Nigeria appears to be witnessing a resurgence of kidnappings, especially of students from their campuses and hostels in the north of the country, where the struggle with insurgents, bandits and sundry miscreants has been on for upwards of a decade.
This follows a lull in such unsavoury activities over the past year or so.
Gunmen abducted at least 20 students, mostly females, in northwestern Nigeria during an attack late September. The students were taken hostage when the gunmen broke into their accommodations near the Federal University Gusau in Zamfara state’s Bungudu district, Zamfara police spokesman Yazid Abubakar said.
Days later, security forces rescued 14 of the victims, following an engagement with the kidnappers.
Just last week, the Katsina State Police Command confirmed the kidnap of five female students of the Federal University, Dutsinma.
The police also confirmed that a man suspected to be an informant to the terrorists had been arrested.
The spokesman for the Katsina Police Command, ASP Abubakar Aliyu, confirmed the incident and the arrest.
There have been a handful of other such incidents of recent.
Abduction of students from schools in the north became a source of concern since 2014 when Islamic extremists kidnapped over 200 schoolgirls in Borno State. The frequency of the attacks though has reduced over the last year and September’s incident presents a new challenge to the administration of President Bola Tinubu who came into office in May.
On February 19, 2018, at 5:30 pm, 110 schoolgirls aged 11-19 years old were kidnapped by the Boko Haram terrorist group from the Government Girls’ Science and Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, located in Bulabulin, Bursari Local Government Area of Yobe State. The Federal Government deployed the Nigerian Air Force and other security agencies to search for the missing schoolgirls and to hopefully enable their return.
Five schoolgirls died on the same day of their kidnapping. Boko Haram released everyone else in March 2018, save the lone Christian girl, Leah Sharibu, who refused to convert to Islam.
Nigeria’s erstwhile Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), Gen. Lucky Irabor, had said before he vacated office that the country required much more than military intervention to deal with the complex forms of insecurity it is faced with and that the transition had started.
Irabor advocated an “All Of Society Approach” comprising multi-sectoral and specialised efforts and involving all of society.
The administration of President Bola Tinubu has confirmed it would follow on with this new strategy to the war against insurgency.
The new strategy gives prominence to the whole of society approach, to ensure effective attainment of military goals and national development objectives.
The approach involves the participation of the government, security agencies, civil organisations, religious leaders, traditional leaders, the press and the general public, it is said.
The military says it involves a non-kinetic approach by developing a policy framework and National Action Plan for Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (NAPPCVE). It further attests that the non-kinetic military operations involve the use of psychological, diplomatic negotiations and economic sanctions to achieve military objectives; include civil military operations, cyber warfare, covert intelligence operations and media operations, among others, and can be used in combination with each other or with traditional military action to achieve specific objectives and are often used in situations where traditional military activities are either not feasible or not appropriate.
Part of the essence of the strategy is to win over the local communities under siege of the insurgents by empathising with them, cooperating with them and providing for their needs, including food, medication, potable water, as well as rendering training in enhanced farming methods and artisanal skills and carrying them along in the visioning for a stable society.
The essence is that poverty is one of the main drivers of insurgency and that people who are gainfully engaged and self-sustaining would have less motivation to participate in antisocial conduct or cooperate with vagrants.
While the essence of this new strategy is much appreciated, there seems not much evidence of its being emphatically put into effect.
Much of the talk from the military brass is of meeting steel with steel and no word of the promised carrot between.
It would then seem that Nigeria’s civil and military authorities need to walk the talk and present proof of doing so, for much of what we hear is of the singular deployment of the force of arms, as against the promised mix with the said “All of Society Approach”.
Well managed, this new strategy just might work.
