NIGERIA’S long-running battle with banditry is throwing up a cacophony. One of them is the recommendation by a former governor of Zamfara State, Ahmed Yerima, asking President Bola Tinubu to grant amnesty to bandits. The former senator’s theory reignites the debate on the best solution to the menace. Another senator, Diket Plang, from Plateau, one of the violence-ravaged states, has been canvassing “forgiveness” for the murderers and kidnappers. Many Nigerians however oppose this, insisting that criminals should be punished for their villainy. Tinubu should resist the dubious amnesty calls, secure the country and bring terrorists to book.
Significantly, the renewed advocacy on behalf of bandits is coming at time when after a lull, the terrorists are regaining their momentum, spreading death and desolation across the North.
Yerima’s apologia is not new. Other influential political and religious figures from the North had similarly canvassed amnesty for the bandits. Yerima said, “The best way to go about handling the issue of bandits is to introduce dialogue first. Former President Umaru Yar’Adua had a similar interaction with the militants in the Niger Delta, and it was successful.”
Like others before him, Yerima is confusing two contemporary security issues– blatant criminality by the bandits in the North, and agitation over oil resources in the Niger Delta.
Yerima, a divisive figure himself, finds support from Plang, representing Plateau Central in the Senate. Pleading Biblical injunctions, Plang, whose brother was killed by bandits and his mother and stepmother abducted during attacks on his country home, recommended “forgiveness” for the bandits at a recent Senate plenary. But Nigeria is not a theocracy; it is a democracy, a society governed by the rule of law, where crime and punishment must be enforced.
Ahmad Gumi, an Islamic cleric, has repeatedly pleaded for amnesty for the bandits. He constantly defies logic by claiming that the bandits kill because of their “maltreatment” by the Nigerian state. The amnesty advocates ignore the fact that many of the bandits are not even Nigerians.
They also mistake amnesty for a blanket idea, to be politicised or invoked to reward mass murderers. It is not. Amnesty worked in the Niger Delta primarily because its militants anchored their fight on the sound economic and federalist principle of resource control. With their people alienated from the oil wealth extracted from their land, and the environmental despoliation in the region, the agitators had legitimate demands.
But the blood-thirsty bandits ravaging the North have no legitimate, political, or economic claim that Nigeria is obliged to countenance. Because of the bandits, killer Fulani herdsmen, Boko Haram/ISWAP/Ansaru, and IPOB, the 2023 Global Terrorism Index ranks Nigeria as the eighth most terrorised country in the world. Together, these terrorist groups slaughtered 63,111 Nigerians between 2015 and May 2023, the National Security Tracker estimated. Therefore, any deal with them translates to rewarding mindless criminality. As some North-West states discovered, negotiating with amorphous groups of bandits with no central command or leadership has no positive outcome.
Moreover, a deal with the bandits is insensitive to the plight of their victims. In the past decade, bandits, who rustle livestock, collect tributes from farmers and kidnap, have been operating in Zamfara, Kaduna, Sokoto, Katsina and Kebbi states. Estimated at 120,000 strong, they are also entrenched in Niger, Plateau, Taraba and Nasarawa states.
Musa Rafsanjani, head of Transparency International Nigeria, declared in 2021, “You cannot allow people who have destroyed, killed, and brutalised communities…you did not heal that wound, now you want to pamper those who have perpetrated that criminality and (those) atrocities. It does not work that way.”
Enriched and well-armed from their rapine, bandits once brought down a Nigeria Air Force fighter jet, and attacked the Nigeria Defence Academy. They occupy forests in several states, from where they launch deadly raids.
Between 2016 and 2019, some North-West states negotiated an amnesty deal with the bandits. The then Katsina Governor, Aminu Masari, spent N30 million on stipends for the “repentant” felons in return for their arms. He regretted it.
Masari lamented, “We went through with the amnesty programme because we wanted peace to reign, and we did all that within our limited resources to see the initiative succeed, but peace has continued to elude the state.”
The Niger Delta situation is different from the banditry. Instead of negotiating with the bandits, Tinubu should learn from Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, and El Salvador, Latin American countries afflicted with violent drug cartels. The deals those governments inked with them all failed, except with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a political group fighting for land reforms. El Salvador’s main criminal gangs – Mara Salvatrucha and Calle 18 – decided in 2012 to forego violence. But after a brief reprieve, violence returned. Signing peace deals with violent outlaws is always a delicate undertaking.
Tinubu should reject that abject option. Its main advocates are the Northern elite that unwittingly created the fertile environment for banditry and Islamic terrorism by pandering to religion. Through the implementation of criminal aspects of Sharia in defiance of the constitution, the North is a cauldron of religious extremism. The Northern elite encourage zealotry by looking away when Hisbah, the illegal religious police, destroys alcoholic beverages, and mobs lynch innocent persons for the phantom offence of ‘blasphemy.’
The President needs to implement hardline measures. The first is to prepare strategically against the bandits. He should re-arm and refocus the military to neutralise the felons. Those interdicted must be prosecuted and given the maximum sentence. The state governments must abolish the archaic open grazing livestock farming. The bandits steal animals easily when they are in the open. Ranching, with adequate security, will stem this ugly tide.
Beyond this, policing must be devolved through a resort to the ‘doctrine of necessity.’ The subsisting police architecture, in which over a half of the 371,000-strong Nigeria Police Force is on VIP attachment is egregious. There must be different levels of policing, which is standard in all other federal countries. The calls for amnesty should be consigned to the dustbin.
