Colonization II; Electric Bugaloo

The Nigerian state needs to reconquer vast swathes of its territory.

After a multitude of fruitless arguments, the Nigerian state has finally forgotten (or tried, at any rate) its military past by amending the constitution to give federating units the right to police themselves. This means that state governors, all 36 of them, can now have their own police command. These police commands will have the right to arms and state governors will be able to exercise executive control over the heads of police departments. On its face, this amendment seems like the silver bullet to end insecurity, as states would be more agile in defending their territory to the best of their abilities. The only problem with this silver bullet is that it does not go far enough.

In 1914, Lord Lugard decided to merge the southern and northern protectorates of the country into the entity we now call Nigeria. While many have regarded this merger as a bad move, the more important question has hardly been interrogated. In that year, the space called Nigeria held 16 million people. This means that much of the country was uninhabited. There were large spans of land that no human had walked in a thousand years, and as such colonial administration had to depend heavily on indirect rule. The country was unbelievably large, with very few (relatively speaking) people, and there was no way the administration based in Lagos could administer everyone directly.

Therefore, the government delegated a lot of responsibilities to traditional rulers who made and unmade laws as they wished in their areas. Since many of the large empires in the country had been destroyed in the early 19th century, a lot of the traditional rulers exerted their authority over very small enclaves. Many of these rulers only interfaced with the colonial government in matters of taxation, as almost everything else was left up to them. One of such matters was policing.

The Sokoto Caliphate, for instance, maintained its own local police force called the Dogarai. These were responsible for maintaining law and order, enforcing local laws and customs, and assisting in tax collection. The Dogarai were answerable to the Emirs and operated based on Islamic law and tradition. However, their actions were also subject to British oversight, particularly if they clashed with colonial interests. But even this rarely happened, as the British were more than happy to let traditional rulers rule as they wanted as long as it didn’t affect the stability and financial viability of the colony. Even in Southern Nigeria, traditional rulers were allowed to maintain their own local police forces that went after criminal elements and bands that threatened the peace. This was a workable arrangement most of the time, and the British, throughout their time as Nigerian overlords (from 1914 forwards), were never forced to crush large-scale rebellions.

By the time 1960 and independence rolled around, many Nigerians had gone to Britain to get their heads filled with books and utopian ideas of how the country should run. These Nigerians were mostly raised in almost urban areas, and had access to the centre of British administrative power. In another age, these Nigerians who wanted power would have had to wrestle it from the traditional rulers themselves, but British administrative control through the conquest of Nigeria in the 19th century made them the new bosses in town. Awolowo, for instance, had no need to stage a coup to wrestle power from the Alaafin; he could simply win elections.

The new Nigerian elite who wrestled power from white men took a shortcut to controlling the country. None of them had to win any battle or kill anyone. They simply inherited what the British had fought for, and called it the independent state of Nigeria. They might not have realized it at the time, but this was mere fiction. They didn’t control the country, just as the British didn’t seriously control the country — they merely controlled an appearance of it. The British, perhaps slyly, handed them the fiction of British Nigeria, and told them Nigeria was now theirs. They were wrong.

When the educated elite inherited that fiction, they inherited it without the self-awareness. They took the administrative apparatus — the laws, the “police force”, the ministries, the borders — and believed it was the country. They mistook the map for the territory. And because they had never had to fight for it, had never had to actually subdue and administer the physical reality of Nigeria the way the British had to in the 19th century conquest, they had no visceral understanding of how tenuous that control actually was.

In any case, even the control over British Nigeria was almost immediately stripped from the hands of the civilian class (as is the case almost everywhere with people who never shed blood for a thing), and Nigeria began an unfortunate journey into military rule. By 1999, even the military class was tired of holding onto the hot potato called Nigeria, and the country was handed back to a military man in civilian garb. True to form, one of his first “big jobs” was indeed a “re-conquest” of parts of Nigeria, beginning with the Odi genocide.

Before this unceremonious handover, something interesting was happening in the real Nigeria that military leaders were too preoccupied with whoring, and killing, and scamming and drinking to notice. The population was growing at an almost exponential rate. From 16 million people in 1914, the country stood at around 120 million people in 1999. The country was now dealing with 100 million more people than it dealt with in 1914 when the British established its tenuous control and created the British Nigeria fiction. And those people had not grown where the state was. They had grown into the spaces the state had never administered — the hinterlands, the corridors, the territories that were empty in 1914 and were now full of Nigerians the Nigerian state had never met. And the Nigerian state called those people Nigerians without ever putting any serious effort into making them so. The history of that era can be explained quite easily, and here is my attempt.

After the country’s first coup, a military leader, Aguiyi-Ironsi, under the influence of cheap Indian hemp, declared Decree 34 which sought to centralize all administrative functions of the country — a boundary that even the British refused to cross. That, and many other fruitless ventures, stopped the Nigerian government from doing the actual work of governing the actual Nigeria, not the fiction that it had invented. In the interim, it found every excuse in the book to strip traditional governance structures of all the powers it could. And since those structures had an address and a leader, this task was quite easy. By the time the country arrived at 1999, it had stripped everyone else of power on paper and transferred legal authority to “states” and “local governments”, which were similar fictions invented by gifted storytellers with law degrees.

This was, ordinarily speaking, a keg — or a hundred million worth of kegs — of gunpowder that the state was sitting on. The thing about kegs of gunpowder is that they sometimes explode.

The wasted military years meant two things. The first is that the Nigerian government never really had to reconcile the nature of Nigeria to the nature of its governments. The second is that there was never any real pressure, in terms of elections and such, for the state to build real capacity. Actual governance, in the terms we speak of, was an afterthought. The country was in essence kidnapped by dictator after dictator who had a functional monopoly of arms and no overarching vision for the country, and were therefore more than incentivized to let the chips fall where they may as long as it didn’t affect their own power. The misadventure of the civil war, and the tragedy of that effort, similarly kept the government in an uneasy peace with the rest of the real nation; you can do whatever you want, as long as you don’t threaten the centre and still name yourselves Nigeria. It was an uneasy truce and perhaps a perverse form of decentralization; one that worked all the same.

Democratic systems of government, however, leave no such hiding place. The governments must deliver the “dividends of democracy” to Nigerians. The only problem is that there was really no Nigeria to speak of. There were large swathes of territory the state controlled or administered in name only, and the federally mandated ban on small arms and the consequent superiority of the military only postponed the evil day.

Unfortunately, the evil day has arrived. The rise of Jihadism in the Middle East, the rise of telecommunication infrastructure that communicated that ideology across national lines, and geopolitical events like the Arab Spring in North Africa lit the kegs of gunpowder, especially in the Northern parts of the country where the kegs were quite dry indeed. The porous borders that the Nigerian state never controlled (because of how ridiculously vast they are) meant that small arms could be trafficked willy-nilly into the nation. Terrible identity management and internal policing infrastructure (that the state never had an incentive to develop outside urban areas — and didn’t even do anyway) meant that baby terrorists, like Mohammed Yusuf and many such others, could go on exile to Saudi Arabia to further their knowledge of the ways of Jihad. And the lack of state control over vast parts of the country meant that such groups could build multiple safe havens where they can pray, train, and teach others military skills to fight the country’s armed forces.

In essence, after twenty-seven years of democracy, the Nigerian state is functionally in the same position the British colonialists were in at the beginning of the 19th century. They have to re-conquer the country, and this time not merely in form, but in spirit and truth.

Colonizing II; Electric Boogaloo

Nigeria has 1,160 designated forest reserves covering approximately 107,527 square kilometres in total — roughly 11% of Nigeria’s total landmass, spread across 362 local government areas. That’s just the designated reserves. The ungoverned savannah corridors, rural hinterlands and border territories that nobody has formally classified as anything push the figure of effectively unadministered land considerably higher.

The Oyo state forest reserve, for instance, is larger than Lagos state. Even if Oyo state hired 20,000 men to police the area, it would not be sufficient, as bandits only need to attack one outpost, which would likely be staffed by less than a dozen men, to gain access to indigenes in the area and commit whatever acts of criminality they prefer against them. There is also the problem of funding, as there is simply no guarantee that states, such as Oyo, have the financial manpower to arm and pay 20,000 men to police the area.

The problem is exponentially worse in the North. Niger is bigger than Belgium and the Netherlands combined. There are many rural communities there who never interface with actual government officials. Some do not even have polling units in their villages, and have to travel hours if they plan on “casting a vote”. They have never had access to government-funded programs, and the only way they interact with the broader Nigerian public is through trade. There are many rural communities like that scattered across the country who feel neglected and abandoned by the country they nominally live in. Even rural communities that are close to state capitals suffer the same problem.

When 200 people were massacred overnight in Yelewata, the president arrived at the state capital but refused to go just 30 kilometres more to visit the village. The official reason (well, according to official gossip anyway) was that the roads were not good enough. The actual reason was probably that state security were not confident that the president’s entourage wouldn’t suffer a devastating ambush on the way, and the fear is valid! A group of a hundred bikes with two hundred armed men — which are numbers obtainable amongst bandits in the area — would easily overrun any presidential entourage in unfamiliar terrain.

In the North (Northwest and Northeast), there are four well funded terrorist groups with thousands of fighters in their ranks. ISWAP probably has thousands of dedicated fighters, Lakurawa boasts of a number of fighters in the low thousands, JAS isn’t left behind and there is also Ansaru. Each of these groups exist in settlements that span thousands of square kilometers and control hundreds of villages — areas that the Nigerian military cannot even pretend to control.

ISWAP, for the past few years, has had a “Burn the camps” campaign where they go on rampage and attack actual army installations with abandon and burn many down. These aren’t mere cowardly “ambush” attacks where a ragtag militia attacks isolated army units when they least expect; they are full force attacks on military installations that have recorded unbelievable successes. Can you imagine the logistics and planning that goes into such coordinated attacks? The feeding? The fueling? The weapons supply? The area around Lake Chad is basically a death trap for members of the Nigerian military, and it isn’t uncommon for Jihadist groups to launch offensives with hundreds of members on hundreds of motorcycles carrying weapons that even the army doesn’t possess.

One may wonder how these terrorists can operate so easily in these areas, but that wonder only comes from ignorance of how large these areas are, and how difficult it is to police them. Nigeria’s lack of a modern air-force means that the country has limited control over vast swathes of the country and is basically incapable of providing any sort of cover or control. Many Nigerians are still under the delusion that these are guerilla fighters who have makeshift camps in the thick of the forest and no central authority, but that is wrong. There are perhaps tens of large permanent settlements, and many of these groups, especially ISWAP, release videos and pictures during Islamic celebrations showing that they have permanent sites that are well fortified in their own right.

This space of practically ungoverned territory has now become technical no-go areas for the security apparatus of the country. According to this paper, the Gwari Hills alone is home to thousands of armed bandits. Extrapolate that problem to parts of the country, and you start to see how herculean this task truly is. There are certainly tens of thousands of armed killers outside the de facto authority of the Nigerian state. These men rule local communities, extract taxes, and make laws that indigenes have to follow. Such indigenes cannot practically be regarded as Nigerians, as they belong to another informal sovereign authority. And the Nigerian state knows this too.

The story is the same for terrorists. According to Ahmad Salkida, Shekau’s compound in Ukuba sat only “a loudspeaker’s reach” from the army’s fortified garrison in Bitta in Gwoza LGA — between 7 and 12 kilometres apart. Soldiers could hear Ukuba’s call to prayer drifting over the scrub, and the fighters heard Bitta’s (the town the army’s fortified garrison was in) in return, yet no one crossed because a “wide invisible wall of landmines lay between them”. This situation persisted for at least seven years, and was only terminated when ISWAP invaded the settlement to take out Shekau themselves.

These armed groups, in the last two decades, have also found extraordinary financial success in kidnapping citizens of the country for ransom. According to the country’s own statistics bureau (in a now deleted report that invited an actual investigation into the temerity and audacity of the director general to make such findings public), Nigerians pay trillions in ransom payments yearly. Regular Nigerians aren’t alone in this business, as the Nigerian state also pays these bandits whenever they pull off an embarrassingly large kidnapping heist. Most Nigerians cannot believe this happens, and are quick to drop all of the blame at the feet of the government. Many cannot even comprehend the scale of the problem. And while it is true that the government does deserve some blame, a much stronger truth is that we refuse to come to terms with the actual reality; we are not dealing with mere criminal elements, but with technically foreign invaders from a foreign land we pretend to control.

We are at war.

The Reality of War

According to this paper, banditry, not terrorism, is the bigger problem for the Nigerian state to deal with. Banditry is a lot more difficult to defeat than terrorism for several reasons. The first is that banditry rests almost entirely on a platform of commerce, as criminals are always on the hunt for more loot. That is their primary reason. It also means they are often better funded, more agile, and can purchase better weapons to prosecute their aims. The fact that they are not ideologically rigid also means they find it easier to blend in with the local population without setting off alarm bells. The command structure of bandit gangs are also extremely decentralized, so “cutting off the head”, as they say, does very little to eventually solve the problem. Terrorists, on the other hand, are ideologically driven and place restrictions on what members can do which can slow recruitment efforts. They also find it difficult to blend in with local populations, and command structures are more centralized.

Unsurprisingly, both groups reinforce and feed off themselves in many ways. For example, the bandits terrorize communities, and then push these communities into the arms of terror groups that promise protection. These terrorists then use these communities to launch long raid missions, impose taxes upon them, and recruit heavily from amongst the people. And sometimes the reverse also happens.

The Nigerian state has unfortunately refused to come to terms with this business, carrying on solemnly with the fiction that the state somehow has some divine right over these territories and as such doesn’t need to do the work of actually conquering them. In a recent press release, after the president received news of the death of a Major in bandit camps, he tells bandits that the “window for surrender” is closing (not closed, merely closing). State governments, on the other hand, are proud to boast about their terrorist rehabilitation efforts, as one such fellow boasts here.

The Nigerian people are also lost in similar delusions. For many of the voting public, the answer seems to be as easy as “willpower” or “honesty” or “no corruption”. Many are even under the delusion that it is a “political problem” and the crisis is government funded. In a recent interview, one talkative, another member of the failed political class, said the solution was as easy as “negotiation” and “commitment” and “good leadership”. These positions are just not congruent with the available facts.

While these armed groups are unlikely to ever coalesce enough to stage any sustained attack on the legitimacy of the Nigerian state, it seems they are content to carve out their own areas of sovereignty while leaving Abuja to bask in the lie of the British Nigeria it inherited. This is existential war. There is no better way to say it. And if the state doesn’t wake up to that responsibility, we will not win.

Of course, all of this explains why the federal government and the military are all too happy to accept repentant bandits, and in some cases arm them in paramilitary formations to go after members of groups they used to belong to. They are in a helpless situation, in technically unknown lands, and have to defer to the help of “natives” who chose to help them. They are in a war they do not want to fight. They are not a national force repressing rebellion in a country they know, with citizens who support them. They are a foreign force trying to keep the peace in unfamiliar terrain and with sometimes hostile communities. It isn’t a task the Nigerian army was constituted to prosecute, and we shouldn’t be shocked at their complete inability to accomplish it.

The Scale of War

According to this paper, there are an estimated 30,000 bandits in Northwestern Nigeria alone. Every other month, Nigerian governors announce the surrender of hundreds of “repentant” bandits as well. That allows us guess what the true numbers of these groups could be across the North.

Let us break down these numbers to their lowest to find out just how badly the Nigerian goose is cooked. A thousand fighters, for instance, require millions of naira in food supplies every week. Just one thousand fighters would burn through around 400 liters of fuel per week, and around 10 million naira in spend as well. They would require dozens of cattle slaughtered every week for food. The logistical infrastructure that supports them probably implicates hundreds of “non-fighters” who provide these amenities. More than that, we now know that some of these bandits and terrorists hire locals to farm for them or keep their cattle. These are not small ranches, but likely hundreds of hectares of farmland that require complex logistics to safekeep and run.

At scale, considering even a low estimate of just 80 thousand armed bandits and terrorists in the country, we are looking at almost a quarter of a million people involved intimately in this business. The state isn’t at war with a ragtag group of scared fighters who attack at night, it is at war with a small city with its own army. The Nigerian army, for instance, has less than 150 thousand people in the armed forces, many of them noncombatants. These armed groups, all-told, either have the same number of combatants, or just a little less. They likely have even more non-combatants who provide logistical services and support.

In a recent speech on the platform, the Minister of Defence, Christopher Musa, said that it is difficult to curb banditry because the people support these terrorists. This may come as a shock to regular Nigerians who still believe in the fiction of the Nigerian state, but it shouldn’t be that surprising to anyone who holds my frame of mind. The Nigerian state is just about as foreign to members of these rural communities as the bandits themselves and, more importantly, the bandits are closer and exercise more functional authority than the government ever could. In some communities, they even provide humanitarian relief such as medicine and employment.

If they have functionally replaced the government, why does the Nigerian state believe they have any more right to their loyalty than the bandits or jihadists, as the case may be? In fact, asking these citizens to be more loyal to the Nigerian state, which has proven its inability to protect them or provide any sort of lasting social services, is akin to asking citizens of a foreign country to be loyal to Nigeria. It just doesn’t work, no matter how many times we raise the flag and play the national anthem.

Furthermore, it isn’t like these armed groups are only hostile to the Nigerian state. They can even be hostile to other armed groups they believe have crossed their ethnic line. The successful Jihadi entrepreneur, Sadiku, was sent out of the Gwari hills chiefly because the armed groups in the area believed he wasn’t one of them and resisted his attempts to establish his authority there. Thus, the ethnic identities of some of these groups are well developed enough for them to resist imposition, not just from the Nigerian state, but from other similar foreigners.

States, like the Nigerian federal government, don’t control these areas. The problem of subduing these areas and these gangs does not get any smaller or more governable because states now have the power to buy arms or believe it is under their control. The real work — which is actually going out and putting the territory under firm Nigerian control through military might — has no name but conquest. And conquest is expensive.

Even before we begin colonizing these lands, we must have a strategy. As I see it, we have two choices. The state either commences a mass enrollment of fighters to actually prosecute this war as we ought to, or we acquiesce to the demands of these terrorists and “rule” them indirectly. The first option is a pointed conquest of these areas, like the British did, with all the financial and military investment that it requires, followed by the appointment of — like the British did — “warrant chiefs” who rule on our behalf.

The second is legitimizing these groups and giving them some quasi-independence outside the framework of the Nigerian state — a solution that is tantamount to defeat, but a situation that we are already quickly approaching. Even after decisive victories against these groups, we must understand that these are seven-headed hydras that will only rise up again. Therefore, a permanent solution must also require delegation of policing to even lower levels of government. In essence, we shouldn’t merely be talking state police, but actual community policing, with all the sophistication in weapons that requires. Even a total military defeat will not uproot the stem of this problem, so we must permanently be on guard.

What cannot work is continuing with the fiction that the state somehow has some divine right to rule these areas without asserting that right through fire and blood. Nigeria hasn’t gotten any smaller since 1914, and the features that made the country difficult for the British to administer directly then have only become more pronounced. This is a problem the Nigerian state has run from for 67 years. It is time to stop running.