Opinion: Insecurity: Nigeria’s blood oil, blood gold By-GREG ODOGWU

The way it stands today, it is as if our country’s sanity – not unity – is tested at every passing moment. I choose not to pussy-foot the familiar unity question, because I am convinced that we deceive ourselves in discussing such. To me, we have passed that level of ascertaining our desire for one-nationhood. We never really want to go our separate ways. We are one, take it or leave it.

We just want a fruitful and fulfilling union, which we are not getting from subsequent governments. Before each general election, we hold our breath, prayerfully wait for the Messiah, but immediately after the election we realise that we were sold a dummy. The new leader is a non-Messiah; indeed, an anti-Messiah. Then, we go back to our ethnic war trenches and start all over again, using our ethno-religious war songs as negotiating mantras for political power, while waiting for the next election.

But the danger in living in such a fool’s cycle is that it has an expiry date. It seems the level Nigeria’s Messiah-waiting cycle has reached has topped its final concentric nexus. This present government may be our final hollow round-trip. It does not take a seer to know that all the weight of our national trials and errors now sits like a dead weight on our neck. Like an old friend would say, something is about to give.

Meanwhile, it seemed the Buhari administration was given the opportunity to control the avalanche from its own power centre when it recently ousted all miners from Zamfara. Some Nigerians reacted with shock, not at the marching orders, but on the fact that such wealth existed there, hitherto perceived as a resource-poor and down-on-its-luck desert hinterland.

However, for those in the environmental sector, the issue was not shock, it was amazement. We were amazed at the short memory of many a Nigerian who did not remember what transpired in the gold fields of Anka, less than a decade ago. When more than 500 children died as a result of lead poisoning, it brought the attention of the world to our country. The news went viral. The hue and cry of all stakeholders, local and international, made the government to do the needful.

My thoughts are, we are today faced with another opportunity to change the narrative and unveil what may actually be our undiagnosed cancerous condition – from the same Zamfara. A state that 10 years ago, was one of the most peaceful enclaves of the North, is today a hub of viral insurgency, embedded in the hunchback of a deadly cabal and treacherous vested interests.

This may be the beginning of a new definition of the Nigerian condition. Call them blood gold, blood oil and blood cattle; and if you include blood money, we have before us the four horsemen of the Nigerian Apocalypse.

During the 1990s, the United Nations came up with the idea of blood diamond, also called conflict diamond, as any diamond that is mined in areas controlled by forces opposed to the legitimate, internationally recognised government of a country and that is sold to fund military action against that government.

It was formulated when brutal civil wars were being waged in parts of western and central Africa by rebel groups based in diamond-rich areas of their countries. Three specific conflicts – in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Sierra Leone – directed world attention to the destructive role of diamonds, though the problem arose in other countries as well. Rough diamonds mined in rebel-controlled areas were sold directly to merchants or were smuggled into neighbouring countries, where they were merged into stocks of legitimately mined diamonds and then sold on the open market. Proceeds from diamond sales were used to buy arms and war material for the rebel groups, some of which conducted extremely violent campaigns that brought great suffering to civilians.

A brief survey of our insurgent-ridden terrain will clearly show the semblance to the UN theme. For instance, nobody can say for sure, who is behind the rampant cattle rustling mafia. Again, we cannot say for sure where the rustled livestock are sold. In summary, there is no paper trail to the crime whatsoever; once the cows are stolen, they disappear off the face of the earth. The question is, where to? So, the monies that accrue to the wicked enterprise may as well be in the hands of people that use them to amass arms to kill civilians, fight the government and subvert the system. The item, therefore, is blood cattle.

In more organised climes, the government, in fighting insurgency, literally follows the money. They follow the funding trail of felonious activities in order to unravel the funding pattern. This is informed by the simple wisdom that no enterprise, good or bad, survives without money. But over here, our governments never talk about who is funding whom and what, where and how. They only carry out kneejerk raids, and batter the enemies with press statements and vituperative threats.

As citizens, it is high time we started shouting to the high heavens about the true situation of the country’s insecurity. We are faced with a conspiracy of blood gold, blood oil and blood cattle. The National President of Miners Association of Nigeria, Kabir Kankara, while expressing concern over the spate of killings in Zamfara said it clearly:

“Field reports have it that these bandits-turned-illegal-miners are mostly from neighbouring countries of Burkina Faso, Chad, Niger and even, Ghana. The level of their reported sophistication in weaponry can only point at the backing of powerful sponsors and patrons both local and foreign.

“We therefore expect our security apparatus to beam their searchlights on such people and make no sacred cow of anyone or group that may be found culpable in the commission of these murderous crimes and economic sabotage.”

In another revealing exposition, a serving Senator from Zamfara State, Kabir Marafa, pointed out that there might be a collusion between the insurgents in Zamfara and the rich miners in the state’s gold mines.

He said, “I am not privy to the information available to government before it took the decision to drive away the miners. But the people are concerned that the rich miners exploring very expensive commodity in the remote areas of Zamfara State are unmolested by the bandits. They have never been killed or kidnapped but the criminals are going after the poor villagers, kidnapping and killing them. Our people want to know the magic behind that. They want to know what the miners are doing that stopped the bandits from attacking them. The people are saying there is a nexus between the miners and the bandits. It is therefore believed in certain quarters that there is a deliberate attempt by the people who are benefitting from the mining activities to scare the locals so that they won’t pay attention to what they are excavating from the soil. If the bandits are looking for money, the miners possess more money than the poor villagers. Some of the miners sleep inside air-conditioned rooms in the bush; yet, they are not kidnapped, attacked or killed.”

I believe time is ripe for the government to look deeply into the existential threat of resource curse in Nigeria before we implode from these evil horsemen. We saw the sign in the Niger Delta region but we squandered the opportunity of a lifetime, wrongly assuming that it was just an environmental issue. Today, we know the truth. Just like the central African republics during the 1990s before the world attacked blood diamonds, Nigeria faces extinction if we refuse to wake up to the truth. Punch