Ending the Carnage in the South-east

ENGAGEMENTS BY Chidi  Amuta

The general atmosphere of violence and anarchy threatening to overwhelm the South East portends ill for our national security. A spate of senseless killings, random arson and general insecurity has since become a veritable signature of the region in recent years. The trend has recently intensified. The subsisting regional landscape of social and economic disruptions has found a new strategic target: the 2023 elections.

Misguided separatists, freelance trouble makers and sponsored criminals are all threatening to disrupt the forthcoming elections in the region. For effect, INEC installations, offices and security personnel around them are being targeted. Some INEC offices have been torched, vandalized or bombed. Personnel protecting these installations have either been killed or injured. Incendiary rhetoric of sundry separatists have are threatening that there will be no elections in the region. An already frightened populace is living in uncertainty. While the rest of the country prepares for the general elections in the hope that they may save the nation and lighten the burden of a hard life, the ordinary people of the South East are afraid for their lives. They now live in perpetual fear and uncertainty, not knowing who exactly is the enemy in their midst.

Some think the enemy are the angry youth of IPOB. For the outgoing dispensation of President Buhari, the emergence of IPOB as a separatist movement has defined the face of protest and dissident anger in the South East. An over exaggerated fear of the IPOB threat got the federal government to declare IPOB a terrorist organization as if that categorization alone would produce a fat track solution. What began as a series of protest marches to mark ‘Biafra Day’ has over these few years graduated into a militia movement with village based youth wings and urban based vigilantes. Over time also, a purely militant armed wing  called the Eastern Security Network (ESN) has emerged under the guise of protecting the eastern homeland from marauding armed herdsmen. Encounters between these multiple vigilantes and the herdsmen has not been too friendly.

The imperative of ensuring law and order in the region and halting the separatist agitation has brought active federal security presence to the region. Apparently, the security forces came with a mandate to crush a fearsome terrorist organization. This must have unfortunately framed their rules of engagement.  The federal force of soldiers, policemen, state security operatives have conducted their mission more like an occupation force rather than a stabilizing civil force. Bullets, bayonets and jackboots have rained terror on a hapless citizenry. Innocent people have been arrested and incarcerated for longer than necessary. A few senseless killings have taken place. 

Something strange has emerged. It is the phenomenon of ‘unknown gunmen’. These are professionally trained killers, marksmen armed with military grade weapons who have carried out assassinations, targeted killings and organized attacks on individuals and facilities. Neither the locals nor the occupying federal forces has been able to arrest, identify or account for the activities of these strange force. In the minds of most locals, ‘unknown gunmen’ are merely rogue elements of the occupying federal security forces. No one has confirmed or credibly refuted this theory but the footprints of the unknown gunmen continue to be heard loudly all over the South Eastern homeland.

In search of the face of the enemy in the south east, some analysts have pointed in the direction of an unusual grade of herdsmen of recent origins. They are armed, professionally trained and speak languages that are not so familiar. They of course are found escorting a few heads of cattle but have also been involved in cases of transactional kidnapping, armed robbery, rape and other violent crimes.

In a bid to underline their mostly political focus, IPOB Central has instituted a regime of protest actions aimed at sending a clear message to the federals and state governments in the region that they are contestants for political supremacy in the region. The weekly ‘sit-at-home’ orders of IPOB have kept markets, shops and other businesses throughout the region shut every Tuesday for the past four to five years. Contrary orders by state governors have fallen on deaf ears as IPOB vigilantes, enforcers and operatives have ensured strict compliance with these orders to the embarrassment of helpless state governors.

The disruptive effect of these orders has frequently brought IPOB and other separatist enforcers into direct confrontation with security forces. In these encounters, a few lives have been lost while a line of hostility has been drawn between the occupying federal forces and the growing army of youth vigilantes and enforces.

The arrest, rendition from Kenya, incarceration  and prolonged political and criminal trials of IPOB leader, Mr. Nnamdi Kanu, has sharpened the lines of animosity between IPOB wings and federal  security forces in the region. Different state arms of IPOB and ESN have also assumed peculiar identities and operational modalities of their own. Of course the violence and criminality has similarly assumed differing colorations and levels of intensity in different states and localities depending on local circumstances.

In states like Anambra and Imo, separatist violence has been overtaken by clashes between political rivals whose thugs are equally well armed. Some political overlords have been known to recruit armed gangs and criminals to further their political objectives. In Enugu and Ebonyi states, the violence is an odd mixture of herdsmen versus farmers and the activities of plain criminal cartels of kidnappers and armed robbers.

Within the IPOB and related separatist movement, the latest developments have been spurred by the long incarceration of Mr. Nnamdi Kanu. Ugly nature allows no vacuum. While Mr. Kanu has been trying to control the energies of his movement from detention, his ambitious followers have tended to issue conflicting orders. Ambitious self appointed rascals who find themselves attracting popular attention can only aim higher and become territorial. Thus,   one little known Mr. Simon Ekpa based in Finland who is ostensibly Mr. Kanu’s erstwhile deputy has been issuing conflicting orders to IPOB formations in Nigeria. It ought to be  a matter of interest to Nigeria’s intelligence and security community that the mainstream of IPOB  activity has been controlled and commanded from off shore by elements from the Nigerian diaspora.

We are in an active political season. Therefore, as the inferno in the South East rages, all manner of conspiracy theories have gone to town. A version holds that the ramping up of acts of violence and instability in the South East is a plot against the emergence of a president from the region. The logic here is that, if for any reason the elections in the region are disrupted or marred by violence and low turnout, it will act as a voter suppression measure against the South Eastern candidate.

The other version of the grand conspiracy is that Mr. Nnamdi Kanu’s relative popularity among the common folk of the region is a political capital. He is being reserved for deployment by an incumbent administration that is desperately afraid of the prospect of a president from the South East. Therefore, Mr. Kanu is being held as a hostage of power who could be compelled to negotiate for his freedom at the last minute so that his teeming support base can either reinforce the election boycott campaign in the South East or deprive the existing political order in the region of support at the 2023 election. The latest conspiracy theory is a variant of the above two. It holds that Mr. Kanu’s errant deputy, Mr. Ekpa, is being hired for a handsome fee by a front runner in the presidential race to scuttle Peter Obi’s bid by creating confusion all over the South East. In all of this, the social media is swarming with theories about practically all aspects of Nigeria’s current political landscape.

However, we need to rise above these pub permutations and conspiracies to face the strategic national implications of the insecurity and instability in the South East. As a matter of fact, insecurity and instability in any section of the country is a threat to our national security and overall nation being. In the specific instance of the persisting violence and instability in the South East, the nation has amassed a pile of losses in the last five years or so.

The economy of the South East has suffered and taken its toll on the national GDP slide. The closure of businesses, markets, banks, highways and urban and rural economic centres for one day in each week means roughly a loss of two months in each year for the last five years. Economists have calculated the loss in Naira terms to amount to billions. Given the overall contribution of the region to the entrepreneurial pool and landscape of the nation, the loss from these disruptions has been astronomical. Ironically, this mentality of shut downs and ‘sit- at –homes’ has hurt the very people whom the separatists claim to be fighting for. It is the ordinary people of the South East that have lost man -hours, daily business turnovers, school days and banking hours.

The social cost has equally been incalculable. The annual migrations and ritual of homecoming of the peoples of the South East has over the years been a major social and cultural phenomenon. Igbos in various centres of commerce in the nation and those in the Nigerian diaspora have cultivated a thriving culture of annual returns to the homeland. These are occasions for socio- cultural bonding, renewal of kinship and the initiation of community development projects. In the last five years or more, this trend has been in recess as most of the Igbo elite remain in their places of abode and livelihood for fear of physical harm. In the process, community solidarity and welfare have suffered. A certain degree of economic leverage which used to accrue to the rural folk from these annual homeland returns has dried up, aggravating the scourge of rural poverty ravaging the nation in recent times.

There is also a political cost to the mayhem in the South East. The challenge of micro national loyalty organisations like IPOB have eroded the political import of the states as political galvanization centres. IPOB and the like appeal to a broad ethnic loyalty which transcends the limited overage of the states. Moreover, the popular appeal of separatist rhetoric has tended to erode the political loyalty to state governors and political party chieftains. Separatist militants and populists tend to command more spontaneous followership over and above the more predictable and even boring appeal of state and local governments.

More worrisome is the effect of the atmosphere of regional violence and insecurity on national unity and solidarity. There is a sense in which the long persistence of violence, separatist rhetoric, hateful language in the South East has deepened the atmosphere of divisiveness in the nation. For some reason, both the separatists and conventional politicians of the South East are united by the concepts of Igbo marginalization, exclusion and alienation from the rest of the Nigerian federation. An atmosphere of violence and insecurity does not make this situation any less grievous. It aggravates it as it makes a section of the country look more like a national killing field or wasteland over time.

The urgency of the situation in the South East is therefore ultimately in the threat it poses to the stability of the entire federation. If we allow the region to implode and conflagrate, the effect will be felt everywhere else in the federation because the region is also home to the most migrant segment of our national population. They will carry their sense of injury, grief, affliction and exclusion wherever they go.

As the ultimate guarantor of the prevailing and ultimate national order, the federal government has an overriding obligation to quickly review its concept of security, law and order in the South East. The current strong arm tactics have failed woefully. It must be replaced by a hearts and minds approach as we are beginning to see in the North east and other troubled places.

On their part, the various state governments in the region must assume a more active crime control posture. Moreover, the governors must themselves rise above their individual political ambitions to understand the strategic importance of the zone as the most entrepreneurial region of the nation. Security, law and order must be seen as irreducible ingredients of productivity and wealth creation. These must precede personal political ascendancy.

Socio- cultural pressure groups like the Ohanaeze must come to terms with their essentially symbolic and cosmetic role in an age of youthful ferment and rapid national change driven by technology and new world views.