Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, of the umbrella organisations of herdsmen in Nigeria, has finally confirmed what many Nigerians have long suspected: that the bandits now afflicting Nigerians are herdsmen.
But the group’s admittance was not made in good faith; it was not made to condemn an evil act, but to colour it so it will wear the cloak to attract sympathy.
Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore’s spokesman, Saleh Hassan, said that some displaced herders in the country, some of whom were dispossessed of their cows, became bandits who terrorising Nigerians, especially through kidnapping.
He said herders in the country were confronted with a myriad of problems, ranging from hostile host communities, including vigilante groups and other criminal elements who rustle cows in the country.
Such justifications do not augur well for Nigeria in its fight against armed groups that terrorise the nation. Declarations such as the one above are self-serving and do not in any way disabuse the minds of millions of Nigerians who believe that there is no justification for what a few people are currently doing to the rest of the citizenry.
Nigeria will not make much progress in the fight against armed groups as long as some interest groups such as Miyetti Allah choose to justify the reasons for the terror that these groups have unleashed on the rest of the nation.
Hassan went on to say: “The crisis of bandits in the north-west is because of some of the activities of the governors in the past. They put pressure on the herders. They lose their cattle. They have no business. Now, they have joined bandits. They are not spirits. They have reasons why they emerged as bandits. If you destroy grazing, you are going to create another problem. They destroyed their economy. They have no cattle and they got radicalised. “Our members are peaceful herders. We have bandits; we have criminal elements in the forest. They are not necessarily herders. It is the responsibility of the security forces to identify the criminals, isolate them and deal with them according to the laws of the land. There are herders dwelling in the forest, doing their peaceful economic activities, which is cattle rearing.”
Their argument tallies with what Ahmad Gumi has been preaching: amnesty to the armed bandits, who he has insisted are not criminals but people who are driven to and fighting for their economic survival.
Gumi has already won that toga bandits’ advocate, one who knows them well deep into the forests from where they operate at will.
“I’m not justifying their kidnapping. What they do is criminal. But their kidnapping is to get more money to buy more weapons so that they can protect themselves,” Gumi said in a virtual seminar on Nigeria’s security challenges organised by the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies.
“Nobody can justify criminality. What we are saying is what we saw in the forest is an ethnic war going on between people in the forest and the neighbouring villages and hamlets. When the herder felt he had grievances and nobody was listening to him, he took up arms.”
His version and that of the herders’ group is the same narrative. The bandits are doing an obviously wrong (criminal) thing, but the circumstance justifies what they are doing, Gumi and Miyetti Allah are saying in effect.
What is the correlation between their banditry or terrorism and the loss of their cows? Who established it, or it one of the spurious unconfirmed and spurious justifications groups easily put forward to support the indefensible?
Or, has it not been proven that some of the bandits are herders by day and kidnappers by night? Or, some disguise as herders on the roads, while deep in the forests they have camps where they tie their victims until a ransom is paid?
Is it not rather the fact that the driving force behind this criminality is the pursuit of easy money? The herders-turned- kidnappers have since discovered that their new profession is far more lucrative than herding, whether on the move or under some other method.
“Looking at their educational status, they don’t have any official or unofficial education,” Gumi said. He went on to wonder how a nation that is serious about security can leave a chunk of its society so uneducated, to arms and drugs?
“If you don’t show them they’re safe in the larger society, there’s no way they can leave their weapons,” he said.
