The media is awash with conflicting reports of this unfortunate clash between men of the Nigerian armed forces and the Gbagyi community in Bosso Local Government Area of Niger State, and it will be mischievous to understand what led to the face-off beyond speculations and propaganda from both parties.
The question some have asked is, why were soldiers killed this way by civilians? Attempting to answer this reveals the institutional lapses that defines this republic.
My trip to Niger State and interactions revealed damning realities of nation yet to take the road to restoring the sanctity of the human life.
The Gbagyi communities of Kpaidna, Legbe-dagma, Bambe, Kopa, Lunku, as a version of the story goes, were involved in clashes with Fulani herdsmen, and there was one about three weeks to their clash with the Army. The herdsmen, according to the communities, came armed and taking advantage of their lack of defence system.
These conflicts resulted in the Gbagyi communities pushed into security-consciousness and ready for anther invasion by the herdsmen.
The nature of their weapons is what we are yet to determine, but contrary to those presented as theirs by the military, some members of the communities claimed they were in possessions of locally made handguns.
So, on August 4, at about 1 am, members of Nigeria Armed Forces, drafted from 31 Artillery Brigade and Airforce Base, Minna, went for an operation to recover weapons from the villages, and this operation tragically went south.
The alarmed villagers suspected the operation as another invasion of the Fulani whom, from my interviews, they claim were “supported by higher authorities” and “given sophisticated weapons” to suppress them. This has been a conspiratorial view of the hostilities of herdsmen amongst all the communities they had attacked.
According to the Army Headquarters, 11 soldiers were killed that day. But figure of civilians killed, initially given as 8 by the Army, was not credible. Corpses of civilians killed were taken away in military vans and since then the military forces have embarked on extrajudicial killing sprees.
The dilemma some of us are yet to overcome is defending the status of the military as guardians of the nation and the gravity of extrajudicial killings. What happened in Niger State is yet another evidence of the dysfunctions of our institutions, this time the military institutions. I doubt, knowing the Nigeria Army for its no-nonsense brutality, anyone in his or her right senses would not initiate such aggression against them.
What we are missing in this chaos of narratives are the roles of the State Security Service and the Nigeria Police in these unfortunate losses of the lives of our citizens. These agencies seem to have relegated not even relinquished their primary responsibilities, which include gathering intelligence on internal security, to the Army.
There are many questions to be answered and I hope the judicial commission of inquiry to be tasked with investigating this avoidable clash will go down the roots to show us how we planted this seed of chaos that now consumes us.
As we await this report of a likely judicial commission of inquiry, over which we know nothing will happen, someone needs to intervene in the extrajudicial killings by the actually angered military? We know the grief of losing their colleagues, but the sin of their killers shouldn’t be visited upon their relatives and neighbours. People don’t walk around carrying a badge that identifies them as killers and guilty, which is why I grieve for the innocent.
Even on August 7, at 4:54 pm, coming out of Kpakungu – which served as refugee camp of villages sacked by the armed forces – a military van drove past carrying a corpse covered in white shroud. A man was seen in the van crying. Either in sympathy as a relative of the killed or fear of what awaited him.
The van was part of a convoy that went towards the sacked villages an hour earlier.
Stories from Kpakungu, where fleeing members of the sacked villages were hunted, with two killed on the spot and others bundled away and being tortured at the military cantonment, still haunt me.
We live in a country where asking for an end to extrajudicial killings is seen as sympathising with the guilty, instead of that being a logical position of any sensible mind. May God save us from us!
