By Ahmed Yahaya-Joe
“An appeaser is one of who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”
– Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister 1940-1945, 1951-1955
On Thursday, February 29 exactly a week before the mass abduction of a reported 287 learners and others from a school compound at Kuriga elsewhere in Chikun Local Government Area (LGA) the embattled residents of Gonin Gora shut down traffic flow for some hours along the Abuja-Kano expressway protesting incessant banditry attacks and abductions in their domain.
Kuriga, Gonin Gora, and 10 other wards make up the administrative subdivisions in the predominately rustic Chikun where palpable insecurity pervades the air despite 4,466 square kilometers of land mass that LGA is larger than the entire Lagos State with its 20 LGAs and 37 Local Council Development Areas including lagoon and other inland waterways spread over a mere 3,345 square kilometers in comparison.
Meanwhile, the whole of Anambra State and its 21 LGAs cover a landmass of 4,844 square kilometers. This is less than a football field size larger than Chikun LGA mostly inhabited by the autochthonous Gbagyi and a motley of their Hausanized cousins and other neighbours from diverse ethnicities that have permanently settled in those outlying districts of the Kaduna metropolis.
Based on the 2006 national census figures, Chikun has a population density of 112.5 persons per square kilometer compared to 7,759 persons per square kilometer in Nigeria’s commercial capital.
The main challenge in Chikun LGA is, therefore, not only glaring but quite obvious – large uninhabited swaths, which by implication are ungoverned spaces.
Despite the 20 polling units at Kuriga, there isn’t any police presence in the entire ward.
A major symptom that all is not well in Kuriga has been hiding in plain sight on the iREV portal.
The last presidential election, which took place at the same LEA school where the morning-hours mass abduction of young learners and some staff members recently took place, showcased relevant figures in the uploaded Form EC 8A.
They indicate on the INEC register at the Kuriga LEA school that there are 481 registered voters, yet only 97 of such eligible were accredited on February 25, 2023.
The chief reason for this disconnect in voter turnout is quite obvious. Kuriga precariously lies at the crossroads of the Birnin Gwari cauldron and the badlands of neighbouring Niger State.
Do crocodiles eat their young?
Not intentionally.
Without extended limbs, crocodiles carry their young in the mouth. Accidents inevitably happen.
The timeline of school abductions across the North is too distressing to repeat here with figures that are so mindboggling, albeit culminating in the Nigeria Safe Schools Initiative under the UNDP Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office.
Back in December 2019, former President Buhari signed the Safe Schools declaration ratification document, “Accordingly, the Federal Government had in December 2022 launched N144.8 billion Safe Schools Financing Plan, to protect schools from terrorist attacks, across the nation.”
Was Kuriga LEA among those beneficiary schools?
The question is pertinent because under President Tinubu in August 2023 the Federal Government announced it had allocated N15 billion to fund the Safe Schools Initiative through a national plan that had kicked off covering 48 schools in 18 high-risk states.
Bureaucratic and oversight function “accidents” happen every fiscal year in Nigeria, feeding off-budget items otherwise immensely beneficial to the likes of LEA Kuriga.
Is somebody somewhere trying to make the nation “ungovernable” using insecurity for political reasons?
Lest we forget, “Contemporary rural insecurity, otherwise known as rural banditry started in Zamfara around 2011, as a traditional farmer-herder conflict or insignificant rural unrest, changing into full-blown conflict, engulfing most parts of the Northwest.”
– I am a Bandit: A Decade of Research in Zamfara State Bandit’s Den (2011) by Dr. Murtala Ahmed Rufa’i
How did the situation in Zamfara metastasize across Nigeria?
Time now for the North’s elites to come to equity with clean hands. Curiously, none have so far embarked on grandstanding or sounded combative over the despicable act at Kuriga, unlike their antics over the CBN relocation of some departments from Abuja to Lagos in the not-too-distant past.
Only the combination of federal might and political will would effectively roll back insecurity to secure hapless communities like Kuriga.
With the benefit of hindsight, President Umar Yar’adua during his time deployed both in the erstwhile restive Niger Delta region.
Unfortunately, he mostly towed the appeasement line. His nice smile didn’t have iron teeth. As a result, “repentant” insurgents in the creeks graduated from the militancy of yesterday to the grand oil theft of today.
How did the British security architecture neutralize the armed struggle of the Irish Republican Army?
Through political will and overwhelming force. IRA’s top operators were either compromised, terminated, in captivity, or on the run. Appeasement was not part of the strategy.
Militants and bandits are two sides of the same opportunistically begrudged coin deploying wantons that have to be neutralized with extreme prejudice.
British style.
By the way, the good people of the Niger Delta can never lay claim to exclusive ownership of the mineral resources therein;
“The geological process of the formation of the Niger Delta and the crude oil and natural gas formed in some of its sedimentary formations goes much further back in time.
These sediments are made up of marine deposits and soil containing vegetable and other organic materials, including waste and remains, which were washed away from farmlands, pastures, and forests all over Nigeria and outside and carried by the Niger to form its delta and all the minerals in it.”
Prof. Ebiegberi Joe Alagoa retrospectively concurs, “The Niger Delta has been built up over then thousand years from sediments brought down by Rivers Benue and Niger.” – A History of the Niger Delta (1972) p.11
Interestingly, the hapless citizens overwhelmingly voted for Asiwaju during the 2023 presidential election as follows:
APC – 60 votes
APM – 1 vote
NNPP – 3 votes
PDP – 30 votes
Total Valid Votes – 94 votes
Irrespective of majority partisan support in Kuriga the entire Nigeria is now his national constituency.
No matter the extenuating circumstances the buck stops on the table of President Tinubu.
But does he possess the necessary political will to crush the bandits of the savannah?
Churchill’s sentinel warning remains instructive.
……To be continued.
