Recently, I had a private discussion with a foreign friend who is a private resident in Nigeria but interested in how we run our affairs. He said Nigeria could solve its dangerous security situation if more attention is given to agriculture. Oil, our present cash cow hardly employs enough young Nigerians to reduce the army of jobless people that have become a security scare. Oil technology he argued remains in the hands of and employs foreigners – almost exclusively.
“But farming has become a very hazardous business in Nigeria. The relationship between sedentary farmers and pastoralists used to be correct and peaceful; no killing/kidnapping for ransom. There were hardly any ethnic or religious clashes in the rural areas. Today the opposite is the case. The young energetic men who wish to/and whom you wish could go into farming, even as it has remains a backbreaking enterprise cannot do so because of insecurity,” I told him
Even as I told him truthfully of the security situation in our rural areas and the dilemma of the young, prospective farmers, I did not expect the story carried by Sahara Reporter’s, an Online Newspapers a few days later. It reported the complaint of rural farmers:
“Bandits are now the ones who decide whether we go to farms or not. In some areas even if farmers plant crops they cannot cultivate due to insecurity.
“In my village, we pay N800,000 as tax and N900,000 as harvest fees. Even if you pay, they will come to your farm and abduct you. These Fulani herdsmen are our problem here in Zamfara, only God can help us,” a resident of Dankurmi Village in Maru Local Government Area of Zamfara State told SaharaReporters.
A farmer in Sabuwa Local Government Area of Katsina said they now negotiated with bandits before they were allowed to harvest their crops.
He said about 45 farmers had been killed by bandits in the local government area alone in 2020.
“They send messages of attack to communities or tax us large amounts of money before they allow us to go to farm,” he said.
How did we get to this level of novel rural crime in rural North West Nigeria?
It is a long story. Some locate this slippery descent into anarchy in 1979, forty years ago; other analysts locate it twenty years, 1999. Those who point at 1979 accuse the two radical governments in Kaduna and Kano that emerged in the wake of that year’s election on the ticket of the Peoples Redemption Party, PRP. The two governors, Abubakar Rimi of Kano and Balarabe Musa, now all late, promptly abolished cattle/pool tax at the occasion of their swearing into office. This was a popular move with the ordinary man, which was soon copied by even the arch enemies of the PRP, even the conservative NPN.
According to this narrative, as popular as the ‘no tax’ policy was to the rural poor, it has produced long term effects that have led to todays unpopular ‘harvest tax’ which is spreading like wild fire in the North West, haunting and or terrorizing the same rural poor of those days. Since nobody – not even those as wealthy as Donald Trump – likes to pay tax – Nigeria’s northern neighbors in Niger, Cameroon and Chad – for long been plagued by unstable governments, draught and or civil wars took advantage of it. They now rushed with their herds of cattle into Northern Nigeria which seemed more stable, with plenty of grazing lands and a promise of prosperity to pastoralists. They moved into Nigeria freely and the village, district heads and Emirs whose responsibility it was to collect these hated taxes and help the government in intelligence gathering – identifying through such taxes who moved into Nigeria, looked on helplessly as all sorts of foreigners – invaded Nigeria. It is not a surprise to those who share this belief that the first serious social upheaval in Northern Nigeria or even in Nigeria after the 1979 change of government came from the North Western state of Kano. The leader of that bloody revolt, popularly known as Maitatsine was from Marwa town in Cameroon Republic. Most of his followers, according to an official report panel of investigation set up by the Shagari government.
That was in 1980 when as a young daring, I hesitate to say reckless newspaper reporter, I covered the bloody event and started following and reporting the group as they carried their violent expeditions to Bulumkutu, Maiduguri in 1982 and Jimeta Yola in 1984. Evidently the violence started in North West of Nigeria and got exported to North East.
Sadly, Northern Nigeria has not really reversed this doomed trend which has been very expensive in terms of human lives, cash and property but has offered little in positive development to the region and or the country.
Boko Haram exploded in the Northeast and now there is insecurity everywhere I the north. The two cult-like movements preach a brand of Islam which advocates a return to the religion’s medieval and cruel practices such as beheading and amputation of those who reject their messages. The similarities between the two sects are very eerie.
They instilled fear in all Nigerians resident in the North. The fear is such that all Muslims are suspect as Boko Haram and Maitatsine adherents. When the roving pastoralists who may not even be Muslims and have always disagreed and even fought with sedentary farmers, be they Christians or Muslims, for whatever reason became more aggressive, the sedentary famers mostly the Christians in the North Central lumped Maitastine, Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen together as new Islamic Jihadist intent on fulfilling Usman Dan Fodio’s threat of 1804 to spread Islam down to southern Nigeria and dip the Holy Quaran into the Atlantic Sea.
It was from that point that some Nigerian politicians made political capital out of the tragic killings in Northern Nigeria and forgot about other scientific factors – ecology, economy, climate change, primitive agricultural practices and narrowed everything down to religion making the herdsmen/farmers clashes intractable. People have refused to find out and see that massive killings are going on between Muslims and Muslims in Katsina, Zamfara and Sokoto.
We have found an easy, short sighted way out. Every conflict in the north is ascribed to religion. But when a crisis defies religion – viz the on-going banditry in the North-West, where Muslims are killing Muslims, and the Tiv/Jukun of Taraba who are killing themselves even when they are mostly Christians, we get lost in our search for a solution.
These are problems that the Federal Government could have solved if it had a serious intelligence network. When this banditry started in 2014 and in 2016 and I saw a media picture of our President in full military uniform and the accoutrements of his rank as a General for the first time since he was sacked by is lieutenants in 1985, at the head of a Special military unit he just created from different units heading to Zamfara, I called his attention to it in my column at the People’s Daily captioned “A tale of two communities”. At that time Plateau and Benue were similarly invaded by bandits, but we did not see such show of martial strength in our President. I pointed out to my President it was tackles for him to indulge in such move simply because many people would see him as defending only people of his faith. Soon, his act will haunt him I warned.
The refusal of the President to change his military commanders who are mostly Muslims for instance has not helped matters particularly with his Christian critics. They see the Nigerian security network as Buhari’s private/Islamic army. No security network can succeed in an environment as complex like Nigeria where they are wrongly perceived as a religious and private army of the President.
The bandits have become bolder now that they know the mental confusion of the country. It should be clear to all Muslims, Christians in Nigeria and even our President that the service chiefs have served the country rather very poorly on the battle ground and are now a political liability to their Commander In Chief.
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