Politics, terror and insecurity in the Middle Belt, by Rotimi Fasan

It has frequently happened across different parts of the North that new reports of similar incidents are simply being treated as pieces of information to be noted for whatever it is worth by whoever finds it useful while life goes on in the rest of the country. But cases of terrorists’ attacks are not mere incidents that should be viewed with bored responses. Communities are being sacked; properties are being ruined, while lives are lost.

The last time it happened, it was on the eve of President Bola Tinubu’s state visit to the UK. That was an opportune time to play politics and the opposition seized the moment to demand that the president cancel the trip. They spoke of his lack of empathy and called him all the names their vocabulary could sustain. It was all politics because when the bloodsuckers made their way to Angwan Rukuba in the Jos North Local Government Area of Plateau State on (of all possible days for such macabre visitation) Palm Sunday, silence prevailed within that structure of criminality, as one of them once described his new friends in the opposition ADC. 

That figure will remain nameless to the extent that his kind of politics, beyond being defined by its lack of constancy, has no respectable name on which it anchors. Just one word fits it for now: unprincipled. But the opposition politicians were all in Kano to oversee the defection into their camp of Rabiu Kwankwaso. Now the drift is in their direction, none of them is warning of the dangers of the country sliding into a one-party state. They are smiling from ear to ear, laughing out loud and slapping one another on the back for a job well done. The talk is no longer about next year’s election being between Nigerians and the ruling party. I guess we may have to wait until after the presidential primaries are won and lost before we know what the opposition rhetoric will change into. But do they lie who say our opposition parties are the homes of disgruntled politicians and sore losers who are motivated by a raw hunger for power; carpet baggers with a high dose of withdrawal syndrome, neither prepared for the work of opposition nor the chilly draught of lost power? 

We have not been told of the strategy they deployed to have Kwankwaso in their camp. Was it by blackmail, through bribery or the threat of exposing his secrets? Yet, Alhaji Kwankwanso could have easily joined the APC but for the breakdown in discussion between him and the ruling party. Had he been given what he wanted, he could well have been ‘standing’ on Bola Tinubu’s ‘mandate’. Had that been the case, then would Nigerians have been regaled with stories of opposition elements who were intimidated or bribed with huge sums of money to join the APC. We would have heard tales of how the EFCC, ICPC and INEC have been turned into a weapon of state control. It is all silent now and no fingers are being pointed at their agbada-wearing dictator in Aso Villa. 

All we hear being bruited abroad are stories of a political space that has been energised by the expanding membership of politicians who, but for their personal gains not being met, could have been speaking for the ruling party at this moment. Kwankwanso made good effort to join the APC. He took part in both open and clandestine meetings with the President in Abuja and Paris, even if all the while he had to contend with the opposition of his estranged associates like Abdullahi Ganduje who was already in APC. Like Nasir el-Rufai, he was once touted for a ministerial appointment and was just a step short of joining the APC a couple of weeks ago before the conditions he set (which bordered on personal compensation) were turned down. Today, the opposition praise him solely for swelling their number.  

The Palm Sunday onslaught left in its wake a gruesome harvest of more than 30 lives by the time the guns were silent. The attack is forever etched in our memory by the heart-wrenching image of a disconsolate mother cradling the bloodstained head of her son as life slowly drained out of him. How does one make sense of the fact that this attack was executed in a crowded part of the city centre by camouflage-uniformed marauders on motor bikes? What could be more brazen? While the Plateau was burning, marriage guests in a part of Kaduna, not too far from Jos, were being sent to their maker. A love feast was abruptly turned into a bloodbath at the end of which 13 lives lay still. The killings across the Middle Belt, particularly Plateau, Benue, Kogi, Nasarawa and even parts of Taraba State have long gone beyond the narrative of farmer-herder conflict. They are not only meant to create a climate of fear in the communities affected and a sense of insecurity across the country, they are also shot through with both religious and ethnic undertones. 

They are by intent genocidal and amount to instances of ethnic cleansing. That is the inconvenient truth the state must face irrespective of the fact that elsewhere in the North, East and West, adherents of Islam have been victims of terror. Theirs is a case of Muslim-on-Muslim violence driven by a difference in doctrines. That is not what has been happening in the Middle Belt despite the false picture of equivalence being drawn by leading Fulani clerics and politicians (including others elsewhere) who for political reasons heap the blame on the Tinubu-led Federal Government and yet work hard to undermine measures devised to address the problem. The terror in the Middle Belt may have been amplified in the last 12 years, it enjoyed passive state support during the eight-year rule of President Muhammadu Buhari, but the geo-politics of the Fulani-led North has rendered ineffective all effort to address the problem. 

It was why neither Olusegun Obasanjo, under whose administration political Sharia and Boko Haram first manifested, nor Goodluck Jonathan, under whose government the country was flooded with Sahelian Fulani from other parts of Africa could deal with it- efforts made by these leaders to address Nigeria’s terror challenges were neutered by Fulani clerics and politicians. Umaru Yar’Adua was, perhaps, the Fulani leader who could have addressed that problem with success given his fairmindedness. But he left too early. The best angle to addressing that albatross is, perhaps, the one being pushed for the devolution of police powers to the state. This move is being championed by the Tinubu administration, and Olatunji Disu, the new IG, has presented a 60-month framework for its implementation. If this proposal will fly, a lot depends on the cooperation of Nigeria’s Fulani elite. 

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