Insecurity: Time to reboot

The only thing truly democratised in Nigeria’s 27-year-old 4th Republic is insecurity. The beast is everywhere. Nigeria operates a special variant of democracy. Whereas democracy delivers freedom, civil liberties, economic prosperity to the citizenry, Nigeria’s democracy in the past 27 years has delivered insecurity with all its props of evil, darkness, bloodiness and raw primeval brutality. It is something to be ashamed of, especially the leaders, power brokers and the legion of political principalities ravaging the nation.

They should be ashamed of this noxious national stench. But they are not. And that includes the top echelon of the Nigeria security apparatchik. Why are we not ashamed that a rag-tag army will infiltrate our security agencies? And why are our intelligence agencies not able to plant moles in the camp of the enemies? Despite all our trainings at top military academies in the US, UK, France, India, Russia, China and elsewhere, the scourge of insecurity has continued to trump the nation.

An affliction brought upon the nation by Boko Haram to taunt western education has snowballed into a nation-wide maniac from its original incubator, the north east. It became a national staple because Nigeria governments since 2002 did nothing. Shocking? More shocking is the sad reality that of those who imported Boko Haram, those who sponsored and are still sponsoring its spread and mutation to ISIS, ISWAP, Ansaru, Lakurawa, are still walking free.

From their initial jihadist posturing, these deadly groups have turned Nigeria to their cash cow. Kidnapping breeds the cash. Those who negotiate the ransom are freer than law-abiding Nigerian citizens. Both the sponsors, the criminal jihadists and negotiators are hosted in government houses. They are friends of top government officials. The National Security Adviser (NSA), Nuhu Ribadu, even called terrorists “our brothers.” That’s the man in charge of the whole national security architecture.

Truly, Nigeria must reboot its internal security strategy. At the moment, it is not working. And will never work when you have sympathisers of terrorists and terrorists themselves as active players and drivers of the anti-terror war. A total reset is needed now. President Tinubu should as a necessity rejig the security structure. The corruption, compromises and deceit need to be checked.

One sign of a failed or failing society is paralysis of law and order; a complete breakdown of the conventional and enthronement of the bizarre. The Nigerian socio-economic ecosystem has witnessed such anarchical order in recent years, elevating a special variant of crime to one huge industry. It is called abduction; kidnapping, the cruel act of turning captives to cash. And damn, we have looked helpless in the face of this new trade.

Just as the nation got stewed in the juice of cheap money from crude oil and abandoned its legendary illustriousness in agriculture, mining, forestry, latex and cotton production, cocoa, groundnuts and cashew nuts, palm produce, among others and slid into the lazy mode, Nigerians are beginning to see huge potential in kidnapping as the new oil. Being able to form a ring of abductors is akin to owning an oil well or even flaunting a lucrative oil block licence.

We can no longer pretend about this; it does not make sense to keep quiet either. Kidnappers are the new big boys in town. And it seems a profitable venture. In the beginning we were afraid of robbers who broke into homes in ungodly hours of night and robbed their victims; we were afraid of robbers on the highway; of pickpockets in brimming molue buses; we dreaded in-traffic crooks who point a gun at you, dispossess you of your belongings in nanoseconds and bolt. Not anymore! These days, our new dread, our collective torment is the kidnapper. They are taking away our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, and worst of it all, children, to dingy places in surreal forests and shanties and asking us to pay money in millions in lieu of their lives and freedom. And we’ve been paying. The more we pay, the more they abduct. It’s frightening how we got here. They have kidnapped all manner of persons: the poor, the not-so-poor and the rich and the not-so-rich. They kidnapped lawmakers, wife of Central Bank Governor (that’s a big fish); retired military chiefs, hundreds of school children in one fell swoop, ex-ministers, bankers, politicians, businessmen, et al. Indeed, who kidnappers cannot abduct does not exist. More worrisome, these days, some criminal Nigerians, retired and still active armed robbers, have joined the kidnapping business.

In its formative days, kidnappers were mainly a bunch of misguided militants in the creeks of the Niger Delta. They targeted expatriate oil workers popularly called ‘Oyibo’. It was their own way of venting their rage against oil majors whom they accused of living in obscene prosperity at the expense of their environment and people. Kidnapping was at that time limited only to the creeks where the oil wells and facilities were located. While all this happened, the nation, as always, pretended that the problem would wear away. It never did. Rather, it grew diametrically to the North and South.

Now, the kidnappers are everywhere; stalking the byways and highways with swashbuckling hubris; unchallenged, unfazed. Worse yet, the kidnapper is not just the ammunition-wired militant in the creeks; the Fulani gunmen, the yesteryears robbers and their growing army of recruits from all over the south have formed a deadly alliance with their peers from the north to complete the deadly ensemble of new millionaires in the booming kidnap trade. Money is the lure of the trade. Recent statistics on the frequency of abductions and volume of ransom paid out by Nigerians to their abductors shows that Nigeria may have surpassed the combined revenue raked in by abductors in Yemen, North Africa and Somali put together.

Kidnapping has become so commonplace that people are kidnapped for as low as N10,000 or recharge card as ransom. Children even arrange their own kidnap to extort money from parents. A pastor was once reported to have ‘faked’ a kidnap and claimed he used the money raised by the church for a capital project as ransom. Smart guy!

What has sustained kidnapping is the secrecy with which security agencies treat those arrested and even victims of the crimes. Victims are advised not to disclose how much ransom they paid to buy their freedom. They are even told not to admit that they ever paid ransom. Plus, the fact that all those arrested in the past do not get convicted with the same urgency they demanded and collected ransom. This is where the judiciary should be alert and responsive. Cases of kidnap deserve accelerated hearing as deterrence to other perpetrators. The challenge is to make kidnapping less attractive and lucrative than it now appears, otherwise it has become the new oil.