Boldness, be my friend. Arm me, audacity, from head to foot.” Some live by that Shakespearean creed. They say aloud what society only whispers. They speak the unsayable, damn the world and make a difference.
Northern Nigeria had the late Dr Yusuf Bala Usman. I think there is another one in Dr. Bashir Kurfi. Kurfi told Trust TV last week: “Government meets with these bandits. Even the case of Muhammadu Danfulani who captured General Rabe… He was having discussions with the government up till the time he abducted Rabe. They said he was a nice person, that he would help them to stop some of the other bandits when they come. And this boy, Danfulani, is 22 years old. He is operating with Bosso in a gang, and Bosso is 24. All of them were trained by Barau… And they are all alive; everybody knows they are alive. Where are these people staying, these terrorists? They are not in the bush or in the rocks; they are living in plain sight. In fact, it is alleged in Katsina that the (state) government paid ₦10 million each to send some of the bandit leaders to Saudi Arabia for Hajj.”
Dr. Kurfi challenged the government to say he was lying. He proceeded to give names of terrorists who went on this year’s pilgrimage and declared that “many of them are still in Saudi Arabia. I don’t know if they are back… I don’t know, … You, a murderer, they take you to Mecca and call you Alhaji. And then they allowed you to fly out through Nigerian airports and come back through Nigerian airports. These are people who do not only kill civilians but also kill members of the military…”
Dr. Kurfi is the convener of the Katsina Security Community Initiative and a teacher of International Finance at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
Kurfi did well with his ‘truth’. Throughout history, society has often been saved by those with the courage to voice uncomfortable truths.
A day or two after Kurfi’s interview, the Katsina State government issued a strongly worded statement denying allegations that it sponsored bandits to Mecca. It described the claim as baseless, unfounded and calculated to mislead the public while undermining the efforts of the government and security agencies to tackle insecurity in the state. It challenged its accusers to bring proofs.
Then, two days after that denial, and only days after Kurfi’s disturbing claims, the Minister of Interior, Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, told journalists at the Presidential Villa: “I’m happy to tell you that even last week Thursday, seven known commanders of Boko Haram and ISWAP, on their way back from Mecca, were arrested in Katsina at the airport and handed over to the DSS.”
The arrests were not what jolted me. What frightened me was the implication. These were dangerous men who boarded commercial flights through Nigerian airports, sat beside innocent passengers, travelled to Saudi Arabia and returned through the same airports before they were intercepted. How did they make that journey? Where was the Federal Government? Where was Katsina State government? Were the ‘pilgrims’ unknown to the authorities until they landed in Katsina? If so, was this a catastrophic intelligence failure? If not, why were they allowed to travel at all? Either possibility raises profoundly disturbing questions. If that is not a national scandal, what is?
Bandits on pilgrimage. They bring to mind the old Yoruba classic play, ‘Asẹ́wo tó Re Mẹ́kà’. Sacred journeys do not sanctify hardened hearts. A pilgrimage may change a man; it may also merely interrupt his schedule. Had those Katsina terrorists not been arrested, the trip might have been nothing more than an interlude between acts of terror.
Now that the government says the brand new terrorist Alhajis have been arrested, let us hope we are not told next year that they have become “repentant terrorists”, completed rehabilitation and deserve reintegration into society.
That brings me to a difficult but unavoidable question: What should society do with those who organise mass murder, mass abduction and systematic terrorism? Put differently, what should be the fate of those whose crimes amount to mass murder?
Almost eighty years ago, the Irish playwright and social critic, George Bernard Shaw, confronted that question in a letter to two British newspapers. The letter, published in The Times of December 5, 1947, and the Sunday Express of December 7, 1947, later appeared under the title, ‘Mad Dogs, Bad Men: Both Should Be Killed Without Compunction’.
Shaw’s argument was controversial but blunt. Society, he said, routinely destroys mad dogs, poisonous snakes and other dangerous creatures, not as punishment but as a matter of necessity. Why, he asked, should civilisation become sentimental when confronted with human beings who repeatedly prey on society and cannot be reformed?
His answer was chilling: “The real problem is the criminal you cannot reform: the human mad dog or cobra. The answer is kill him.”
Shaw was not speaking of ordinary offenders. He distinguished between petty criminals who could be rehabilitated and those he considered irredeemably dangerous. For the former, he prescribed reform. For the latter, elimination.
Now consider this: the terrorists who beheaded a teacher and abducted scores of pupils and teachers from the Esiele, Yawota and Alawusa communities of Oyo State on May 15 reportedly demanded the release of their detained commanders. Those who abducted the late Major General Rabe Abubakar, former Director of Defence Information, and his wife made a similar demand on behalf of another set of detained terror kingpins. We arrest them and keep them in custody. Yet, like snakes kept in the kitchen, they remain dangerous enough, even from detention, to strike by proxy through the beheading of teachers and the abduction of schoolchildren. We are not well.
Read Shaw again and reflect. You need not agree with Shaw’s conclusion to appreciate the question he posed. What should a society do with people who make a profession of kidnapping schoolchildren, slaughtering farmers, beheading teachers and travellers, and turning entire communities into desolate theatres of fear?
Nigeria appears unable to answer that question.
We detain terror commanders for years, feed and finally exchange them for victims of their terror. In more bizarre times, we set them free, rehabilitate and let them loose as repentant horrors. We celebrate the rescue of victims but rarely discuss the certainty of punishment for perpetrators. We seem trapped in a cycle in which terror is treated less as a crime against society than as a bargaining chip.
The result is predictable. Criminals learn that kidnapping pays. Communities learn that government protection is uncertain. Citizens learn that they are largely on their own.
I reproduce a part of Bernard Shaw’s argument:
“Dogs are friends of Man; but an exceptional dog sometimes goes mad and runs amok through the streets, biting and infecting everybody it comes across. Fond as we may be of dogs, we must kill it on the spot, by gun or bludgeon.
“Cobras and adders…may get loose in a school playground or domestic garden. We break their necks without trial by jury.
“A fox caught in a poultry yard is liquidated on the spot, though it is only acting according to its nature, as we ourselves do when we eat turkey. We kill the fox for pursuing with the same purpose. Nobody thinks of these liquidations as punishments, nor expiations, nor sacrifices, nor anything but what they really are: sheer necessities.
“Precisely the same necessity arises in the daily-occurring cases of incorrigibly mischievous human beings. They are vermin in the commonwealth, ferocious wild beasts on our highways, robbers and crooks of all sorts.
“What are we to do with them?
“The thoughtless humanitarian is ready with his reply: Reform the criminal; be kind to him.
“But the criminal who can be reformed is not the problem.
“The real problem is the criminal you cannot reform: the human mad dog or cobra. The answer is kill him…”
Shaw said petty criminals could be rehabilitated “but the ungovernables, the ferocious, the conscienceless, the idiots, the self-centred myops and morons, what of them? Do not punish them. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill them.
“The most amiably soft-hearted monarch, confronted with a death warrant, must sign it or abdicate as unfit to reign.”
The president and all our governors must read this.
Because they remain beyond the reach of the law, terror kingpins in our forests are gradually acquiring the mystique of folk heroes. That is why Bello Turji boldly goes online and flaunts the latest weapons of war before a helpless nation that can only watch, wonder and wait.
The spectacle recalls Robin Hood, England’s legendary outlaw. In one of the medieval ballads, Robin invites the King to dinner. The King comes disguised as a humble monk.
Before the meal begins, Robin raises his hunting horn and blows a single blast into the forest. The response is immediate. One hundred and forty hardened outlaws emerge from the woods and kneel before him.
The king watches in astonishment. Here is a man outside the law commanding a loyalty that rivals the crown itself.
Unable to conceal his amazement, the king murmurs: “What a remarkable sight this is! By God’s passion, it seems to me that this man has more followers ready to obey his command than I have ready to obey mine.”
When the state fails to enforce the law, outlaws begin to acquire legitimacy, mythology and even political capital. Persistent impunity creates an aura of power around men who should simply remain fugitives.
There is a similar scene in Florencio Luis Parreño’s 1868 novel about the Spanish bandit Jaime el Barbudo. A military lieutenant sent to capture the outlaw finds himself bewildered by the devotion Jaime commands among his followers.
Unable to understand how such discipline exists without formal structures, he asks the bandit chief: “How do you get your men to obey you without formal rules or discipline?”
Jaime’s answer is as simple as it is profound: “By being the bravest among them, by knowing more than anyone else, by being the first to face danger, and the last to take a share of the loot.”
Interesting stories. I did not invent them. I found them in a fascinating 2011 essay by Ben Dodds titled ‘Jaime el Barbudo and Robin Hood: Bandit Narratives in Comparative Perspective’ published in ‘Social History’ in November 2011. Dodds places the English outlaw Robin Hood alongside the Spanish bandit Jaime el Barbudo and explores why men who lived outside the law often commanded extraordinary loyalty from their followers even as society watched in feeble wonderment.
Which brings us back to Nigeria.
We wonder why the Nigerian state appears helpless before some of its most notorious bandit leaders. Is it true that the Katsina State Government sponsored terrorists to perform Hajj? Why do some northern governors and influential leaders appear reluctant to confront figures such as Bello Turji and the various Kachallas publicly and unequivocally?
Today they negotiate with terrorists; tomorrow they lament that the understanding has collapsed. Who will tell them that you do not negotiate with terror? It is strange that they fail to see that terror feeds on concession and that every compromise enlarges its appetite.
A further journey into the Robin Hood story is instructive.
In ‘A Gest of Robyn Hode’, the outlaw is eventually reconciled with the King, but the peace proves temporary. Robin accepts royal service only on his own terms. He acknowledges the King’s authority, yet insists that he reserves the right to return to the greenwood whenever he pleases.
He tells the King:
“But me lyke well your servyse,
I wyll come agayne full soone,
And shote at the donne dere,
As I am wont to done.”
In modern English, Robin is saying: “I like your service well enough, but I shall soon return to the forest and hunt the King’s deer, just as I have always done.”
The lesson is obvious. An outlaw who bargains from a position of strength does not surrender his outlawry. He merely pauses and restructures it for greater profitability.
In Yorubaland, we say that when an iroko acquires witchery, no sacrifice can appease it. You go for the roots.
That is where those who urge us yesterday and the day before not to name, examine and call out the source of Nigeria’s insecurity get it wrong. They misunderstand the nature of curing and healing. Dante Alighieri understood this. In ‘The Divine Comedy’, he demonstrates that the journey to Paradise begins not in Paradise but in Hell. Before redemption comes confrontation. Before ascent comes descent. The road to salvation passes through an honest reckoning with what is broken.
The Nigerian state must sit up or go down.
Every state claims a monopoly of legitimate force. That monopoly exists for a reason. As Max Weber observed, the state alone is entitled to the legitimate use of force within its territory. Hobbes expressed the same principle more starkly: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words.” A government that cannot suppress those who massacre, abduct and terrorise its citizens begins to erode the very social contract on which its authority rests. Citizens surrender the right of private vengeance in exchange for public protection. Once the state can no longer protect the innocent or punish those who prey upon them, the foundation of the social contract begins to crack.
The first duty of government is security. Not roads. Not bridges. Not ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Without security, every other achievement stands on borrowed time.
Which is why the debate over terrorism should not begin with how to accommodate or negotiate with terrorists but with how to defeat them. Yet defeating terrorism starts long before the first gunshot. It begins in the home, the classroom and the community. It begins by bringing into the world only the number of children we can nurture, educating those children, equipping them with marketable skills, and protecting them from destructive socio-religious dogmas and violent influences. Those are responsibilities shared by parents, society and government.
But a government that appears more eager to negotiate with terrorists than to destroy their capacity for violence sends a dangerous message to both criminals and citizens.
Bernard Shaw’s prescription may have been severe. Some will reject it. Yet his central point remains difficult to dismiss: there are moments when society must decide whether it exists primarily to protect the innocent or to indulge the violent.
The lesson is simple. Appeasement does not merely fail to prevent atrocities; it encourages them. Nigeria must stop cuddling terror. You do not negotiate with an evil iroko; you bring it down. Iroko tó bá gba’bodè, gígé ni wọ́n máa ń gé e. Anything less is an invitation to the next massacre, the next mass abduction.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
