The latest attacks in Jos, which claimed scores of lives, were just another of the bloody protracted conflicts that have defied solution in Plateau State.

With about 54 ethnic groups, the state comprises Christian groups – among them, Afizere, Anaguta, Berom, Irigwe, Ngas, Tarok and Ywom — on one hand, and on the other hand, Muslim Hausa/Fulani, whom the former commonly regard as “settlers” and “usurpers.” Stoked by political standing and religious sentiments, clashes between these heterogeneous groups often had to do with mutual animosity, manipulation of information and struggles for self-determination, control over land resources and chieftaincy affairs.

As the arid lands across northern Nigeria, as is in most parts of northern Africa, continue to creep outwards, coupled with the shrinking of the Lake Chad basin, the abundance of fertile green land keeps diminishing, pushing Fulani pastoralists down south for forage and into clashes with farmers over grazing rights.

So these criminal attacks are a battle for survival and exacerbated by poverty and unequal access to social benefits. But there are also non-discriminatory attacks, which have to do with pure criminalities, including kidnapping and banditry. In this interview, first aired on Channels Television Newsnight in May 2022, a former Commander, Operation Safe Haven, a military outfit set up to tackle the conflict in Plateau, and parts of Kaduna and Bauchi states, Major General Augustine Agundu (retired), gives an insight into the complexity of the issues among other things. Excerpts:

What is your assessment of the nation’s security metrics? Has there been any improvement?

Indeed, the security challenges we have in the country are not different from what other developing nations have. It is a building block. We all appreciate the fact that the security situation has improved so much, compared to two, five or even 10 years ago.

The point is an understanding of the operating environment and knowing how to place your resources, both human and material, to achieve set goals. We have challenges but there is no challenge that is not surmountable. I believe sincerely that there is an improvement. Again, the perception of individuals on what security is matters a lot.

Some are there to promote the fact that we have a series of challenges. Yes, we have challenges but some of them are human-made, caused internally by ourselves. So, you cannot divulge a growing economy from elements of insecurity but our job as practitioners is to solve them.

Some of the people, particularly those of us who have not served in the military, are sometimes amazed at the dimensions insecurity in Nigeria has taken, Boko Haram in the North East; banditry, cattle rustling in the North-West; kidnapping, ethnic and religious crises in other parts of the country, etc. Are those mutations coming as a result of our previous inappropriate deployment or as a result of attempting to kill a fly with a sledgehammer?

We tend to undermine the context of nation-building.

We should not ‘microwave’ people. We all want a quick fix. Nation-building takes time. It might be slow but there is a steady movement. There must always be motion towards perfection. Many nations have not had the type of challenges we are having in this country and for us to solve them, we need a collective effort. All of us have a stake in it. The bandits we are talking about are someone’s children or parents, they belong somewhere. They are not from the sky. We must have the dexterity to face the realities of today by saying “this is not acceptable”. Are we overwhelmed? I think that has been over-flogged for too long, but the point is that where was the military at the beginning of all these? We were the bride of the world.

In every peacekeeping mission, Nigeria participated very actively and professionally too. But today, it is the devil that we are living with; it is better managed than it was at inception because, now, all of us are on board and that is why an aspect of the National Security Service talks about a two-side approach. All hands must be on deck. It concerns both the nose and the eye. An aspect of national security study also talks about the society approach. So, it is surmountable if we want. If we come to the same table, and agree that we are going to put aside our differences to resolve this issue, once and for all, things would get better.

You have acquired a great deal of relevant experience in the course of performing your duties in and outside the country. Do you think that that capacity has achieved critical marks?

One thing we must do and which I always urge every military officer to appreciate is the fact that the nation has given us a platform to operate. She has also given us all the capacity to build us up. I could have been in a ministry or anywhere else, but the military prepared me and I was privileged to have had some of the appointments that exposed me to some of the ingredients that shaped me.

I often tell the younger generations that a military officer, especially those who have attained the rank of general, that “you must have substance and style, you have to learn as you grow, you have to play all scenarios in your head; if you find yourself under this situation, what are you going to do? And, if you get into an operating environment, a good understanding of that environment is the starting point, because you cannot apply the same antidote everywhere. You can’t apply the measure being applied in the North-East or here in Plateau State somewhere else, it won’t work.

You must find out certain things about the people you are operating under their circumstances.” I have seen (many) conflict areas. All over the world, I have seen how things are resolved, even when they seem insurmountable. Coming back home, the nationalistic instinct must be there; that I am here to work.

Now, what is often missing if you misapply your priorities? We do have what we call mission command in military terminology. You must have done your stress assessment to the capacity you have, and how to apply the limited resources at your disposal to achieve the desired result. This is very paramount.

During my assignment in Plateau State, I discovered that there is a total disconnect between the rural area and the urban. My focus then was on the rural area. I understood the people in the rural area and then brought their concerns to urban.

I was able to tell people, “no, what you are saying is false, this is what the rural dwellers said are their concerns”. Based on this, we were able to make the right decisions. Like I said, you cannot apply the concept of operation we used in Plateau anywhere else. It won’t work. Of course, we have kinetic and non-kinetic approaches to solving issues. Now, which one do you carry out? At a point, I realized that I achieved more by applying non-kinetic.

In the first instance, I usually remind my officers that the Plateau people were citizens with some perceptions that have burnt in their hearts over time, so they sometimes see us as their enemy, so we must be ready to take that insult in the course of our operations. We don’t have to be too hard on them. With this, we pumped a lot of non-kinetic efforts and saw something different. With that, I won the people to my side and, eventually, got an appreciable level of stability we were able to achieve.

We are often told that without intelligence, even the best weapons are useless. As an expert in intelligence gathering, how do you explain the place of intelligence in the distribution of resources and personnel?

Operations are intelligence-driven. But, let’s reduce the grammatical concept of intelligence gathering by simply calling it information which is the international norm now. We call it gathering information. In this, what people are looking for is trust. “I have this piece of information; if I reveal it, will you be able to use it without endangering me?” That’s what they (informants) want to be sure of. Like we experienced in Plateau and other areas where we had Operation Safe Haven under my command, there were people readily available to provide information on where things were going wrong and you knew what measures to adopt.

Sometimes, you might have to leave certain situations as they are and deal with others so that people would learn from it. Your brain must be able to work 24 hours. I had sleepless hours. (But) at a point around 12 December 2018 when we were having a certain level of stability, I got worried, wondering if it was calm before the storm. I called my team and asked them why the area was so calm and they said they didn’t know the magic. I asked for a proper check and, at the end of the day, it was my style of command that facilitated the progress. We discovered that there was a greater acceptability of our style of command.

Plateau, a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state was very peaceful before this problem started. It was later discovered that criminality and ethnic divide were the two major problems there. Did you in the course of your two years operation there find out…

There was…you can amplify the criminality and, of course, the ethnic divide, because everybody held tenaciously to his position. It doesn’t work like that. You feel that you are superior to the other person. You have to understand that, first of all, we are human before belonging to any ethnicity. And you are a Nigerian before you talk about being Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, etc. If you have that at the back of your mind, you will always assert things that help us in driving our processes and procedures.

In some cases, there are elements of hatred and animosity. Plateau as we know is a mini Nigeria, it has 54 ethnic nationalities. So, whatever leadership position you are, you must be able to harness these 54 groups and carry them along. That’s what makes you a leader. And, with due respect to His Excellency, the governor of Plateau State, this is exactly what he has been propagating because he has to carry that embodiment.

Leadership is trust. The ability of your followers to follow you, knowing that you are going to take them to the other side of Jordan, that’s what leadership is all about. But if you decide to be myopic, you will get it wrong because you are dealing with other ethnic nationalities.

What was your experience like when you arrived and had to restore peace in these many groups?

Before the assignment, I was Director, Campaign Planning at the Defense Headquarters. I have very good knowledge of the operating areas across the country because we made briefs and analyses and submitted to the Chief of Defense Staff for executive decision. So, I know the terrain very well. But, coming in as a commander, you are now on the hot seat. So, you now have to understand the operating environment.

That is the first thing for any commander. You have to carry out your threat analysis, including the causes of the conflict and how to reform the mindset of your troops because every commander comes with his style of leadership. Then, it has to be in tune that this is what this man is coming on board with before you go out. What happens is that we have to re-strategize the state, especially for Plateau, into a high-risk area, medium and low-risk area; how do you deploy your force? Remember you have your security and threat analyses, you now know how to distribute your resources.

No army across the globe has all the resources it needs. When we established a buffer within the state capital (Jos), I approached the Commissioner of Police and told him that I was relieving all my troops within the capital city, they were going into the hinterland, where I needed them, “take over your police duty”. I had to dismantle all the roadblocks in the capital city. People woke up one morning and saw that there were no roadblocks.

Was there panic?

They may have panicked but it was a hypothesis I had to put it into the test, and made sure that the police took over security operations in the capital city. The soldiers then moved into the hinterland where there was no access. We needed more motorcycles for our operations.

The Defense (Headquarters) was quick to provide everything I requested as a starting point, so we were able to be visible. We became visible. You have to understand the Plateau setting. The dirty soup is cooked in the capital city but the bitter taste comes out in the rural area. So, I populated the rural area with a lot of our presence. At the time, they said there were Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs. I set up a committee to go to all the villages and most of them (IDPs) came from the 2008 and 2010 crises which preceded this administration.

And I told his Excellency that I was going to close some of the camps. What happened was that people were becoming mischievous, including some Non Governmental Organizations. They would collect money from their financiers and when you go to IDP camps, you won’t see anybody there, but once you say there will be distribution of materials, people will run to the camp, collect their share and go back to their respective homes. I said, no problem, I am going to close the camps down. Plateau people are hard-working; they want to eke out a living. I encouraged them and strengthened the place with a lot of military presence. We also strengthened the local police and worked collaboratively with all security agencies in the area, which worked perfectly because there was a good understanding among the security heads.

If I say we are going in a direction, everybody follows. This helped us get to areas that were ordinarily ‘no-go areas’. Again, I was also visibly there to encourage locals to remain there. The state provided the resources for the locals to go back home. And, before you know it, all IDP camps were closed. Today, there is no IDP camp in the state. So, these things are possible if we are committed.

What is peculiar about Jos North and Bassa area in terms of occasional security breaches?

If you work on the psyche of the people, they will follow you. Before the 2019 general elections, I carried out a study on my own of how the 2007 and 2015 general elections were conducted. I realized that most of the uproar started from Jos North. I said ok and got my team together. We went to Jos North and had all the pressure groups and other associations assembled for a meeting.

When we got them, I told them that I came with one message, only; that Plateau people are hard-working people, and they are. You can recall that in those days if your car broke down in Kano, they would say “if you get it to Plateau, it is fixed”.

Those things are still prevalent to date. The best tanker bodies are built in Plateau. I now said, “But this is not you, you cannot be associated with violence all the time. Elections are coming. I need only a word from you, youth leaders, that there will be no violence in these elections”. And one of them, a youth leader, came out and said, “Sir, we are promising you, there will be no violence”. Remember, we did presidential, gubernatorial and supplementary elections and there was no single concern of insecurity. And, that was the basis at which Jos North violence, more or less melted down. There were challenges; I identified some criminal gangs and all that. I rehabilitated 500 of them, on my own. So, the approach that you adopt in handling anything is very important.

Now, going to Bassa…

The conglomerates that make up…some of their differences are as old as humanity. But, you cannot continue to play the ostrich. How many generations do you want to inherit what your forefathers did? Farmers’ attacks and other issues are isolated incidences; you cannot use that to blanket a people. There are infractions under normal circumstances. The issue is that it is the duty of a leader to solve such problems; they must not be allowed to escalate. We nipped things in the bud and always ensured that whatever happened got to the lowest level of leadership and we were always their first port of call. And we moved in to calm tensions. Again is the influence of outside forces. You can’t brand people as if they are not humans.

The Army and Operation Safe Haven had a traumatic period when a fellow general of yours was murdered, leading to temptation on the side of the military. How did you meander through that in such a way that soldiers did not retaliate and, at the same time, those involved were facing the music?

That was a very unfortunate moment in my life as a commander in Jos, it was quite painful and avoidable. It is painful because that was a gentleman par excellence. He retired from active service exactly one month to that incident. I want you to imagine you have served with all the rigors of this work for 35 years, retired meritorious, and wanting to live a civil life, without any apparel of the military, only to be murdered. He was just going to his farm in Bauchi, all alone, because he knew the terrain very well and that befell him. But, the beauty of it is that we got to the bottom of the whole issue, the perpetrators were arrested and they are facing justice. It is one of the bad days I experienced in Plateau State. It’s something I don’t often like referring to. He was a senior colleague who sacrificed a lot for the nation. His death is unacceptable.

Operation Safe Haven operated in Plateau, Southern Kaduna and part of Bauchi State. How was Plateau operation different from that of Southern Kaduna?

Ethnic setting was on one side while on the other side was perception. Generally speaking, we need to grow to a stage in nation-building where we say that the other person is not our enemy. We have to grow to the level that will facilitate the socioeconomic growth of our nation. Southern Kaduna is very rich in agricultural produce. We have not been able to harness the potentials that are there. Some of these things are also perceptions, “you are coming to take over my family’ he is not from my family”. “I am coming to take over your family” and stuff like that. But, can we close our eyes for once and think about how beautiful the world would be without crisis? When you close your eyes, you will be able to understand better. We can’t be beating the drums of war always without getting any results. We know from military history that no war has ever ended with a bullet but at the table. So, why don’t we start from the table before going to the field, if necessary? I am speaking generally. This is where our leaders should be held accountable for their utterances. We should be able to adopt some conciliatory tones in our utterances to help the less informed. But when you fan the ambers of hatred, this is the result that we get.

What about Bauchi?

Bauchi is unique. Those two local government areas, Goro and Tafawa Balewa, were unique. At a point, I wanted to withdraw my men from there because there was no need for them but because society had become so used to them and, for deterrence’s sake, I left them there. But everything is internal and, sometimes, it takes a political dimension to describe what the security situation is going to be. But, there is a better understanding. Every problem has a solution.

But, perhaps, the will to implement…

The will is always there, but I see more, from my point of leadership, attempts to circumvent my effort to achieve certain results because, no matter how much you try, there are people who are there to ensure that you don’t achieve your goal so that it will not be ascribed to you and that’s unfortunate. So, this attitude has to change towards nation-building. We must develop that capacity of patriotism for us to take this nation as a whole to where it is supposed to be.

Some thrive in conflict. They will always generate conflict…

We call them conflict merchants. They are all over the world. We cannot start by mentioning, those who create conflict to sell their arms, but there is something different in the Nigerian people. We are unique people. We don’t know the potentials we possess. We excel anywhere we go. In the military, there are instances where if two slots are allocated to Nigeria for a course until the two Nigerians arrive, that course is not in full blast. We have those experiences.

They know the potentials we have but we do not know and that’s why they like us to be in chaos. So, that’s the issue and this is supposed to be a multi-lateral issue with many people on board, our religious leaders, community leaders and all the groups that make up the society.

We should start directing our psyche towards nation-building. Where we are today as a nation is not where advanced countries were. You must have seen write-ups that if they allow us to get to where they are, we will not need them. These are facts. Those who thrive under chaos, I know they will meet their judgment day, certainly.

Some of the challenges in Sudan where you also served are similar to what we are experiencing in Nigeria. To what extent can one attribute them to a cross-border problem?

We seem to have forgotten that the trans-Saharan trade route of the early 18^th century still exists to date, and is usable. That’s what made the commonality of the people around there, they were almost insignificant. We never bothered. People travel all the way, goods move from Kano to Sudan along that route. When they were dealing in merchandise, people who wanted to go to Mecca on pilgrimage trekked between Kano, Borno and Sudan.

They kept on making their money back and forth until they made the amount they needed before crossing over to Mecca for the holy pilgrimage. The route is still there. Unfortunately, criminality has taken over, with the discovery of other several mineral resources. Maybe it is not booming like it was in those days but they are the same people along that route, all the way from Senegal.

Human beings will always migrate. It is natural for human beings to move from one place to the other, in search of whatever it is, and when he finds what is good, he might try to settle there. In the course of all these, there are inter-marriages and once a community starts growing, elements of conflict and conflicting interest will start to play out. They were resolved amicably in those ancient days. But, today, the education we acquired, is a blessing. When people talk about the capacity to resolve conflict when they know that they are bringing themselves forward for a particular purpose… These are some of the situations that make conflict linger.

The absence of the perception of justice has often been noted as one of the factors fuelling these crises. As a military person and a scholar of conflict resolution, what is your take on the issue of amnesty?

There are a lot of determining factors. Once you are within the executive arm of government, you will be seeing what other people are not seeing. Again, one of the challenges we have in the country is that if you are a professor of history, you will want economic problems solved through that historical line of discipline. There are a lot of things you do to balance to move a nation forward. For instance, I was aide-de-camp, ADC, to the late General Victor Malu. When we were in ECOMOG talking about disarmament and the United Nations, the UN, brought this bogus book of proposals, recommending, among other things, $100 to encourage people to bring out their weapons, because General Malu understood that environment, he calculated and looked at the large amount of money such a method would gulp, and said no, that a typical Liberian eats rice, “give them one bag of rice and one tin of vegetable oil in exchange for arms returned”.

This worked. We know the amount of arms we recovered from rebels. There are principles of minimum initiatives to adopt in doing certain things. This is not rocket science. You have to understand the environment and circumstances and the fact that a lot of things come into play. So…amnesty for those who surrendered, what do we require? That we should continue fighting? Or we should look at those who have genuinely surrendered and can be rehabilitated into society? But, perhaps, the missing link might be that the larger society was not properly prepared to say “This is a policy that we are going to live with”.

And, of course, a combatant who has dropped his arm under international norms and conventions cannot be harmed, even if he is met in combat and he drops his weapon on the floor, you have no right under international conventions to harm him. Let’s not forget that rehabilitation/resettlement is part of bringing human beings back into society.

Or because we want things done in our own perceived judgment, then whatever I am bringing on board you don’t want to hear. That is not the case. Remember that we are primarily humans before becoming whatever we are. So, we must uphold that humanity. Once a combatant in any sphere of our conflict genuinely drops his gun and you have to convince me that they have genuinely repented, I have the right as one in the executive arm of government to rehabilitate you and make you a better person. (Sunday Vanguard)

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