Escalating violence is a worrying reminder that things are not at ease in the country.
Ebenezer Obadare
As he marks his second year in the saddle, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has not been shy in touting what he considers to be his administration’s chief achievements. A glossy bulletin released to commemorate the occasion by the Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation revels in the many “notable events, engagements and milestones” of the administration, down to the number of citizen apps launched, kilometers of highways rehabilitated, and regional development commissions inaugurated. On security, the administration puts the number of terrorists it has eliminated at “over 13,500,” although it then goes on to admit that “more needs to be done.”
Considering the dastardly events of this past week, there is no denying that there is room for improvement. Within the space of a few days, villages and communities across Benue, Plateau, and Kebbi States in the North Central and North West regions of the country came under apparently uncoordinated attacks, while a female suicide bomber claimed twenty-four lives and armed bandits gunned down a police inspector in Borno and Katsina States in the North East and North Central regions of the country respectively.
For reasons having to do with its sheer horror—media reports from the affected Yelwata community put the death toll at between 150 and 200—not to mention the audacity of the assailants, who reportedly took their time, opening fire on their helpless victims and setting their homes ablaze all night, the incident in Benue State has attracted the most publicity. A shell-shocked President Tinubu traveled to Makurdi, the Benue State capital, where he directed security agencies to “hunt down the perpetrators” and demanded to know why the police had yet to make arrests days after the attacks. He then vowed to “restore peace, rebuild, and bring the perpetrators to justice.”
Opposition leaders also joined the chorus of condemnation, though they were quick to use the opportunity to criticize the government for taking its eyes off the ball. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar called for “a decisive, people-centered approach to security, one that prioritizes human life above all else” and seemed to chastise the authorities for an indifference that appears to “normalize this scale of bloodshed.” For his part, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party (LP) in the 2023 presidential election, Peter Obi, regretted that “the alarming regularity of bloodshed has tragically diminished the value of human life in the country” and urged the Federal Government to “begin to treat insecurity as an utmost national priority” and to see criticism of its efforts as “a genuine and constructive voice to help direct authorities to their failings.” The Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen. Olufemi Oluyede, promised that the Nigerian Army will “fully deploy and tackle the menace head-on,” though he warned that it “cannot be everywhere at once” since “Nigeria is a vast country, but we are not in large as number as many people believe.”
Although the assurance by the president and the army chief is welcome, it goes without saying that this is not the first time that Nigerians have received such a guarantee. If anything, it is a reminder of the macabre ritual whereby the authorities, no doubt desperate to smother rising public anger following yet another mindless attack, promise decisive intervention, only to move on to other things as soon as there is some semblance of normalcy. As such, this is not the first time that the Tinubu government has sworn to deal decisively with terrorism and armed banditry in Nigeria. As presidential candidate, Tinubu boasted about “ending the insurgency and insecurity swiftly.” Yet, according to Amnesty International, “more than ten thousand people have been killed across central and northern Nigeria” in the two years since he took office. That this figure does not include fatalities from attacks by gunmen in the southeastern region and the many untold deaths associated with random abductions across the country in general makes it all the more astonishing.
What accounts for the increased frequency and horror of these attacks, and why has the government been unable to contain them?
One theory is that the attacks are motivated by enemies of the government intent on causing political destabilization, hence their, i.e., the attacks’, intractability. A different theory holds that the attacks (whether by Boko Haram insurgents or just bandits, period) are an indirect product of the unfortunate coincidence of climatic and environmental forces, leading to a deadly struggle for scarce resources, especially land and water, between mobile “herders” and sedentary “farmers.” These hypotheses are directly contradicted by a third, which insists that the attacks have nothing to do with neither strained farmer-herder relations nor nefarious anti-government actors, but instead what James Ayatse, the paramount ruler of the Tiv nation, calls “a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing that has lasted for decades.”
No matter what one thinks of these postulates, each of which has its merits to be sure, two critical factors are worth paying special attention to as both have implications for our theory of counterinsurgency and the likelihood of the attacks extending into the foreseeable future. The first is the parlous state of the armed forces in Nigeria, vitiated by a combination of monumental corruption, poor equipment, and low morale. The commentator who once remarked that the Nigerian army is part of the problem as well as part of the solution could not have been more right.
A second factor is the religious one. The fact of the matter is that after all is said and done, the attacks, insofar as they can be traced directly or indirectly to the murderous activities of Boko Haram, have an indisputable religious undertone. To continue to deny this is to wish away the quintessence of the conflict. While this does not make every attack religious by per se (there are other relevant factors as indicated above), recognizing and accepting that, by definition, Boko Haram insurgents have an underlying religious agenda, one that the group itself has consistently avowed, is a huge step towards getting the policy response right. If an insurgency whose declared aim is to abolish the secular state in Nigeria and replace it with a theocracy is not religious by definition, what is? A religion-free jihadism would make Nigeria the first and, to the best of my knowledge, only such case in the entire world.
Even at the best of times, Nigeria, the country equivalent of a devil’s brew, is always threatening to burst at the seams. To that extent, last week’s attacks belong to and demand to be seen as part of a sociohistorical continuum, one whereby, in the face of chronic state incapacity, recourse to violence is a last resort for pressing claims. There is nothing wrong with recognizing this while keeping the religious angle, one that seems to have increasingly fallen away even as the insurgent attacks across the northern region have become more vicious with the passage of time, in view.
The Tinubu government faces the challenge of balancing short-term military imperatives with long-term institutional reforms. Everything hangs on it.
*Professor Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).This article was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy: Nigeria’s Never-ending Security Nightmare | Council on Foreign Relations