Nine years ago, Professor Shehu Abdullahi Zuru, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), authored an article entitled “The socio-legal analysis of Boko Haram” published in a Canadian journal, in which he dissected Nigeria’s terrorism crisis. In this interview with IMOLEAYO OYEDEYI, the former Dean, Faculty of Law, Nile University of Nigeria, Abuja, examines how historical ethnic tension influenced by religion and politics in the country is fuelling recurring bloodshed and arsons in Plateau State, among others.
IN recent times, some local government areas in Plateau State have been under siege of heavy attacks, which have culminated in wanton killings of over 200 Nigerians. Even the state government on Tuesday declared curfew in the affected LGA, but surprisingly the assailants still came around to unleash terror on innocent citizens during the curfew. Some analysts have said the worsening insecurity of the Plateau has a certain political undertone; what is your take on this?
Nigeria is a very funny country. The instability and unrestrained carnage going on in Plateau State is not peculiar to the state. But unfortunately, it has been a vista of the general security situation in the country. Why Plateau State is very interesting is that it is a state where almost 90 per cent of the population belongs to one religion. Under normal circumstances, the state should have been the least area that will be besieged by the large-scale instability that has bedeviled it for some time. Having said that, I would rather attribute the insecurity to a kind of historical ethnic tension in the state. This ethnic tension could have been influenced by the religion-politics being played in the country, where we see everything in the context of religious divide and that could be deep and dark, which goes further to explain why the Nigerian security architecture has not been able to address the gale of insecurity.
In other words, the failure of the security formation to address and effectively tackle the insecurity in Plateau could only be understood in terms of the inability of the kinetic approach which is the traditional way of the military to squarely address the ideological questions that surround the security crisis. It is just like what someone wrote in his book “Amilca Cabral: A Revolution in Guinea” where he said fortunately or unfortunately, you cannot defeat or compromise someone’s ideology with his blood. And that was what I meant when I said ideological questions and the issue of ethnic identity could be deep and dark. And when you address the symptoms, you are only courting failure. I think that is what has been going on.
So you mean those attributing the insecurity to certain political undertones aren’t entirely correct?
Like I said, I have also alluded to that when I talked about the religion-politics of the country. But I think it is not just about politics per se, but what drives the brand of politics that is being played out, which in the case of Nigeria is peculiar to the geopolitical characteristics of every particular state. This is what defines the brand of politics that is being played at the state. For instance, why do you think it has not been possible for the minorities in most states of the federation to produce the chief executive of their state of origin? That is feeding into the undercurrent of what you are seeing today.
But even before the current Plateau State governor, Caleb Mutfwang, got to the saddle, successive administrations in the state failed to halt the attacks and killings. Is it that the non-state actors behind the butchery are more powerful than the country’s security apparatus?
They are not more powerful than the military, but this is a kind of invisible warfare just similar to what you watch in American movies. The truth of the matter is, like I told you, the root cause of most of these conflicts are usually deep and very dark. The problem is this: whether you call the attackers state actors or non-state actors is a matter of semantics because sometimes you could have state actors acting behind a veil to preserve a frontline of political resistance. That is, you could have elements of state actors hiding behind a cover to unleash terror in a bid to preserve their political advantage. So from the surface, it might just seem as if the attackers are non-state actors. This is because the non-state actors are like foot soldiers that are easier to see and identify. So, unless the military and other security operatives carry out extraordinary research to know the belief system and the dark ideologies that are fuelling geo-political instabilities in ethnic enclaves, they will not have a solution. That is a fact. In other words, unless you have the will to compel and persuade an extraordinary reset of the mindset (The belief system and dark ideologies) of those who are perpetuating the heinous crime for whatever reason, the military by nature of their operations so far, will never have a solution to the crisis.
But what would you advise the Plateau State government to do, because some persons have said it appears the government lacks capacity to conquer the assailants who could gallantly breach a curfew to carry out another massacre?
From what I have keenly observed, I cannot blame the state government for what is going on in Plateau. It is just like what the Americans discovered in Afghanistan. They found out that the firepower of the military cannot subdue the belief system and ideology of the people. If you juxtapose this with what is going on in Nigeria, you will see that the state government cannot use the instrument of state power neither the police nor the military to bring the ongoing crisis to an end. It will not work. This is because there are people who are deeply involved in the crisis, who represent a certain divide which could be religious or ethnic. These people are the actors. They are agrarian and deep-rooted in the rural communities.
As far as they are concerned, the military cannot condition their belief system and what they perceive as super-imposed survival ideology, which they imbibed. The military cannot condition it. That is a fact. The state government too has no capacity to do it. These things usually take time. What the government should have done first is to find out how it can build trust which, in situations like this, will only happen by embarking on aggressive evangelism for peace. That is the first step before the government will go forward to find out other potential for peace. Sadly, we are in a situation where that trust no longer exists and you cannot, as an institution of public policy, impose it on people. It won’t work. It is an issue of conscience engineering. And this cannot be imposed on anybody. You can sit in Abuja or at the Government House and say whatever you want to say. It will not move anybody. The people will keep holding onto their strong belief system about your government. Unless you begin to dismantle that ideology, so that the people can begin to trust and see you as a true partner in progressive development that will genuinely transform their lives, you may likely not succeed as a government.
But what do you think could be the grievances of those behind the killings and how do you think the government can even bring them to a roundtable for settlement?
What you need to understand is that just as you watch television and listen to the news, these same dark forces also do the same. Besides, the issue of who they are still remains the subject of wide speculation. However, the government can get clues if it deploys superior intelligence in analyzing the crisis, which has been ongoing for many years. However, if there had been an apostolic pursuit and gathering of credible intelligence, I believe by now, the government should be able to know who and who are behind the dreadful crime. I simply think the attitude has hardened on both sides. And that is why it has been very difficult for the other side to see government as a partner for peace and development. There was a paper I wrote nine years before I became a professor. It was entitled “The socio-legal analysis of Boko Haram”, and published in a journal in Canada. So, I understand the socio-ideological context of ethnic crisis and philosophy of hate and how, if not well managed, it will snowball into a Molotov cocktail.
Going by the way most of the attacks played out, it is expected that the residents in Mangu LGA and those in other affected areas in the state will have some useful clues on the identities and locations of the attackers. But why haven’t we seen them coming out to offer intelligence to the military and even the government?
It is chiefly about ideological self-preservation. Even in advanced democracies, you have to first build trust before the citizens can trust you with certain sensitive information. Yes, the people will surely have an idea of where the attacks are coming from. Both sides will also have alleged actors that are engineering the crisis. But the truth of the matter is, unless you have a credible partner, you cannot begin to give trust.
Some observers have argued that if local government administration is given full autonomy and allowed to have its local security as seen in countries that practise effective federalism, such could have helped in the case of the Mangu LGA attacks…
I don’t believe in that. Such could have even been a recipe for genocide. This is because when you have the Nigerian state kind of composition where minority ethnic groups live within the same political space if you allow a local government in such a setting to have a legitimate authority to deploy force to resolve conflict at that agrarian level, you might end up with genocide. We have seen a resemblance of this in Rwanda. Even though the country’s genocide was at the national level, if you look at it closely, you will see that it was at the rural level that it played out mostly. So, I don’t subscribe to the argument that local governments should be given a statutory mandate to recruit and maintain their security surveillance at their level. What I believe their autonomy will do in situations like this is that it would have put them in a better position to provide credible intelligence to the state government. But unfortunately, they have been paralysed, if not extinct within the scheme of things in the country today.
Away from the Plateau’s crisis to law, in the last two weeks, the Supreme Court has affirmed the election of about 19 state governors in the country. What do you make of the verdicts, especially given the fact that some of the election petitions were very controversial?
As a very senior lawyer at the bar and an academic, who has taught law and jurisprudence at the University for more than a decade, I believe the truth of the matter is that in every case, let’s put the issue of election petition aside, there is the law of justice and there is the politics of justice. There was a Harvard University scholar called Professor Karl Lewalee. He was one-time the Dean of Law of Harvard Law School. He was also once a judge of the Supreme Court in the United States. He wrote a book called The Political Economy of Justice. When you look at the thesis of what a case is vis-à-vis the expectations of justice, you will come to appreciate the intricate workings of institutions of justice and the difficulty being experienced in defining what amount of justice is in the circumstances of every case.
However, in some of the verdicts given over the election petitions, the apex court sharply contradicted and even opposed the ruling of the Appeal Court, especially the judgments for Plateau, Kano, and some others. What do you make of the contradictions in the rulings of the two senior courts in the land?
My problem with most legal pundits is this: there is nothing like contradiction in the Appeal system within the judiciary. What people need to understand is that the apex court constitutes an assemblage of the wise men of the law and justice. They are expected to hear matters of controversy on issues of law and justice. They are trusted to provide a viable opinion on appeal. But just because they disagreed fundamentally with the decision of the Court of Appeal does not amount to contradiction, because there is nothing within the appeal system that is suggestive of the fact that the Supreme Court must agree with the Court of Appeal. This is one fact that people should understand. This is because when issues are brought forward, it is a question of interpretation of the law within the general context of the circumstances of every case.
But the ruling of the Supreme Court on the Plateau State governorship election petition has somehow triggered a crisis at the state House of Assembly, because the 16 erstwhile members of the assembly sacked by the Appeal Court are pushing to come back, saying the apex court’s upholding of Governor Caleb’s election has offered them a legitimate ground to take back their legislative seats since both cases shared similar premise. How true can this be?
That is not correct. I understand the plights of the PDP lawmakers, but their case can’t be a cynosure on the main case that the Supreme Court decided. Though the premise might appear to be the same, there was no plausible ground for their claim. Assuming the lawmakers had applied to be joined in the case and the apex court also permitted them to be joined, then of course, they have the merit of the law to claim benefit from the judgment of the apex court. But since they were not a party in the case, they can’t lay any claim. Unfortunately for them, their case could not go beyond the Appeal Court. But that of the governor did progress from the Election Petition Tribunal to the Court of Appeal and then the Supreme Court. More so, when the apex court decided the matter, it decided it as a governorship election petition case. So at the end of the day, you cannot say because your issue bordered around the main case that the governor pursued up to the apex court, then you must benefit from the judgment of the apex court, it doesn’t work that day. It does not even appeal to common sense, let alone the law.
The sacked PDP lawmakers have petitioned the National Judicial Commission (NJC); do you see them making any headway?
How could they have written a letter to the NJC? Is it a court of law? Besides, whatever the end of the move may be, it still cannot affect the issue at the moment. Besides, the NJC cannot make laws for adjudication of matters in the court. It does not have that mandate. At best, it can only churn out administrative guidelines that will enhance the efficiency of court processes and then, of course, on the appointment and discipline of judges. That is the problem when you try to make sentiments of the law or perhaps you look at the law from the hindsight of what I call “The Judgment of Public Expectation”.