The anti-terror war is bound to assume a renewed virality with a new set of Service Chiefs taking charge. This is not in any way to pooh-pooh the contributions of their immediate predecessors.
The immediate past security chiefs, no doubt, gave a good account of themselves, having dealt the terrorists a lethal blow and decimated a lot of them and their leaders. Their efforts may appear somewhat impalpable, a drop in the ocean, because the war to rid our land of the implacable insurgents and bandits has become quite convoluted and complicated.
However, it is eternal verity that life is not a straight trajectory. The business of government is a continuum. It is akin to a relay race; the sprinters who start the race at a point must hand over the batons to a new set of sprinters, who then fast-track the sprint with a new surge of energy because they are still fresh, having just started the next leg of the race.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu replaced the Chief of Defence Staff, Gen. Christopher Musa-led service chiefs penultimate week at the wake of a ‘coup scare,’ which the Defence Headquarters promptly denied. The new security helmsmen were sworn in and decorated with their new ranks by the President at the Aso Villa last Thursday after their confirmation by the Senate.
The newly decorated service chiefs include: Lt.-Gen., now Gen. Olufemi Oluyede, as Chief of Defence Staff; Major-Gen., now Lt.-Gen. Emmanuel Undiendeye, as Chief of Defence Intelligence; Major-Gen., now Lt.-Gen. Waidi Shaibu as Chief of Army Staff; Air Vice Marshal, now Air Marshal Kevin Aneke as Chief of Air Staff; and Rear Admiral, now Vice Admiral Idi Abbas as Chief of Naval Staff.
It is, however, not a tea party affair for the new security chiefs as they take their respective mantles of security leadership, because the turf on which they will be operating is already tough and steep. It is literally precipitous.
The official prevarications, acquiescence and complicity of the past had given the terrorists the leeway to grow tap roots and spread their tentacles across the vast swathes of the nation’s landscape, north and south.
This is precisely one of the blights and dark sides of an anti-terror war that has, as noted earlier, become convoluted, complicated and intricate. The precariousness of the situation on ground is, no doubt, not lost on the new security chiefs. They have been part of the system. They have partaken in the hydra-headed battles against terror as commanders of troops in the various theatres of operation.
And as veterans in the game, they have been talking tough. They need to show force and flex muscles. It is a necessary war strategy to deliberately fill the enemy with dread and put him in disequilibrium ahead of the actual attacks.
In response to their commander-in-chief’s marching order to put paid to the usual game of excuses and finish off the terrorists once and for all, both the new Army chief and his Air counterpart promised to frontally confront the goons and decimate them.
In his own case, Gen. Oluyede, the CDS and the head of security team, promised to adopt an intelligence-run initiative backed by technology and foreign partnerships to give a niche to the fresh onslaught against terrorism.
It is expected that the new service chiefs will walk their talk because the change of guard has somehow revved up renewed hope in Nigerians amid forelorness, as the security maelstrom continues to assume new and frightening dimensions daily.
Many parts of the nation have become sprawling killing fields, as kidnapping-for-ransom, which has become a full-fledged business venture, stalks the high ways and communities, including southern states.
The terror siege, which was confined to the North East some 15 or 16 years ago, has, one way or the other, infected virtually the entire country, although in different degrees.
Just as the Boko Haram insurgents continue to terrorize Borno State and have even graduated into using drones to scale up their terror dragnet, so have Fulani bandits held the North -central states of Plateau, Benue, Niger, Nasarawa, Kwara and Kogi by the balls.
The siege the bandits also lay to the Northwest, especially Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna and, to a certain extent, Sokoto, where bandits’ kingpins are holed up in massive forests, lording it ruthlessly over the communities, is so dreadful that government has sought a way to mollify them through peace deals. They kill with ferocious glee, kidnap for large ransoms and impose taxes on many of the communities.
In some of these states, communities have been completely deserted due to incessant attacks and many of them are being renamed and occupied by the daredevils.
It is now common to see or hear of fully loaded commuter buses and private cars being heckled on many highways across the country by the terrorists and veered into the forests and the passengers kidnapped for ransom. Some are killed in cold blood, even after ransoms have been paid, while most female kidnap victims are mercilessly raped.
The bandits-cum-kidnappers have particularly gone completely berserk in their rapacious demands for ransoms. A report by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) revealed that about ₦2.2 trillion was received by kidnappers as ransom within just one year.
The survey, which produced estimates at national and zonal levels covering both urban and rural areas for a 12-month reference period of May, 2023 to April, 2024, also showed that abductions are more rampant in rural areas than in urban centers. The Northwest reported the highest ransom paid, totalling ₦1.2 trillion, while the Southeast recorded the least with ₦85.4 billion.
The social media is awash with the heart-rending tales of hapless kidnap victims or their relations begging for contributions to pay ransoms to free their kith and kin from captivity. The kidnappers often display an uncommon savagery anytime ransom payments are delayed.
The first major spectacle about going public to raise kidnappers’ ransoms occurred last year in the Federal Capital Territory( FCT), when Alhaji Mansoor Al-Kadriyar, a senior official of the National Population Commission (NPC) and all his six daughters were kidnapped in their Abuja home.
He was released shortly after to raise the N60million ransom the abductors demanded. They (kidnappers)soon raised the amount to N100million. And in a display of fiendish rage, the kidnappers seized his first daughter, Nabeeha, a 400 level student of Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, and shot her dead in cold blood, because payment of ransom was delayed!
The heartless felons then made a most callous spectacle of her corpse by dumping it on the Abuja-Kaduna Highway!
Oladosu Ariyo, an Abuja-based lawyer, his wife and three children were also abducted in their Abuja residence about the same time. The undisclosed amount demanded as ransom was beyond him. So, he had to scamper around, begging colleagues and well wishers in a bid to raise the sum.
He was still running around trying to raise the ransom when the vicious gunmen killed one of his children in their custody, 13-year-old Folashade. Like in Al-Kadriyar’s case, that was their own way of warning the lawyer not to delay payment of ransom any further!
The new wave of abductions sparked public outrage, casting a pall of gloom on the FCT. Some good Samaritans joined the drive to raise the ransom demanded, using the social media to save Ariyo’s wife and his two remaining two children.
Recently, a viral video set the internet abuzz showing gruffy-looking kidnap victims in a Kwara State den pleading for help, lamenting that they were being starved and tortured while their families struggled to raise a ₦50 million ransom.
A young woman, Aïshã Wahab, from Edo State was shown in a viral video where she tearfully begged for assistance to raise a ₦20 million ransom. She was later released after a sum was reportedly paid.
In 2021, kidnappers released a video of 15 staff and students kidnapped from a college in Zamfara State, pleading for their lives and urging the government and parents to meet the ₦350 million ransom demand within 24 hours.
This is the appalling level into which the banditry and kidnapping-for-ransom siege has degenerated. The new service chiefs should, as a matter of priority and in active collaboration with other security agencies, move decisively to halt the nation’s drift into anomie and complete anarchy.
They should not allow non-state actors to seize the initiative and begin to lord it over sections of our nation when there is a valid government in place with all the appurtenances of sovereignty. In Zamfara and Katsina states particularly, the bandits have become so audacious that they now come out openly to make demands and even set conditions for peace.
It is unthinkable that state actors who should tame the bandits shockingly kowtow to them, striking peace deals with them. These are caparicious characters with a mercurial temperament, who soon break the terms of truce to swoop on the hapless communities to plunder them.
It is shameful and highly impolitic to negotiate with soulless, irascible characters like the bandits because any form of peace overtures to them is akin to begging them. It will be counterproductive as it emboldens them to be more vile and ferocious. The only language that makes sense to them is larceny through mindless kidnapping.
Mass abductions have become almost interminable and intractable because of the allure of ransom and the acquiescence of desperate families, petrified communities and even some state governments (even though they do not admit it) to paying. This access to easy money has made the atrocious heist a very lucrative criminal adventure for the hundreds of armed gangs holed up in the forests of northwest, the main epicenter of their gangland.
The new security chiefs should move in swiftly, stop the shenanigans and deal decisively with the daredevils instead of pampering them. Brutes like the blood-thirsty bandits and insurgents are to be tamed not coddled.
However, the military option needs to be coupled with mending the ‘leaking roof’ of the anti- terror war by ridding the armed forces, through effective intelligence, of internal saboteurs who have allowed the infiltration of ‘fifth columnists.’ Their sponsors, some of whom are, no doubt, highly placed but certainly not above the law, must also be fished out and prosecuted.
The oblique complaints about soldiers in combat being shortchanged by being denied their inconvenience allowances and armed with obsolete weapons to confront the terrorists clutching sophisticated arms must also be addressed at the highest level of governance. The anti-terror war must be won by all means!
…kudos to President for reviewing pardon list
President Bola Tinubu has again proved to be a listening leader by bowing to public pressure and reviewing the clemency list, which ruffled feathers recently.
The matter had incensed the public because The Presidency had, in the exercise of the constitutionally backed prerogative of mercy, included malevolent characters undeserving of pardon, on the list of 175 inmates, because they did not meet the criteria for it.
The pardon was extended to those convicted of serious criminal offences, including drug trafficking, importation and possession of illicit substances such as cocaine, heroin, cannabis, tramadol and Indian hemp as well as convicted kidnappers and murders.
According to the presidential spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, the earlier clemency had followed recommendations by the Presidential Advisory Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy, headed by the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Lateef Fagbemi (SAN), which cited remorse, good conduct and acquisition of vocational skills.
One of the names that sparked serious outrage was that of Maryam Sanda, who was convicted in 2017 for stabbing her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, to death. It, however, came to light that the list was actually sabotaged along the line.
We had, in an earlier editorial and alongside others, strongly deplored the presidential action as a travesty capable of weakening penitence and emboldening criminality, among other negative repercussions.
And The Presidency, in deference to public sensibilities, especially those of the victims’ families and angry Nigerians, last week released a new list showing that about 141 controversial names, including that of Sanda, had been removed, leaving only 34 names on the final list.
The President had granted clemency to 82 individuals in the earlier list, reduced the jail terms of 65 inmates, commuted the death sentences of seven convicts to life imprisonment, among others.
But 15 individuals were granted clemency in the new list, while the death sentences of four convicts were commuted to life imprisonment. Sanda’s own death sentence was, however, commuted to 12 years.
The revised list has, no doubt, assuaged the feelings of victims’ families and met the public expectations to a large degree. President Tinubu deserves the thumbs up for not allowing the hubris of power to blind him against public outcry over the pardon list.
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