As I have often argued on this page, the connecting thread for the variants of violence we are witnessing across Nigeria is the loss of what Max Weber described as “the legitimate use of physical force” to criminal cartels. And until we muster the capacity to effectively confront those who trouble the peace of our country, we will continue to be at their mercy. My main concern for today, however, is the policy of appeasement of criminals which otherwise respected stakeholders recommend as a solution to our national security challenge.

Rather than confront criminals, the federal government is being advised to seek ‘dialogue’ – after which we then ‘settle’ them with public money. It started with Boko Haram which was conflated with the ethno-religious politics of the time. We of course can see where that has brought our country. Now the same mistake is being made regarding bandits who target schools for easy prey. The chief promoter of this idea is no other than respected Islamic cleric, Sheik Abubakar Gumi, who has made himself the emissary for Nigerian bandits he romanticizes almost as if they are members of the International Red Cross. I am of course aware that there are those who cite the example of the Niger Delta amnesty deal to rationalize why insurgents, bandits and other criminal cartels holding the country by the jugular should be “taken care of”. Such thinking is not only misplaced, it is also dangerous and very soon, I am going to explain why. But back to Gumi.

In his interview with PUNCH newspaper last weekend, the cleric said the bandits in whose custody the kidnapped pupils of Tegina Islamic School in Niger State have been for several weeks, are insisting on collecting N150 million before releasing their victims. “But we are trying to talk sense to them that these are just innocent schoolchildren. We are just saying these are young children trying to study and they did nothing, so why are you trying to take dirty money from their families?” said Gumi who added: “This (kidnap of Islamic pupils) actually proves to the nation that the bandits are not really indoctrinated, they are just looking for money and I think that this is a good prognosis. They are not targeting a religion; they are not ideologues, which are difficult to deal with. We should not forget that they are not educated, formally or informally. They are just going about with cattle, and suddenly they found a lucrative way of finding money.”

A combination of porous borders, weak signal and technical intelligence, lack of proper data regarding who exactly is a Nigerian and the influx of illicit drugs such as Tramadol have given rise to opportunistic criminals. But the suggestion that anybody can appeal to the conscience of criminals is ludicrous. More offensive is Gumi’s insistence that these killers are harmless. “With good engagement, education and enticements like jobs and other things, they will leave this work. But we need a partner and we need the government to understand. Individuals like me alone cannot do it”, Gumi rhapsodized. “All those we met (have stopped kidnapping), except for one of them who is kidnapping again, and he told us his reason, that he was neglected and he thought we had the mandate to negotiate. But when he realised that we did not have the mandate from anybody, he said he was going back to his business. So, the earlier we go into engaging them, the better. The ones who have agreed to lay down arms, you can engineer them to take care of the rest.”

If every unemployed person decides to take up arms to kidnap, kill, maim or rape innocent citizens, then our country would be in a far worse situation than Somalia. Yet, Gumi sounds ominous in his reading of the situation vis-à-vis the capacity of the Nigerian state. “To secure schools, why not engage the bandits? Engage them; they are not many. You can count them with your fingers. How can you guard schools? It is not possible,” said Gumi who seems to know so much about these bandits, including that they are not more than 100,000—as if that is not big enough. “That is talking about those with weapons; because not all of them have weapons. Ninety per cent of those who have weapons use them to protect themselves against cattle rustlers. They are victims too. Aerial bombardments will only worsen the situation because when you start killing their children, you remember they also have our children.”

Before I conclude, let me refresh Gumi’s memory. In September 2019, Governor Aminu Bello Masari, along with other top government officials, security operatives, traditional rulers and Miyetti Allah, held sessions with representatives of the bandits terrorising Katsina State. He told the head of the criminals, who openly brandished an AK47 assault rifle: “We were advised by the President to talk to you.” A permanent secretary in the office of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Dr Amina Shamaki would later put official imprimatur to this approach of resolving security problem. “The application of the carrot-and-stick approach is an effective strategy that enables criminals willing to embrace peace to do so while repentant ones are identified and isolated for appropriate actions by security agencies,” she said. In case Gumi does not know, all the efforts failed, despite the the resources committed to the idea.

Governor Masari’s lamentation last June, which I recommend to Gumi and the federal government, reveals why a peace deal with bandits can never work. “We entered into various phases of dialogue with the bandits on the prompting of the security agencies. By the time we completed, we reached an agreement on so many solutions. Even if we were not able to meet their demands 100 per cent, we were able to meet up with between 70 and 80 per cent”, the governor confessed. The implication is that these bandits have already been given a lot of money without any attempt to mend their ways. “In the forest, a lion or a tiger kills only when it is hungry and it doesn’t kill all the animals, it only kills the one it can eat at a time. But what we see here is that the bandits come to town, spray bullets, kill indiscriminately for no purpose and no reasons. How can a human being behave the way that an animal cannot even behave? That is why I say that they are worse than the animals in the forest. For me, there are no longer innocent persons in the forests,” said Masari.

These are the people the federal government is being encouraged to ‘engage’, simply because the Nigerian State has become too weak to enforce law and order. The bandits on whose behalf Gumi is negotiating are violent men who have turned women to widows, children to orphans and displaced hundreds of thousands of our people from their communities. Yet, with this idea that they be appeased, we are unwittingly adopting a criminal code in which individuals can terrorize without consequence and be rewarded for visiting their violence on innocent citizens.

All factors considered, asking authorities to negotiate with bandits on grounds that they are jobless, as Gumi is campaigning, can only lead the nation to the abyss of a Hobbesian jungle. Sadly, there are those who will argue that we are already there!

Looting Bank Depositors’ Money

Two years after the 2004 consolidation exercise that saw to the emergence of 25 banks in Nigeria, I approached the then Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Prof Chukwuma Soludo, about publishing a book on the banking industry. The idea included extensive interview sessions with Soludo whose consolidation exercise saved the banking industry from imminent collapse. He agreed to my proposition and an interview eventually held for about four hours in London. Although I can no longer find either the tape or the transcript of that interview, one of the stories Soludo told me was that of the owner of one of the banks that could not meet the N25 billion recapitalization threshold at the time. The man, according to Soludo, would visit the branches of his bank at the close of business every day to ask, ‘How much did you make today?’ in reference to deposits from customers!
I recall that episode (and some of the insights Soludo shared with me) on Monday when a video surfaced on social media of the staff of a bank that had besieged the house of a Senator to entertain themselves in the name of loan recovery. Aside the fact that banking is being debased by recourse to such a primitive way of recovering loans, questions must be asked about how the Senator, and many others like him, are awarded jumbo loans without the requisite collateral to fall back on in cases of default.

Ordinarily, bankers who give out loans are supposed to measure the risks and guard their interests when considering such applications. But as we have seen over the years in Nigeria, the only time these bankers bother about security is when they are dealing with genuine customers without ‘connection’. For those people, they impose stringent conditions. For the fat cats, who they are very much aware would not pay back, they never demand any form of security. In most instances because they share the money.

In July 2019, the federal government established a task force comprised of the EFCC, ICPC, NFIU and the Federal Ministry of Justice to recover N5.7 trillion owed to the Assets Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON). Approximately 20 Nigerians account for as much as 60 percent of that amount. Two years after, there is no word from that presidential committee. I will not be surprised if a majority of that committee members are themselves chronic bank debtors. But there is no way we can tackle this problem unless we restore a measure of sanity to the banks.

As Justice Lateefa Okunnu of the Lagos High Court said last week while sentencing Francis Atuche, a former Managing Director of Bank PHB (now part of Keystone Bank) to six-year imprisonment for defrauding the bank the sum of N25.7 billion, these corporate thieves are dispossessing innocent customers of their money. Also sentenced to four years’ imprisonment was the former CFO of the bank, Ugo Anyanwu. “It was a well-planned, well-executed scheme but the bubble burst when the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) intervened,” said Justice Okunnu who had earlier in the year similarly convicted former Managing Director of Finbank Plc, Okey Nwosu, and three former directors of the bank for stealing the sum of N10.9 billion.

As the Yoruba people would say, “omo buruku l’ojo ti e” (even the bad guy has his day). With the Failed Banks (Recovery of Debts) and Financial Malpractices in Banks Decree 18 of 1994, the late General Sani Abacha focused on this problem and to a large extent, dealt with it in his own way. Where the security pledged for a loan is impossible to locate, or where no security is pledged at all, according to the decree, the tribunal would hold the directors, shareholders, managers and other employees of the failed bank liable for granting the loan that had become irrecoverable. Also liable was “Any director, manager, officer or employee of a bank who knowingly, recklessly, negligently, willfully or otherwise grants, approves the grant, or is otherwise connected with the grant or approval of a loan, advance, guarantee or any other credit facility or financial accommodation to any person without adequate security or collateral.”

I certainly do not suggest a return to the Abacha era, but we cannot continue with the situation in which bank debtors and their corrupt enablers not only shortchange the people but also end up receiving national honours and doctorate degrees from our universities before they end up as ‘his excellency’ or ‘distinguished senators’.

Amina Mohammed @ 60

The Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations (UN), Ms Amina J. Mohammed will be 60 on Sunday, although I am aware of a small event being organised in her honour tomorrow in Abuja. I had the privilege of working with Mohammed between 2007 and 2010 and very much admired her passion for excellence, desire to serve the public good and rare capacity to make even the most difficult assignment appear easy. This was most evident when we served together in a small committee (of about ten officials) who met regularly with the late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua on the Niger Delta Amnesty Programme.

Ms Mohammed believes in the power of endless possibilities and it is evident in her achievements. From coordinating the Task Force on Gender and Education for the United Nations Millennium Project to being Senior Special Assistant to Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Goodluck Jonathan on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to becoming Special Adviser to former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon saddled with the responsibility of crafting the Post-2015 Development Agenda, only perhaps those who never knew her would have been surprised when in January 2017 Mohammed was tapped by Antonio Guterres to become the 5th UN Deputy Secretary General. And she has performed so excellently in the job that she was recently appointed for a second term.

Working within the development space, as Ms Mohammed has done for most of her adult life, can be frustrating. But it can also be rewarding, especially for those who make a significant difference in the lives of the most vulnerable people in the society. This she continues to do. As she marks her 60th birthday, I can only wish her a most wonderful birthday, long life and good health.

•You can follow me on my Twitter handle, @Olusegunverdict and on www.olusegunadeniyi.com

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