The armed child, by Hakeem Baba-Ahmed

“You do not call a hyena to discipline a troublesome goat”— African proverb

His name is Aliyu. He is better known as Ali Fari due to his light skin. He could be anywhere between 13 and 16. No one is sure. It has never been important. His father died about six years ago in a fight with vigilante and soldiers. His uncle adopted him after his mother got married to a relation and moved away.

His uncle is now a senior member in the gang of one of the most widely known bandits in the North-West of Nigeria. He is one of many young boys  and a few girls who have moved with parents and the leadership of the gang numerous times. Many are orphans, or children whose parents have offered them to leaders of bandits. Their current location has been home for the last year or so, but the entire camp is experienced in moving at very short notice.

Ali has never attended a school of any type. None of the children in the cluster of camps has attended any school either, but they are educated. The girls know how to tend cattle, cook and look after small children, fetch water and look after injured fighters. Sometimes they serve as scouts around the camps when most of the men are away. Ali and all young boys are trained on use of weaponry, including sophisticated equipment and motorcycle repairs.

They know how to fight and maintain weapons, to spy on the enemy’s movement, to tend rustled cattle and escort them to markets to be sold. The more senior ones are trusted with huge assets like millions in cash, weaponry and drugs when the leaders are away from camps. They are trusted to watch over kidnapped people, feed them and, when necessary, punish or kill those who represent threats. They breach rules, but punishment is often harsh and fatal.

Ali and many of the young people openly smoke Indian Hemp and take other drugs like codeine and Rophinol. Most boys his size have sexual experiences, encouraged by adults who on occasions make kidnap victims available to them. The entire cluster of camps says it is Muslim, but very few people pray. What the young lack in Islamic education, morals, responsible mentoring and a sensitive hand in grooming the young is made up by deep sense of injustice and the correctness of the life of the bandit.

The ideology in the bandit’s territory supports a culture  and consciousness which is rooted in grievances and deep injustice being perpetrated against the Fulani bandit by the Nigerian state and Hausa farmers, represented by the Hausa vigilante. The bandit lives in a world which speaks of rejection, not rebellion; restitution, not offence, and victimhood, not impunity. Young members of the gangs have known no life of peace or the drudgery of normality.

Their heroes are adults among them who kill, punish and abuse because it is the only course left. Their dreams do not go beyond the next encounter and success or escape. Most have known dead adults: fathers, brothers, others who died or were captured in the course of fighting or during expeditions to bring kidnapped people, negotiating for weapons, intelligence or collaboration from shadowy characters who provide lifelines  to survival of the group.

Boys like Ali dream of becoming powerful leaders of bandits, feared by the enemy and respected by those they lead. There is nothing else to aspire to. It is a tough life, but it is one that adults say has been forced on them as inheritance. Their only access to another world are on phones that young adults allow them to watch when they access pornographic material. They see other young people in towns and villages attending schools and in vehicles when they escort rustled cattle to markets or other locations under supervision of discreet adults. They have been conditioned to see these as the other life the Nigerian state and serial injustices have denied them for life.

In camps, adults speak of negotiations and overtures that could bring an end to life as Ali knows it. They have acquired a sense of superiority over Hausa peasants who oppose them; great hatred for the Nigerian state, its agents and informers, and a total lack of compassion for anyone who is a source of money or power. Many arguments have broken out among adults during those discussions, and lives have been lost when fights break out over strategies or options.

A rickety hierarchy holds structures with an apex as Fulani who only herded cattle ten years ago, Hausa volunteers, an assortment of trainers, defectors, suppliers and buyers from many parts of Nigeria. Ali’s uncle and other adults manage an elaborate system of laundering huge amounts from ransom, illegal mining, drug trafficking and extortions of villagers who buy just enough peace to eke an existence. Seemingly rustic bandits are one end of an elaborate network of supply and demand which covers the entire country and has turned many professionals and entrepreneurs into emergency cattle owners.

There are quite likely thousands of young boys like Ali in many parts of Northern Nigeria, representing a threat that could last and mutate for decades more, or deepen the fallacious assumptions that the young, hardened bandit is only the problem of his current locations. Their AK-47s define them as the most serious problem for which the Nigerian state does not appear to have an answer. Many of these young, hardened and dangerous boys will grow to be bandit leaders, replacing those that the Nigerian state will kill or arrest. 

As we speak, the disarray in how to approach this threat promises to give Ali the time he needs to become a key member of his group, or even create his own. Most governments fight the bandit with the right hand, and bribe him for some little peace with the left. The bandit knows the state is currently too weak to eliminate him. He is dug too deep and spread too wide for force or erratic negotiation to defeat.He has no faith that he can ever live as a free citizen in Nigeria. Muslim clerics and mediators are spurned by the State and manipulated by the bandit. Rural communities know better. Many negotiate with bandits for unstable respite, to work on farms just to feed.

The armed child represents one of our country’s major threats to its existence as a secure nation. Our choices are to destroy him entirely and permanently, or constructively engage his very existence, from root to manifestation. Right now, the Nigerian State sees him as an enemy that can be defeated, yet his continued existence alone breeds many like him. As an armed child or a full-blown bandit, he will continue to challenge leaders who have responsibilities to account for their failure to contain or eradicate him. Of the many advantages he has over the Nigerian State, this obligation to account to the citizen is the most burdensome for our leaders. Yet, leadership has to rise  above the bandit.

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