According media reports, between 50 and 145 defenceless men, women and children were slaughtered in their sleep in a dusk militant operation by yet to be identified gunmen in Barkin Ladi and Bokkos local government areas of Plateau State, North Central Nigeria. The dastardly act, which happened on the night of 24th December, 2023, was a well coordinated attack on multiple communities in the affected local government areas, with hundreds of properties set ablaze by the assailants. This latest attack on communities on Plateau has left the people in sorrow, tears and blood, making this year’s Christmas a “Black” one for the predominantly Christian people of the affected communities.
While the rest of the world celebrate the birth of Christ Jesus by making merry with family and friends, for these people it was mourning after the massacre on the Plateau on the eve of Christmas. The anguish and lamentation of the bereaved family and friends of the massacred has cast dark shadows on the Christmas festivities across the land with an anxiety of hopeless helplessness of the people.
Since 2008, the once beautiful and scenic cities, towns and villages on the Plateau have lost whatever was left of their innocence to ethno-religious conflicts and bloody communal crises between its predominantly Christian and Muslim peoples over control of political power in the state. Another dimension was added to the Plateau centre of conflict when the state was invaded by killer herdsmen who were said to be on revenge mission against sedentary farmer communities for earlier attacks on their Fulani cattle breeder brethren in the protracted struggle over land and water resources for cultivation and grazing. And for many years, thousands of Nigerians on the Plateau have been slaughtered in the vicious cycle of reprisal attacks that have become the security reality of the state.
Even though Caleb Mutfwang, the governor of Plateau State, has declared the latest attack as neither ethnic nor religiously motivated, but “criminal” acts by terrorists against the people of the state, the latest attack fits into a reccuring pattern of killer herdsmen’s attacks on sedentary farming communities on the Plateau that has gone on for more than a decade without respite. While the governor’s conciliatory tone and non-confrontational demeanor is understandable as a measure to maintain unity and cohesion among the people of the state, it is nevertheless important to situate the conflict within the context of its reality as a continuation of the ethno-religious conflict that has rocked Plateau State for most of the last decade in order the unravel the motive and modus operandi of the perpetrators and effectively contain their terrorism.
Nigeria has remained a thoroughfare of banditry and terrorism by killer herdsmen who have poured into the country from all over the Sahel and Central Africa to wage an ethnic war against sedentary farmers in Plateau and other parts of Nigeria under the cover of farmers-herders’ clashes. And the defenceless reality of the affected communities has emboldened the assailants to sustain the attacks, which is gradually degenerating into ethnic cleansing of genocidal proportions.
Unfortunately, in the face of these constant attacks, the Nigerian state appears even more helpless than the affected communities as it appears lost at sea about how to put a final stop to this carnage. For many years, the government of Nigeria has not been able to redesign its national security architecture to address to debilitating security situation in Plateau State. The government appears lacking in imagination, strategy and tactics to scale up security measures to defeat terror in Nigeria and seems to have run out of ideas on how to secure lives and properties of Nigerians.
For a country that is reeling from the worst economic crisis in living memory to be plagued by sustained, heightened insecurity, it is an indication of advanced warnings of state failure. The Nigerian state has become fragile from unreconciled ethnic, religious and regional contradiction that is now gradually unraveling the weak structures of the state.
Beyond the platitudes of condemnation, condolences and empty pledges by both the federal and state governments to “bring the perpetrators to book”, it is time to take concrete steps to save lives and properties of Nigerians within Nigeria. Faced with the reality of proliferation of arms and the rise of armed groups terrorizing Nigerians, the Nigerian government should consider a change in approach to arms possession and counter-insurgency strategies.
It has become trite to liberalize arms possession for law-abiding individuals and groups for the purpose of self- and communal-defense in order to complement the efforts of conventional security forces in the war against terror in Nigeria. Only a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun and Nigeria is ripe for its own version of America’s Second Amendment, which will liberalize the strict Small Arms and Light Weapons prohibition laws in Nigeria to make it easy for citizens to legally acquire arms in enhancement of their right to self-defense. And this liberalization of arms possession should begin with organized state government-sponsored vigilance groups such as the Amotekun in the South West, Civilian JTF in the North East and similar groups across the country.
A Volunteer Unit in the Nigerian Security and Civil Defense Corps should be created as a special purpose vehicle to incorporate state-funded vigilance groups for the purpose of training, monitoring and operational control. Members of this unit will be drawn from the communities affected by terrorism and they will serve as first responders in the counter-insurgency strategy of the security high command.
This measure has become imperative in the light of the inadequacies of Nigeria’s conventional security forces as a result of under-staffing, poor funding and ill equipment to contain the current situation. Nigerians can no longer continue to pay the supreme price of government failure to protect their lives and properties by being disallowed the lethal capabilities of self-defense.