Conservative Northwest Vs Ravaging Banditry: Symptom Or Epidemic? -By Abdu Abdullahi

Some crude ruffians emerged abruptly in the Northwest of Nigeria and enthroned the rule of terrorism under the republic of violence. Labeled as bandits, they are devoted to only brutish and indiscriminate killings of human beings, perpetrating looting, raping and arson with great passion. By reflective analysis, they are ultra genious in wanton destructions with immunity and are law unto themselves, beasts of the generation!

The mainstream of the wrectched of the Northwest are mainly the casualties of these henious and senseless killings. Their troubled world is controlled by excessive and persistent fears of incessant attacks by the bandits as if they were state enemies. Having degraded their living to the theatre of game of death, their costly blood has become cheaper than water which cannot circumvent the horrors of the evil men. The merciless assassins have murdered the peace of the downtrodden and installed sorrow, tears and despair unabated. Indeed, the Northwest region is a colossal casualty of self- inflicted wounds and is resettling the humongous debts of unconstricted subservience to Northwest conservatism!

The banditry empire has already achieved a proportional growth and fixed our zone on a dangerous path. These deadly elements are showcasing that they are mandated to actualize devilish vision, terrorrizing an ample space of the Northwest, defiantly expanding the frontier of insecurities to our boisterous agony. While the bandits are counting their superlative gains for unfoiled and brutal operations, we are still enumerating our tremendous losses interms of lives and properties, human and regional decay as well.

Alarmingly, banditry is now a mega terrorrism industry recruiting and breeding more terrorists to hike the general level of mass destructions and dislocations of law and order in the Northwest of Nigeria. Inspite of the unfolded strategies of killing scores of bandits by our gallant soldiers as the only panacea to the conundrum, yet it is obvious that the expected light to be sighted at the end of the tunnel is still a big mirage. What is the way out then?

The Northwest of Nigeria, largely populated by the Hausa Fulani, is conspiciously trapped between the devil and deep blue sea. It is on the brink of a precipice because it lacks the political will to decipher and acknowledge its deeply-rooted social diseases spreading destructions, but is pre- occupied with fruitless battling with symptoms as the only remedy to our socioeconomic turmoil. Consequently, we are timid or hypocritical of interrogating ourselves some thought provocking questions which are inevitable for salvation.

For instance, how did we find ourselves into this embarrassing mess today? How bad are we doing and how well are the other geopolitical zones developing? What are the originators of our lingering predicament? How are we going to uplift ourselves from the zone of self- destructions to self- actualisation? In relation to conservatism, why are we allowing subversive tendencies to shape our social living? What will be the future of the Northwest if this notorious cankerworm persists? These questions should be hitting and knocking hard on our minds and stimulate us to wake up from our protracted slumber in order to rescue us from further drifting by departing from the danger zone of conservatism.

Undoubtedly, this unbridled criminality( banditry) is a product of our regional failure as well as the collapse of our jingoism. In the Northwest, there is scarcity of foresight on where we want to be and how to reach there because we have imbibed the culture of ‘ misplaced fight’. Our belief is predominantly focused on doing the right thing instead of doing things right. While the former is negative and conservative in reality, the latter is positive and progressive. Thus, our socioeconomic infection is not given the treatment it deserves just as a doctor refuses to diagnose a disease and allows the patient to die. I therefore candidly view banditry as a symptom of a contamination called conservative society. The more we deliberately discard this fact, the end of banditry will be a long and turbulent journey.

To foster a reliable linkage between this argument and our collective tragedy, recall that a conservative society strives by reproducing and conserving the conditions of its own survival. Essentially therefore, the Northwest is not ready to usher in a paradigm shift to eliminate its destructive socioeconomic and political structures. Michael Oakeshott argues that to be conservative is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, prefer the tried to the untried, the limited to the unbounded. Are we guilty of boycotting new discoveries for a new Northwest or not?

It pains me to mention that a ruinious condition for our survival is sustaining two extreme socioeconomic classes for our retrogression and for which we are committed to safeguarding against all odds. As a people, we are proud to preserve the extreme class of the rich and the extreme class of the poor. This gives rise to class antagonism, class distinctions and the rest. Whatever the factors for this orthodox arrangement are, it is not a socioeconomic setting that strives in all the other geopolitical zones of Nigeria.

Of course, the Turji Bellos, Adamu Alieros and the other bloody terrorists are just a symptom of a social infection. That is why they are acting the script of human catastrophes in the Northwest and we are not analysing their devilish activities beyond the surface level. These unrepentant villains are products of our ailing system of a class society among others. To buttrest this point, some interviewed bandits confessed to having been neglected in terms of enjoying social amenities and left without acquiring Western education. Nevertheless, that could not be a genuine reason for gruesome killings.

If our governments have made judicious utilization of scarce resources for overall inclusiveness, heartless bandits such as the Turji Bellos, Adamu Alieros and their evil henchmen would have been trained as medical doctors saving lives instead of killing innocent and vulnerable people. Some would have been couched as engineers constructing infrastructures instead of destroying them. Related to this is the fact that the governments of the Northwest have continued to abandon agriculture as the mainstay of the economy in which there is no wealth creation to reduce the level of poverty among the people despite our vast and fertile land. It is also lamentable that we do not have a single University of Agriculture which can be effective in revolutionising farming activities.

To conserve and sustain the conservative order for our underdevelopment, we are more interested in building powerful individuals rather than constructing a strong and virile region in which the average and ordinary people will pass through a dignified living. With this negative trend, our powerful persons are not interested in living for the less priviledged in our midst but they concentrate their vast resources to build a new world that is completely different from theirs. This uncharitable character is a training ground for the evolution of envious and broken men and the end result is what we have today.

The bandits of our generation are too unrefined that they enjoy killings of the innocent like chickens! This notwithstanding, they are not pure evils but the negative of positive evil. It is therefore condemnable that our conservative structure is the positive evil, the father of banditry. Bandits can be killed on a mass scale but no amount of armoured tanks can eliminate banditry if this conventional setting remains unchanged.

Thus, we must go back to the drawing board to launch heavy assaults against the disease and not the symptom. The Almighty Allah categorically states that He does not change the condition of a people until they change their condition themselves.