Children’s Day in captivity and cane marks

By continuously sharing the photos of the traumatising abduction of school children and teachers in Oyo State, the popular singer, Paul Okoye, captured the mood of the nation on May 27, this way: “Unhappy Children’s Day.” On her own, the Nollywood actress, Bimbo Ademoye tearfully noted that, “Seeing the babies with cane marks on their backs dug a very deep painful hole in my heart.” But the post that pointedly indicted the ruling class is the one made by Actress Ruth Kadiri. In her words: “There was once a country where people lived freely…now fear resides with us. Uncertainty lives amongst us. Stay and build your country, they say. Stay where? Home is no longer safe. Home is no longer home.  Our children are kidnapped right before our eyes.”

Sadly, two weeks after what has been described by the Police as a “coordinated kidnapping” of 46 school children and their teachers in three schools located at Esiele and Yawota communities of Ogbomosho, there is no clue about their whereabouts and/or when they will safely rejoin their loved ones. Indeed, the agony and emotional devastation by the families and the victims alike are clearly unfathomable. To that end, my heart goes out to the family of late Mr. Michael Oyedokun, the mathematics teacher at the Community High School, Ahoro-Esiele in Oriire LGA of Oyo State, who was gruesomely beheaded by the wild-animalistic bandits.

The whole ugly scenario speaks to the increasing propensity of attacks on soft targets: schools, churches, markets, relaxation spots and sleepy communities. It is obvious that beyond their radical indoctrination, the audacity and cold-blooded operations of the criminal elements showed that they have no place for constructive engagement and pleadings that will prick their consciences.  It is that bad!  Thus, it is now a big security risk to live in rural, under-policed, and under-governed territories. Travelling along that route makes one a potential ransom payer.

Today, those areas that are spared of the hustling and bustling of modernity and city-life, as well as the trappings of materialism, have become the fowlers hunting field. Those areas with unexciting social life, no nightlife economy, and are known for firewood-prepared meals have become tension-soaked. The serenity of nature, the usual plucking of non-preservative fruits and vegetables, and ubiquity of bushmeat, have unfortunately given way for the pursuit of their inhabitants by kidnappers, the way hunters go after bushmeat. The natural ecosystem that produces the crowing of roosters, whistling of birds, hooting of owls, hissing of snakes, croaking of frogs and toads, chirping of grasshoppers, buzzing of bees, and even roaring of lions and howling of wolves in the forests, has been displaced and disarticulated by the detonation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and booming of sophisticated guns of the bandits. Not the familiar local hunter’s gun that the animals were used to and could easily take cover.

But the search for a solution seems to defy all efforts made so far. Tracing the root causes of the hydra-headed form of kidnappings in the country, some scholars have argued that there is a relationship between banditry and the location of forests, especially in the northern Nigeria. A recent report by The Punch which states that the affected communities in Oriire LGA communities “sit on the fringes of a forested belt that the abductors have exploited for cover since the attack” tend to collaborate the empirical assertion. Last Sunday, a team of top echelon of security and intelligence community dispatched to the mourning communities by President Tinubu, among other assurances, informed the nation of the presidential approval for recruitment and deployment of 1,000 forest guards for search and rescue operations. This policy pronouncement inadvertently reveals that forests enable the unending guerilla-like criminality.

As the nation reels under the debilitating violence, a new report released by the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) reaffirmed what is already known. Part of the report states that: “An estimated 30,000 Fulani militants likely operate across the country, traditionally concentrating in the country’s northwest, then migrating down through the Middle Belt, and becoming increasingly active in the South. Each group consists of anywhere from 10 to 1,000 members.” It further states that “Violence by Fulani militants caused the highest number of deaths among all religious communities in Nigeria over the last year, as compared to attacks by organized insurgent groups and criminal gangs.” According to the report, the Fulanis who are largely herders of livestock targeted the Christian farming communities in the South, displaced over 1.3 million people whose homes and churches were burnt.  As a balancer, the report notes that the Muslim communities are not also spared of the attacks by the marauding militants who have been described as the deadliest among the non-state armed groups in the country.

In attempting to locate the drivers of the intractable armed conflict, the report notes that “The violence associated with Fulani militants is driven by a complex combination of religion, ethnicity, competition over land and water resources, criminality and environmental degradation.” It also made mention of desertification, population growth and shrinking grazing routes as a major cause of the violent clashes between nomadic herders and sedentary farmers.

The report carpeted the security agencies in Nigeria for not doing enough to contain the violence and prosecuting of the culprits. “Government authorities have often failed to prevent attacks, respond actively to incidents, or hold perpetrators accountable.” It noted that the lack of prosecution of the implicated persons inadvertently breeds a culture of impunity and recurring cycles of insecurity in the porous communities.

Flowing from the foregoing, the federal government needs to go beyond the reactionary approach to a more enduring to curb the scale of violence. Just as we expect the safe return of the pupils and their teachers as soon as practicable, the issue of state police should to be taken up urgently by the National Assembly.  We must factor in our forests in our national development plans in a way to turn them to real assets and not enablers of destabilisation.