Amalgamation Day in Lagos, 1914

Amalgamation Day in Lagos, 1914

05 August, 2009

Without preparation and information we cannot be safe

The State Security Service claims it informed the Borno State government of the Boko Haram threat well in advance of the outbreak of violence. Addressing the House of Representatives, the SSS Director-General blamed politicians and "action agencies" for failing to act:

“Nobody was taken by surprise; it was something that was adequately covered; that was adequately reported, but to have the will to take action on this, people felt reluctant and, of course, a lot of sentiments,” he said.

In the best of circumstances, it is difficult to tell when someone is lying. In Nigeria, there are no institutional structures to test and/or verify public statements and pronouncements.

I don't know if the State Security Service is telling the truth. The only thing we can know for sure are the visible outcomes of whatever it was that they did or did not do. We know of the extra-judicial killings because people took pictures and video and posted same to the internet.

Sometimes people in power are intentionally or unintentionally honest. We learned much about the true nature of Nigerian politics from men like the late Wada Nas, the late Lamidi Adedibu, Chris and Andy Uba, Arthur Nzeribe, and many others. What they do and did, deliberately and unintentionally, revealed to us the true method by which Nigeria is governed.

If the State Security Service had been monitoring this group, they would have had extensive records from their surveillance. Pictures and video of members, finger prints and DNA from objects "stolen" from there bases. They would have identified the sources of arms, and been in a position to interdict same.

The whole thing perhaps could have been less randomly violent, more judicial. There could have been live men in prisons awaiting trial, and not rows of bodies of men who may or may not have committed a capital crime or any crime at all.

During the ECOMOG wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, our soldiers faced enemies that did not wear uniform. They could not even assume that children were non-combatants.

In Maiduguri, hundreds of devout, bearded Muslims rushed to completely shave off their beards.

The mass shaving began after it became clear that bearded men, irrespective of their ideologies, affiliations, occupations or ages, were not safe at the heat of the crisis.

A Daily Trust reporter was briefly detained at the height of the action:

The police told our reporter who was arrested in the heat of the crisis to shave his beards too, saying, “If you don’t shave, we cannot guarantee your safety”.

The SSS says it provided the relevant governmental agencies and federal and state administrations with information sufficient to forestall the violence. The reality on the ground seems to suggest the army and police had very little in the way of information to guide what it was they were doing.

The one part of the SSS statement I believe where they suggest the politicians were reluctant to intervene to forestall violence.

Our political leaders are not pro-active in seeking peace, stability and security for the citizenry. When confronted by extremist groups, some of them try to use these groups for their own benefit -- to directly prop up their power, indirectly promote the mutual fear that keeps us citizens divided against each other, or to point to as a threat that might get out of control if they do not get their way in the negotiations for slices of the national cake. Other politicians talk and act in a way that makes you suspect they secretly admire militia groups and vigilantes.

The Armed Forces and the Nigerian Police Force are left to respond, when it is too late, to various outbreaks of communal, cult or gangster-related violence. And they are not given the equipment, the training or the information necessary. In recent fighting in the Niger-Delta, communities like Oporoza, Kunukunuma, Okerenkoko and Kurutie were reportedly destroyed with obvious results for the civilian population.

We are too quick to use our uniformed services as a blunt instrument to smash and flatten anything and everything.

The Nigerian Armed Forces and the Nigerian Police Force have vitally important jobs to do on behalf of we the citizens. During the colonial era, one could understand if the British did not want to give them the best of training, weaponry, strategic planning and indoctrination, because the last thing they wanted was a strong and effective army comprised almost entirely of Nigerians, with only a smattering of British officers at the top. If such an army had turned against the colonialists, "Nigeria" would have regained its self-government a lot sooner than 1960.

What I don't understand is why post-Independence Nigeria has failed to build the Armed Force, Police Force, and State Security agencies that we so desperately need in a frequently violent world. We have not given them the tools they need, we have not given them the strategic framework they needs, and we have certainly not given them the DOCTRINE they must have if they are to be our protectors rather than a group of armed men that we are all afraid of.

People are blaming Yar'Adua, but this is unfair. It has been nearly 50 years since we retook our country from the British, and across several administrations in that time, there has been no effort to reform, restructure and transform these vital federal republic's institutions. Yar'Adua inherited these problems from all of his predecessors. Granted he does not appear willing or able to fix the situation, but his predecessors were no better at it, and I doubt his successors will do any better.

We have lost billions of dollars to "bunkering" in the Niger-Delta. How is this possible? They keep telling us about the maze of creeks and waterways, and the many vulnerable kilometres of pipelines, and the "militants" abilities to attack barges on the high seas.

But what has that got to do with stopping bunkering?

In order to get the crude onto world markets, the bunkerers must take the stolen oil to oil tankers out in the ocean. Unlike Somali pirates who can go anywhere at any time, the oil tankers must come to Nigerian territorial waters to get their illegal crude supply. Our coast is not overly huge, nor are our territorial waters particularly vast. Oil tankers are slow, lumbering vessels, and there cannot possibly be that many of them involved in picking up bunkered oil as there amount being bunkered, while considerable, would not exactly fill a fleet of super-tankers.

Is it really so hard for the Air Force to pick them out from the sky? I don't mean attack them; OECD countries don't mind when their citizens steal other people's offshore fish, steal their crude oil, or deliver weapons to rebels, but will get quite angry if you attack there citizens extra-judicially. But at least we could identify them, sue them, name and shame them, or do something else to force them to stop coming to Nigeria to collect crude. If all else fails, the Air Force can spot them while NNS Aradu or some other vessels is stationed in the territorial waters to give chase once the Air Force gives the word.

If we do not have the equipment to do this, we can always pay the countries with spy satellites to give us constantly updated satellite imagery of our territorial waters, allowing us to spot which oil tanker shows up in our waters and just sits around without making for Bonny or Port Harcourt.

It is not like we have not done similar before.

In 2003 we captured and detained the MT African Pride, a Greek-owned ship with a Russian crew, some 31 miles off the Nigerian coast as it awaited delivery of bunkered crude. Sadly, two Nigerian Navy admirals were convicted, along with junior officers, of assisting the MT African Pride's escape from detention. Navy officers actually "escorted" the criminal vessel out of the harbour, and into the high seas, where it transferred its cargo of 30,000 barrels of crude to another ship, and then continued to the safety of its home port, wherever that is (likely in Europe).

As near as I can tell, the authorities in that home port did not re-arrest the ship and force it back to Nigeria. Come to think of it, I have not seen any evidence that our government requested such an arrest. And the sentences handed out to the Navy officers and to the Russian sailors were ridiculously light, in view of the billions of dollars in lost revenue we suffer from bunkering -- with consequent effects on everything from infrastructure to healthcare, not to mention fuelling the insurgency (and attendant counter-insurgency) in the Niger-Delta which has claimed hundreds of lives. I am afraid the only reason anyone was court martialed, much less convicted for the escape of the MT African Pride, was the fact that the escape was so public it was basically an international embarrassment, that made us look like amateurs.

In a later incident, we came close to capturing a bunkering barge laden with tonnes of crude, but someone in the government or the military high command tipped off the bunkerers and again they escaped. If you read the barge article, note the description in the final paragraph of a separate incident in which Fillipino sailors were arrested for bunkering, sentenced to five years, but were released almost immediately on payment of a fine. A fine? Their punishment was a fine? That could have been easily paid by senior figures in the bunkering trade?

And by the way, did we interrogate any of these sailors? Get them to point the finger at figures higher up on the ladder?

What sort of self-defeating behaviour is this?

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