenities including functioning telephones, and electricity, and which consider the state an oppressive stranger.
Hopefully, time will come when we will have a knowledgeable and developmental government that will understand that it cannot govern without the support, cooperation, and intelligence-gathering of the people it claims to govern. This is the fundamental reason why the communities, and sometimes their chiefs appear to be in bed with bandits. This is to say, resources, influence and power do not trickle down to the poor. Hence, apart from the circulation of illicit weapons through borders shared with the Sahel, itself a refuge for Islamic militants and Boko Haram insurgents, a pronounced youth problem indexed by the extensive use of hard drugs, a soaring out-of-school population, there is the issue of the governance crisis created by shallow electoralism, of candidates and parties winning elections without the consent of the people. This may seem an extreme way of putting it until you realise that all those “landslide victories” have not meaningfully affected the lives of desperately poor people whose plight has gone from bad to worse.
It is in this context that bandits operate as alternative governments because the state, to borrow a Marxian formulation, has withered. No matter how much rhetorical energy we invest in such concepts as community policing, intelligence-led policing and the like, we must come to terms with the tragedy of ungoverned spaces, in itself a military term borrowed from American strategic thinkers, developing into outlaw republics. Going forward, we must create state-building projects that will incorporate forgotten communities into a new national framework of equitable, resource sharing. Finally, a new impetus is required for tackling the poverty question beyond palliatives and optics.
