The height of insecurity in Nigeria begs for high level solutions. Insecurity can be traced to recent increase in proliferation rising poverty.
Successive governments since 1999 had only succeeded in sustaining the widening gap between the poor and the rich.
Our reference, essentially, speaks to the volume of manifestations and purveyors of insecurity as occasioned by proliferation of Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) in the country.
Unfortunately, our linking the current insecurity in our dear nation to poverty is connected to the wealth of the nation. Is it not surprising that citizens of a mineral resource nation like ours would be languishing in poverty and penury?
This is the reason political economists say resource dependency makes so much money available for sharing, as we do say humorously, “money miss road’. Sadly, this makes access to the Nigerian state seat of power very lucrative, highly competitive, and a do-or-die affair.
In the bid to achieve this, some stakeholders in the Nigeria project have devised several dubious means, including flagrant abuse of people’s rights, inciting violence, aggressive pursuit of injustice and the accompanying galloping corruption.
Though Nigeria is notorious for ethno-religious, communal, political conflicts, of late, banditry and kidnapping have become a menace in Nigeria forming part of the predicaments confronting and distorting development.
Kidnapping for ransom has become part and parcel of insecurity challenge in Nigeria. It is part of the inhuman criminal activity that has escalated over the years alongside other insecurity challenges of communal clashes, ethno religious violence, and terrorism.
Other violent activities include that of the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), Odua People’s Congress (OPC), militancy and herdsmen/farmers crisis, cattle rustling, cultism and gang war.
Regrettably, kidnapping has snowballed into hostage taking of school children, travelling passengers, traditional rulers, clergymen, village heads, and ransacking of communities.
The abduction of Kankara Government School students in Katsina state and
Kagara Government School students in Niger state, to mention a few, is still very fresh in the minds of Nigerians.
These kidnappers operate in different groups across the country. Media reports have it that some of these bandits and kidnappers are affiliated to Boko Haram and other Islamic militia groups operating in the North-east while others are members of ethnic militia and criminal gangs.
The latest of kidnapping havoc was witnessed in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja and environs, where kidnappers stormed residential estates and victims were taken to isolated areas in the forest, with demand for millions of naira as ransom to free their victims.
Painfully, kidnappers and their allies now see this ransom as their entitlement or kill their captors when payment failed. However, government is yet to tackle the menace of ransom payment.
A critical observation of ransome payment to kidnappers is worth reflecting on. It’s a phenomenon that is now becoming a norm of which, if not nipped in the bud, could be legitimised.
Sadly, there are those who justify it in our societies with divergent moral, ethical, social, cultural, religious and political sentiments. Arguably, corrupt individuals are let loose by our court system.
This set of persons and groups that society already considers their actions criminal and murderous, now get pampered after contravening the laws of the land. This begs for answer: what happens to law abiding citizens that are victimised by these criminals?
Some scholars believe that this as a result of frustration when legitimate desires of a person or group are denied them either directly or indirectly as a result of the way the society is structured.
They argue that the “feeling of disappointment” may lead such a man or group to express anger through violence. This anger and violence can also be directed to people who are directly or indirectly related to those people that are said to be responsible. The foregoing, however, does not justify why kidnapping and ransom payment persist.
Similarly, the support by these theoreticians for amnesty for bandits and kidnappers is not acceptable.
Banditry and kidnapping have been equated with pipeline vandalism, the activities of the Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) struggle against oil pollution and underdevelopment of host communities by both the Nigerian state and oil companies. And this, to the advocate of amnesty for bandits and kidnappers, is the way to go.
Many Nigerians have argued that the relative usage and success of violence in drawing attention to the injustice has made this a strategy for promoting “identity politics”. This has given rise to provoking ethnic tension, sentiment and violence as a means of attracting attention to economic, political interests. In a way, this suggests that Nigerians who are disgruntled against the government can take up arms against the state to attract whatever favour or largesse they feel is there to be given.
Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 work, Leviathan, stated that citizens yield to a powerful rule by a sovereign, who, in turn, promises an end to civil and religious war, and to bring forth a lasting peace, and give him the right to conduct policy, including waging war or negotiate for peace for the good of the “commonwealth.”
Therefore, for us, the Nigerian state has no business negotiating with elements such as kidnappers, or allow ransom payment to succeed the way it is today. For instance, the Westphalia Peace Treaty ignited the concept of a sovereign state. An attribute of it is what i.e., a mandate for national security that suggests that the Nigerian state has absolute power to go after the enemy of her citizens, which, in this respect are kidnappers and ransom collectors or negotiators.
This could discourage others as well as show that the Nigerian state is in charge of securing the life and properties of citizens, young and old
What needs to be done in addressing this challenge?
From a critical stand point, ransom payment to kidnappers can only be understood from the dialectics of discovering the truth of ideas that gave impetus to kidnappers in a way they see the money they received as self entitlement. Another is that our fight against kidnapping and ransom payment must commence from a logical point to unravel the linkage between poverty and crime on one hand, and failure to cater for citizens’ welfare through equitable distribution of state resources to all.
To mitigate the challenge at hand, it is important to understand national security as “measurable state of the capability of a nation to overcome the multi-dimensional threats to the apparent well-being of its people and its survival as a nation-state at any given time, by balancing all instruments of state policy through governance, that can be indexed by computation, empirically or otherwise, and is extendable to global security by variables external to it”.
We believe that paying ransom to kidnappers is to further deepen problems around our national security. Therefore, all hands must be on deck to address this ugly scenario as that will be the panacea for development in the country, ensuring the assertion that as development increases, conflict decreases. When this happens, the peace space expands, while the violence space contracts.
Nevertheless, it has been observed that crime and criminality are likely to exist and thrive in societies where leaders are not doing enough to alleviate the plight of the people. This is the time to act against the character of post-colonial state in Africa evident in Nigeria’s unnecessary resource looting and wastages that ordinarily should be used to provide critical infrastructure for the citizenry.
Adefolarin A. Olamilekan, political economist, writes via adefolarin77@gmail.com
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