On December 3, 2017, while driving in my car with my wife and daughter around 8pm, I was flagged-down by what I presumed to be personnel of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) in the heart of Abuja. It looked like the thousands of checkpoints that police personnel mount in our cities, especially at night, and I had no hesitation stopping.
By the time, however, I realized that those stopping me were men of the underworld, it was too late for me to do anything to escape. The gang leader opened the door from the driver’s side and first of all removed the car key from the ignition. He then closed the door to make the operation look normal for passersby and then proceeded to snatch the cellphone from my hands. Together with his gang members, they made sure they robbed us of every valuable in the car, including the little cash we had on us.
It was while they were still desperately searching the car and seeking for more that I summoned the courage to query why they could not leave us alone. The answer came from a hungry looking member of the gang who, surprisingly, apologized to me and explained that he had a master’s degree that he toiled to secure, hoping it was going to assure him a solid future, but he roamed the streets of Lagos for over two years without getting a job; that it was after a hopeless search for job that someone advised him to move to Abuja where, in his words, “all the money in Nigeria is being shared.” That moving to Abuja ended up becoming a disaster, as he found it to be “a city where the rich resented the poor,” and that he took to crime only as a last resort. Two other members of the gang explained to me that they had not eaten since the previous day, and all efforts by them to engage in menial jobs came to naught.
In June 2014, also in the same Abuja, I was driving one evening when I noticed that the tyre pressure in my car was low and I stopped by a vulcaniser somewhere in Wuse 2 to get the air beefed up. I then decided to venture out of the car to take some fresh air. It was an area of the city that I thought was very secure, with tens of people milling about.
Suddenly, a young man approached me and asked for help, saying he had not eaten since the previous day.
It was around 7pm, and having convinced myself that he truly looked desperate, I gave him one thousand naira. The young man thanked me profusely and left. But all of a sudden I saw him coming back to where I was. He explained, to my shock, that it was my good heart that saved me because he had taken a decision to stab to death the next person he was going to ask for help (who happened to be me), if the person refused to oblige him. He said that before meeting me, he asked quite a number of people for help but none obliged him.
From one of the inner pockets of the suit he was wearing, he showed me a small sharp knife that he said he wanted to deploy in attacking the next person who turned him down. He told me he took the risk of explaining that to me, to encourage me to continue to be good to everyone, irrespective of tribe or religion.
But I also strongly advised him never to kill anyone because the person refuses him help, and he explained further that death was better than the situation he found himself in, and if he was lucky to only end up in prison, he could at least get free meals served by the authorities.
This is a story of a young Nigerian who has given up on his country. It is the story of sheer hopelessness, and I am sure there are thousands or even millions of young men and women facing similar situations. We parted on that note, but I surely won’t be surprised if that young man becomes a full-pledged criminal shortly after that meeting.
I could not but agree with the Sultan of Sokoto when he once said that we are brewing a monster that is worse than Boko Haram, and he cited hunger as that monster.
There are, of course, many other reasons why some people take to crime, and this is by no means an excuse for anyone who chooses to tread that dangerous path.
But for those of us who are Muslims (and I am sure there are similar traditions in Christianity), there was the story of someone working in a farm, who stole from the produce of the farm to feed his family. The owner caught him red-handed and reported him to the Caliph of the time, who was one of the direct successors of Prophet Muhammad ruling over the Islamic world.
The Caliph asked the man how much he was paying as salary to the young man who stole from his farm. When the owner mentioned the amount, the Caliph saw that it was grossly inadequate. He then asked the next question about how regularly the employer was paying his employee, and when the owner attempted to lie, the worker mentioned that he had not been paid any salary for months. It was at that point that the Caliph decided that the real culprit in this case was the owner. But because the worker also took the law into his hands by stealing, he punished both of them, with the owner receiving a larger share of the punishment for pushing his worker to crime.
Sadly, in Nigeria, not only do governments at various levels blatantly come up with all sorts of spurious excuses refuse to pay workers’ salary as and when due, they also steal the money that is meant for that purpose and use it only for themselves and members of their small families. Today, whereas our legislators earn the highest salaries in the whole world, our workers earn some of the worst wages globally.
In Nigeria today, and this has been going on for ages, if job vacancies exist in any state or federal establishment, the chief executives will in the case of states, share it among the governor, his wife and cabinet members, and then the legislators. This is also what obtains at the federal level where in NNPC and Central Bank, for example, almost all the aides of the chief executives are sons and daughters of the rich and the mighty whose parents have stashed enough money to last their families five generations down.
I recall a chief executive of a federal agency telling me that if he were to live the next two hundred years, there was no way he could be poor. But when a vacancy existed in a sister “lucrative” federal agency, he ensured he grabbed it for his two children. For many of them, they will rather give such job offers to their girlfriends, rather than their own relations.
Senate and House of Representative committees make it a duty to corner almost every job vacancy existing in organizations they exercise oversight responsibilities over, in spite of the billions many of the members individually make illegitimately annually.
Yet, only a few Nigerians have true access to those legislators, in spite of deceiving ourselves referring to them as being close to the grassroot members of the society. Some of them so greedily even go to the ridiculous extent of selling job offers. It is common knowledge that, in Nigeria today, if you are not a member of the establishment and want to help your son or daughter or any person to secure a job, you must part with millions of naira for organizations whose salary is excellent.
The anti-graft agencies know of all these, but it doesn’t seem to bother them in the least. It is amazing, therefore, when we keep talking about building the ideal society when unprecedented greed and sheer wickedness could well pass for the first names of our leaders at various levels.
I recall that the first thing President Paul Kagame of Rwanda did, upon coming to power, was to ensure that the very deep poverty in the rural areas of the country was significantly reduced.
The Rwandan President told me, in a chanced meeting I had with him five years ago in Abuja, that he had the good fortune of realizing that his country could not make any meaningful progress or attract the much sought-after foreign investment unless crime was reduced to the barest minimum.
His strategy was simple: reduce the rural to urban migration and make the citizens productive wherever they may be, and ensure the striking imbalance between the rich and the poor was significantly reduced.
President Kagame does not go about seizing the legitimate property of the rich. He succeeded in building a just and egalitarian society by ensuring that as much as possible, citizens only own property or any wealth through their sweat. With that, he said, he encouraged the spirit of enterprise and fair competition among the citizens, with the result that today, Rwanda is one of the most attractive countries in the world, with a solid record of foreign direct investment.
Foreigners flock to that country in large numbers for vacation and other noble causes because the rate of crime in Rwanda is one of the lowest anywhere, all because the country’s leadership has been insisting in fair treatment of its citizens.
For fifteen years now, the poor has been at the receiving end of the major problems of terrorism and banditry afflicting Nigeria. The rich and the powerful hardly get affected because they have the means to secure themselves from the brigands. And we all know that those who gave rise to the menace are the politicians whose shoes we are forced by hopelessness and poverty to lick.
A renowned politician, whose identity we all know, gave rise to Boko Haram in his desperation to win a second term of office as governor and dominate the politics of his state. He armed the group and mobilized them to intimidate the opposition. Today, that politician is living in absolute peace and comfort while those, including soldiers that have nothing to do with the evil he sowed, are the ones being killed everyday.
We applaud the same politician and others of his ilk inspite of the fact that the billions that they stole is the very reason the government of the day could not access adequate funding to fully equip and mobilize our military to completely wipe out the twin evils of banditry and terrorism bedeviling the society.
Talking about banditry, a former governor of one of the states worst hit by bandits is reported to have perfected the criminal art of awarding contracts at the most ridiculous sums, with one borehole costing over two hundred million naira.
I recall a friend drilling a borehole in his house in Kano, located in a rocky area of the city, at a cost of seven hundred thousand naira three years ago, and it has been working very well for many years now.
It costs much less to drill a borehole in other areas of Kano and other cities of Nigeria. But this politician is today living in absolute comfort and peace because he belongs to the ruling political party whose former national chairman publicly said one’s sins get completely forgiven for merely being a member of the party.
Not only does the man, whose disastrous misgovernance is said to have contributed significantly to birthing the banditry afflicting the entire northwest and some other parts of the country living in absolute comfort, he has continued to insult our collective sensibilities because he rightly believes he is above the law.
In Nigeria, our elections are war; a survival of only the fittest.
In the 2019 general election and the two governorship elections that took place later in the year in Bayelsa and Kogi, we saw how governors that were defeated in the election hired deadly thugs and armed them to intimidate the opposition. In Kogi, an innocent elderly woman was roasted to death just because she was opposed to a second term of office of the incumbent governor.
In Nembe in Bayelsa State, tens of people were killed just because they were members of the PDP. In Kano, hundreds of thugs chased away everyone who they were not convinced was going to vote for the person that hired them, during the 2019 rerun election induced by a compromised electoral commission. The same thing obtained in Osun months earlier.
Sadly, the judiciary that should be the last hope of the common man compromised and gave a stamp of judicial approval to these acts of treasonable felony.
Now, seeing that thuggery and criminality pay, chances are that we have bid goodbye to peaceful and fair election anywhere in Nigeria, in the next round for elections.
The means to power is no longer by popular vote, but the ability to hire dare-devil thugs and equipping them with deadly weapons to terrorise everyone and ensure victory by all means.
I am not a prophet of doom, but this is simply the whirlwind we sow, and which we must collectively reap, if we have to tell ourselves the bitter truth. Living in denial or saying only things that are politically correct cannot, and will surely not help us even one inch as a nation.
Inspite of the best efforts of our security services, terrorism and banditry have continued to increase in Nigeria because we have refused to address them from the roots. We have refused to point at the perpetrators of evil and get the law to deal decisively with them.
Former president Buhari was misled to congratulate the Governor of Kogi State, inspite of the fact that a record number of innocent people were killed by thugs loyal to him, all in his desperate but successful bid to return to office by hook and by crook in the last election that took place in that state.
Every Nigerian will tell you they want terrorism and banditry to come to an immediate end; that our soldiers should perform magic and crush the deviants making life difficult for us. But we all know that this cannot be possible because even if the military totally crushes the present set of criminals spread all over Nigeria, another set is warming up to inflict evil because after the elections, the governors and senators who hired them to crookedly win elections abandon them with those sophisticated weapons at their disposal.
The reality, therefore, is that unless our politicians change their attitude and show patriotism, no effort by the Tinubu administration towards tackling our security situation will yield the needed fruits.