Remembering General Tsiga, Prof. El-Juma and hundreds of innocent Nigerians held captive by kidnappers, by A.G.Abubakar
It’s been more than 40 days since Maharazu Tsiga, a retired General of the Nigerian Army and a one time DG of the NYSC, has been in the captive hands of armed bandits.
The incident took place in Tsiga town, of Katsina State. Not quite a fortnight ago, a university don, and dean of the Engineering Faculty of the Nigerian Army University, Biu (NAUB) named Abubakar el-Juma was abducted along the Damaturu-Biu highway. The point of abduction was Kamuya, a village barely 10 kilometres to Buratai, the hometown of a former CAS of the Nigerian Army.
Tsiga was kidnapped in the Northwest zone while that of El-Juma took place in the Northeast flank of the country. Down South, in Akure North LGA of Ondo State, to be precise, armed herdsmen allegedly attacked and killed many people.
They also took some as hostages for ransom purposes. Such unwholesome acts had come to define life and living in parts of the country with the far northern fringes worst hit. Nigerians have literally become numbed and no longer unsettled by such unfortunate occurrences.
The people’s perception of successive governments in securing them as obligated under the constitution and social contract has become dangerously conflicted, and the attendant trust deficits doesn’t seem to be abating. There is a growing feeling that what’s happening in Nigeria in terms of security challenges and related impunity can have no place even in some of the lesser developed climes of the globe.
Enemies can ambush and kill an American citizen, including an army General. They can also kill a Saudi, Chinese, German, Russian military or other high-ranking individuals, but certainly not to keep them captive for months within a stone throw from the seat of power.
Tsiga is held within a radius of may be a hundred kilometres from the state capitals of Katsina, Zamfara, and Sokoto. The Professor also may be in a location of less than a hundred kilometres from Damaturu, the Yobe State capital. They may even be in “Abbottabad instead of Tora Bora”, metaphorically. During the search for Bin Laden, the US army focused their attention largely on the Tora Bora mountain ranges of eastern Afghanistan, while Osama was actually living in a compound inside Abbottabad, a garrison town on the boader with Pakistan.
In the case of general Tsiga the haggling for his release has allegedly been on for weeks, the bandits had the audacity to communicate “freely” with the victim’s family even as they kept shifting the goal posts of their demands, often with reckless abandon.
They allegedly kept raising the ransom from the initial ₦250 million upwards on various occasions. As for the Professor it seems, contact was yet to be established, may be the insurgents are trying to create a sense of anxiousness on the part of his family and well wishers. In both cases, and hundreds more, the security agents seem to be in a systemic flux, or are rather feeling helpless and overwhelmed, in the face of a growing public despair.
However, instead of the military to double down on offensive battle strategy, they seem to be gravitating towards such evolving concepts as “non-kinetic” approach as well as “winning the hearts and minds” of the people for the purpose of intelligence gathering among others.
Good as these concepts are, their appreciation and impact tend to become less in an already traumatised communities/environments. They look like a paradox because the very enemy the Military is seeking intelligence information about, is operating in full glare.
Some have established known enclaves over which they administer (maybe with zip code, and correspondence address too) taxes and levies as they deemed appropriate. Fighting insurgency and terrorism has never been an easy one, but under normal circumstances their firepower and sophistication can never march those of the conventional military.
Besides, most of the criminal groups in Nigeria can not be too far ahead of the very communities that begot them in terms of sophistication, something definitely seems amiss, as regards the ongoing campaign.
The pathetic tale of the two distinguished Nigerians is what thousands of lesser citizens experience on a daily basis, some through physical attacks, while others go through the same thing, psychologically. Whole communities had cause to be displaced or made to live under the control of armed bandits/terrorists/insurgents, depending on the region.
Boko Haram was provocatively struck in 2009, it was actually a second stage in the evolutionary process of most insurgency/terrorists movements. The first being the many years of incubation, the other phases may network expansion, embarking on guerrilla warfare and making attempt at creating “spheres of influence” or safe haven. This, Boko Haram and its offshoot like ISWAP have successfully done. Fifteen years later, the crisis is still festering.
In the heyday, of Boko Haram, Maiduguri, the Borno State capital was literally parcelled into two, one half, from the famous Customs Area to Lamisula/Shehuri North, was under the influence of Boko Haram.
The other was under the jurisdiction of the state. The town was held by the jugular, and literally paralysed, it took the intrepid move on the part of the youth to call off the bluff of the insurgents who got them pushed out of the city. The Biu youth did it, the Gudri youth of Azare did too, both towns have since been relatively more peaceful.
As the security challenge in Maiduguri started to abate, terroristsm began to manifest over parts of Northwest zone, with spillover into the North Central States, that was around 2014. The group comprising kidnappers, armed herdsmen, and armed bandits have effectively taken over the ungoverned spaces, grounding economic life to a halt for millions across the two contiguous geopolitical zones.
Their activities have since assumed industrial levels run by merchants of deaths called bandits, kidnappers, insurgents.
Add the activities of the IPOB militia in the South East, the Igboho group in the South West, and the restive youth in the Niger Delta to the mix, and the ominous security challenges become more apparent and desperate.
For a fact, no society is immuned from conflict. Indeed, the history of the world is a history of conflict and humanity’s constant search for antidote, the history of the world is, therefore, replete with huge literature dealing with all forms of crisis and conflicts.
A body of knowledge that exposes a nation’s security personnel to all manner of concepts, theories, and strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN) and Counterterorism (CT), among others. Some to be applied within national boundaries, while others, outside, to an extent too, the Nigerian Army is reasonably equipped in terms of hardware and related weapons.
In terms of experience ,the Nigerian Army has been a major participant in many security campaigns both at home and abroad, the nation can therefore boast of having one of the best military in Africa, with a cotre of fine, tested and trusted officers and men.
READ ALSO: Abductors of former NYSC DG demand ₦250m ransom
As an institution, members of the Nigerian Army played critical roles in resolving both global and regional conflicts that include the WWII (1939-1945), the Congo (Belgian-Congo) war in the 60s and the ECOMOG (Economic Community of West African States Monitoring Group) campaign to stabilise Liberia and Sierra Leone, in the 90s.
Other duty tours saw them in Dafur (Sudan), East Timor, and many more, mostly as part of the UN missions. In addition, Nigeria has some of the foremost academies on the continent that run top-class military programmes that could serve the security needs.
Given the needed commitments the Nigerian military should be more than capable of addressing its security challenges; both conventional and unconventional, including terrorism, banditry and insurgency. It has the capacity to do that effectively and efficiently as well.
So, why has the current security architecture in Nigeria been unable to address the twin challenges of terrorism and insurgency in the land in more than a decade? The answers may not be unconnected with the “human factor.” The mindset and the politics of war.
The military seems to be playing it too safe; an uncharacteristic COIN and CT campaigns strategy. Risk aversion is necessary but not to the extent of reducing troops and other vulnerable groups to sitting targets, too much is too bad.
Maybe that’s why insurgents could operate freely along the 120 km Damaturu-Biu road that hosts about half a dozen “check points” spread basically on the motorway. Terrorists and insurgents are highly mobile, so troop mobilisation and movement should be paramount.
The war should be taken to their various enclaves off the highways, including the “mystified” Sambisa forest in Borno and Pawwa-Bununu forests in Katsina-Zamfara axis, troops should be on the offensive without let up.
The growing subscription by the security to some of the concepts of COIN and CT strategies like “winning hearts and minds,” “counter propaganda,” “clear-hold-build,” etc don’t seem to resonate well with people because they see gaps in the such campaigns. Most time the security forces have been lethargic in responding to their cry for help.
On occasions, despite the timely supply of information on enemy movements and/or imminent attacks, the forces were never keen in mobilising a couner, they took so long a time that they arrived after the damage has been done. Because of such experiences, many communities simply chose to resign to their fate instead of relying on the military for a timely intervention. This loss of faith has invariably dealt a huge blow on Nigeria’s COIN and CT wars, the approach needs to change before it is too late.
The war against terrorism and insurgency is not about the common man only. It’s about everyone; the low and the mighty. The lives of the masses may have been lost to the various conflicts, in tens of thousands cumulatively from Borno, Yobe, Katsina, Niger, Zamfara, Benue, Ondo, Imo etc, but the latter have not been spared either. Great sons of Nigeria like Gen. Shuwa (1939-2012), AVM Bade (1957-2018), Maiwada Galadima Atom Adara, of a Kaduna Chiefdom), Col.Dahiru Bako (Damboa war theatre), Lt-col. Muh Abu Ali (Northern Borno war front) Sarkin Gobir Isa Bawa (Sokoto), HRH Etsu Yuda Garba, a District Head, Bwari-FCT etc became victims of the needless bloodletting across the nation.
One may be tempted to contemplate calling for the “democratisation of gun ownership” but gun culture hasn’t helped those societies that embraced it, much. Be it Haiti, DRC or even the USA, this is regardless of the fact that in a conflict situation the power dynamics between the captor and captive is skewed in favour of the individuals holding the gun. Power and/or terror actually flows through the barrel of the gun, when parties to a conflict are all armed the outcome becomes more catastrophic.
Thus, governments are never quick in liberalising arms bearing by citizens, exceptions should however be made to allow trained local security outfits that support the Military, called civilian JTF to bear arms. Together with the Military they should be able to let go of the defensive tactics and strategies in favour of offensive approaches.
Government strategy on signal tracking and war theatre communications should be improved. Geospatial and Signals gathering intelligence should be enhanced. It is unacceptable that terrorists, bandits, kidnappers and bandits can keep negotiating ransom for days and even weeks on end, and still vanish into thin air.
Many, not before asking for handsets, brand new motorcycles and other ancillary items as part of the ransom to be delivered most likely “unmarked,” and without trackers. Something that even fuel transporters use in tracking the whereabouts of their fleet by leveraging on ICT facilities, the excesses are becoming embarrassing.
It’s time to review and overhaul the nation’s security architecture especially the human “factor” as Nigerians pray for the safe return of all those who found themselves in captivity, Tsiga and El-Juma inclusive, to their respective families.
The government should do the needful as the public pledge their support.
agbarewa@gmail.com
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