Forgotten Dairies
Banditry in Nigeria – A Brief History of A Long War -By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
“Bandits” have emerged as the new bogeyman for insecurity in Nigeria, joining a long (and still growing list) that includes Boko Haram, cultists, herdsmen, kidnappers and militants. In different parts of the North-West, from Birnin-Gwari in Kaduna to Tsafe in Zamfara, bandits are offered as the trope for an intolerable carnage, and the inexplicable haplessness of a federal government that doesn’t appear to care for much else in an election season. As this lamentable state metastasises, it may be worthwhile to reflect on banditry in Nigeria.
In different parts of Nigeria, banditry is used to describe different variants of outlawry. In reality, the usage conflates two underlying problems – ineffective law enforcement in Southern Nigeria, and the crisis of ungoverned spaces in Northern Nigeria. Since Independence, successive governments have had to confront variants of these trends. The evidence over time suggests a link between governance, its failures, and banditry.
In This Present Darkness, his history of organised crime in Nigeria, Stephen Ellis traces post-independence banditry in Nigeria to “shortly before the civil war, when
In Southern Nigeria, which comprises a mere 29 per cent of Nigeria’s nearly 924,000 km² of landmass, urban banditry ensued. Unsurprisingly, armed robbery in built-up areas of the country was an early manifestation. An early exponent of this was Ishola Oyenusi, a high-school dropout who chose to be called “the Doctor” and terrorised Lagos at the end of the Civil War. In response, the military government introduced mandatory death by firing squad for convicted armed robbers. The first set of public executions took place in front of Bar Beach, in Victoria Island, Lagos on April 26, 1971. Less than four-and-a-half months later, on September 8, 1971, Oyenusi was executed at the same location.
Urban banditry was not confined to southern Nigeria. In April 1970, three armed men robbed a bank in Kano of £27,750.
The pace of public executions quickly escalated. By 1976, over 400 armed
robbers had been publicly executed by firing squad. In 1984 alone,
under the regime of Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, there were at least
338 such executions. In the 12 years between 1984 and 1996, over 1,200
of such executions took place. Around the same time, drug trafficking
emerged as a major factor in outlawry in Nigeria.
It appeared that each succeeding decade saw an intensification of urban
outlawry in different parts of Southern Nigeria. In the 1980s, the
poster-boy was Lawrence Anini, another school drop-out who concatenated
indiscriminate violence with a touch of the Robin Hood marinated in
advocacy for the downtrodden. Anini’s reign of terror in the then Bendel
and surrounding States was facilitated by the complicity of some senior
police personnel who helped to provide his gang with intelligence and
made evidence against them disappear. When two members of his gang were
convicted in mid-1986 following effective police work, Anini turned his
guns on the police in an intense rampage of mass killing, during which
10 police officers died between August and October 1986 in Bendel State.
That would prove to be his undoing. Military president, Ibrahim
Babangida, turned up the heat on then inspector-general of Police, Etim
Inyang, famously asking him during a meeting of the then ruling military
council in October 1986: “Where is Anini?” Two months later, in
December 1986, the police arrested Anini and dismantled his gang, which
included Monday Osunbor, a Police superintendent. In March 1987, they
were executed.
In the 1990s, Shina Rambo terrorised parts of South-West Nigeria with similar escapades. In South-East Nigeria, the Otokoto case in Owerri, Imo State, in 1996, revealed a netherworld of ritualised human sacrifice. By the 2000s, commercial kidnapping, political violence and assassinations would emerge as dominant forms of outlawry. The best-known exponents included a man known as Osisikankwu (Obioma Nwankwo) in Abia State and resource militants in the Niger Delta. In Abia State and parts of South-East Nigeria, government broke down and security was taken over by a bandit, vigilante horde, known as Bakassi Boys.
Three additional factors collaborated in launching this new phase.
First, public universities became fertile breeding grounds for outlaws. The story of how this came about lies in the history of competition between university-based confraternities. The Pyrates Confraternity, the oldest of these confraternities in Nigeria was forced to leave the universities about 1986. The Supreme Eiye Confraternity (National Association of Airlords) emerged in Lagos around 1965 as rival to the Pyrates. In Ibadan, the National Association of Sealords, better known as the Buccaneers, followed in 1972. University of Calabar produced the Klansmen Confraternity and in University of Port Harcourt, the Vikings emerged. The growth of these groups coincided with the emergence of articulate civic activism in the universities led by the National Union of Nigerian Students (NUNS), later known as the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS). Military rulers co-opted these cults to disrupt official student activism. Competing groups in the politics of university administration also found them useful. In the Niger Delta, Stephen Ellis recalls that they “became a factor in the region’s politics.”
Second, Babangida’s transition to civil rule programme created a mutual support network between politicians, robbers and cults. By 2008, Mujahid Asari Dokubo, asked how the armed youth who traded in violence acquired their weapons, answered the Rivers State Truth and Reconciliation Commission presided over by former Supreme Court Justice, Kayode Eso, that “the guns were purchased with money disbursed by politicians.”
Third, mismanagement of the exploitation of natural resources in both
the North and the South energised the transition from urban to rural
banditry. Mismanagement of the economy did the rest. Southern Kaduna,
for instance, had always been rich in gemstones, including diamond,
sapphire, quartz, ruby, temaline, and aquamarine. In the early-to-mid
1980s, this set off a mad rush of artisanal gemstone rustlers who would
invade communities in Jema’a. The rustlers came from as far as Mali,
Senegal and Sudan in search of shiny gemstones that the locals called
“devil stones”. In 1986, Newswatch magazine’s Aniete Usen
reported “cases of eliminating by kidnapping, sudden disappearance of
dealers and diggers and a whole range of other blood-chilling tales. The
barons, agents and diggers became fanatically…. fully armed with
automatic weapons.” The weapons they brought into Southern Kaduna would
feature prominently in the first Kafanchan crisis in 1987. Their methods
have been evident in the descent from artisanal mining to organised
banditry in Birnin-Gwari and Zamfara three decades later.
In the Niger Delta, the military government of General Abacha introduced guns to quell civic advocacy for resource justice. In 1994, they deployed the Joint (Military) Task Force. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the guns are everywhere and the JTF is mired in an interminable mission.
In a little-noticed release on December 21, Nigeria’s defence minister, Mansur Dan-Ali, a retired one-star General, himself also from Zamfara State, complained that: “the issue of (sic) drug abuse, unemployment and governance amongst others contributes to the deplorable security situation in Zamfara State.” The best the current administration has done is the launch in December 2018 of a Presidential Advisory Committee on the Elimination of Drug Abuse. Chaired by retired Brigadier Buba Marwa, its membership also includes the wives of both the president and the vice president. This looks more like a token than a policy response.
Quite clearly, successive regimes in Nigeria have, in different ways, made efforts, mostly futile or counter-productive, to address the different kinds of banditry that they confronted. The difference this time it seems, is the government of the day appears not to be much bothered by the rising human toll of the descent into an ungoverned country, nor does it care to tell the country why it can’t afford to be bothered.
Chidi Anselm Odinkalu is co-convener of #NigeriaMourns.