Please Tinubu, why can’t we all own rifles?, By Ugoji Egbujo

It’s glaring that Tinubu cannot protect citizens, and he shows neither anger nor remorse. He has to allow people to protect themselves. He withdrew policemen from politicians, yet Minister Wike still moves around in a Rolls Royce with a battalion of policemen. Since Tinubu is a pathetic commander-in-chief, he should outsource security to the people. He must allow ordinary Nigerians to protect themselves. It was probably good law to prohibit citizens from keeping rifles all those years. But times have changed radically.

Poor Nigerians. These days, ordinary people are one wrong journey away from a brutal death. General Rabe is now dead. Who knows what his family went through to recover his remains? May his soul rest in peace.

The lessons from Rabe’s killing are for the living. When he served as military spokesman, he did his best to minimise the security crisis and lionise the military. His job was to portray the military and government in the best possible light. But after soothing the populace, perhaps generals should tell their civilian bosses the truth. The current strategy isn’t working.

All the bad people in Nigeria own rifles. Good people are not allowed to have them. The politicians own the police and army, who protect them at home and on the move. The ordinary Nigerian is a hapless prey. Even retired generals cannot keep rifles in a country where every thug has easy access to one. If General Rabe had possessed a rifle, he might have died a more dignified death. Instead, he was taken like a chicken and slaughtered by rag-tag bandits, while the nation wallowed in utter helplessness.

For over sixteen years, since these insurgencies began, our governments have repeated the same unworkable strategies and served us the same fickle hopes, the same fatuous promises, and the same concocted excuses. The same trite platitudes. It is either “Libya” or “global phenomenon.” Otherwise, it is “We are winning” or “We must live with it because all nations now do.” And sometimes, near elections, the blame is heaped on the political opposition.

But it is not Libya. Because Algeria, Egypt and Morocco are closer to Libya. Are they infested with bandits and jihadists? If arms have poured in from Libya, it’s because the Nigerian state is weak and porous. Jonathan’s wife probably believed it was Shettima, Buhari and Tinubu “sharing blood” to damage her husband’s political fortunes. Now Tinubu, Shettima, Akpabio and Okpebholo probably think it is Atiku, El-Rufai and others. This easy recourse to cheap conspiracy theorising and finger-pointing is partly why nobody has produced serious new ideas to tackle this intractable problem.

Tinubu probably thinks state policing will solve the problem. But the state police project, as currently conceived, might not be better than a proliferation of ill-trained civilian JTFs, which already exist. Though it will provide a needed boots surge, the very idea of state police without a reformed federal police will probably be a disaster. The proper process would have been to reform, reorient and re-equip the federal police first.

It’s glaring that Tinubu cannot protect citizens, and he shows neither anger nor remorse. He has to allow people to protect themselves. He withdrew policemen from politicians, yet Minister Wike still moves around in a Rolls Royce with a battalion of policemen. Since Tinubu is a pathetic commander-in-chief, he should outsource security to the people. He must allow ordinary Nigerians to protect themselves. It was probably good law to prohibit citizens from keeping rifles all those years. But times have changed radically. A desperate situation calls for desperate measures. The government now hires mercenaries to fight bandits. It also allows communities to buy peace from bandits who, it now appears, are permitted to keep rifles. The state is feeble. The law cannot continue to handcuff the law-abiding people it was meant to protect. The original mischief the law intended to curb was the proliferation of military-grade weapons. But the horses have bolted.

Nothing illustrates our total hopelessness better than the story told by Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed. Last year, his nephew and three companions were attacked at night. The bandits came to abduct them. One tried to run and was shot dead. The bandits are diabolically ruthless. His nephew and the two others ended up in captivity in the bush. The bandits knew Dr Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, who worked as special adviser to President Tinubu, and seconded to VP Shettima. They also knew Datti Ahmed, Peter Obi’s former running mate. Dr Baba-Ahmed ran to everybody in the Presidency to plead for help. The entire Presidency was involved. Promises were made to the Baba-Ahmed family. Days and weeks rolled by. The bandits, who had demanded a hefty ransom, began to run out of patience. The government dilly-dallied. The family knew it could no longer rely on the government, so they raised the ransom: ₦175 million, brand new motorcycles, and hard drugs.

The captives spent 36 days in the forest. The ransom was delivered in three tranches. At one point, the people handling the delivery missed their way in the bush and met soldiers who showed them the route to the bandits’ camp. The government knew the location of the bandits, yet they got away with the murder, kidnapping and ransom. Tinubu, the commander-in-chief, could not help his own special adviser. Shettima, who had promised to march into the forest, while leading the war against the bandits, did not seize the opportunity to show his courage. If the four men had possessed rifles, the bandits would probably not have approached them.

Tinubu probably thinks state policing will solve the problem. But the state police project, as currently conceived, might not be better than a proliferation of ill-trained civilian JTFs, which already exist. Though it will provide a needed boots surge, the very idea of state police without a reformed federal police will probably be a disaster. The proper process would have been to reform, reorient and re-equip the federal police first. Then, with the federal police as a bearer of ethical standards and a model of professionalism, the state police units would have a supervisory model worthy of duplication. The current federal police has no culture to bequeath to the state police units. If the state police are funded, trained and equipped as wretchedly as the federal police are, they will not be able to fight petty crime, let alone banditry.

Rather than wallow in persecutory delusions and paranoid permutations, Tinubu should adopt a three-pronged strategy.