Some terminological clarification is in order: who are the terrorists? In the discourse on Nigerian security today the term terrorists hitherto referred to those elements of Boko Haram and their Islamic State in West Africa Province counterparts that have,through sustained campaigns of terror, turned most parts of the North-East into ungovernable frontier states, places where they have imposed their form of violent sectarian control.
Following their dispersal to the North-West, these elements have been called by the less sinister if not fond label- bandits.
Nigerians know that the terrorists and the bandits have close affiliations that have rendered attempts to separate them useless.
It is for this reason that many, if not most, now see the terrorists and the bandits as one and the same.
That being said, what needs to be added is that there is something mysterious about the attitude the Muhammadu Buhari administration has adopted towards them.
This attitude explains the clear ambivalence at the heart of the manner the so-called war against terrorism, banditry and the general state of insecurity in the country, has been conducted.
This attitude that is a huge challenge for Abuja under Buhari, goes back about a decade to the time President Goodluck Jonathan came into office following the demise of President Umaru Yar’Adua.
All attempts the Jonathan administration made to combat Boko Haram, which was then mainly an insurgent group under one command, were frustrated by politicians from the North who ethnicised these efforts, made religious capital out of them and concluded they were organised attacks against the North.
One of the main promoters of this line of thinking was then opposition leader now president, Muhammadu Buhari.
The fight against banditry which is a code name for terrorists in the Buhari dispensation has been lame and half-hearted, perhaps not unexpectedly.
This is very evident in how the Buhari government has been very hesitant in either putting the terrorist label on the bandits given their terror campaigns or even naming their sponsors.
On a number of occasions officials of the administration, led by Abubakar Malami, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, had advanced contradictory reasons why the bandits could not be called terrorists.
They even somehow tied the naming to why the administration could not deploy the super Tucano jets they went to great length and great cost to acquire.
After exhausting all the lies their mouths could manage,they finally came to the point of calling the bandits by their right name a couple of weeks ago.
But the hardest nut to crack is naming the sponsors of the bandits or terrorists who by general consensus are the actual criminals that must be taken out if Nigeria is to know peace.
This is a task that this government has tried but failed spectacularly to execute. It has been promises upon promises, not even when the government of the United Arab Emirate all but placed the names in the hands of the Nigerian government.
This government continues to balk, taking a step backwards each time it becomes necessary for it to step up and do what it must.
The latest star in this circus is Alhaji Lai Muhammed who has been tantalising Nigerians with statistics that bear no name tags.
Alhaji Muhammed had the nerve to tell us that no less than 96 names have been identified as sponsors of terrorism in Nigeria.
Yet he lacked the balls to name even one of them. Which strengthens the notion out there that many of the sponsors have direct and indirect connections in the highest places in government if they are not themselves politicians of note- governors, legislators and political advisers as the late Obadiah Mailafia claimed to his own peril.
Why is it difficult for the Buhari government to name the people who have made Nigeria its most insecure in peace time, if one could describe the present state of the nation in such terms?
We must go back to the immediate post-Yar’Adua years after Jonathan became
president and the North started to court Boko Haram.
It was not long after this open accommodation of Boko Haram that the Northern establishment would come to the realisation that Boko Haram was a raging fire that the Yoruba proverbially say makes no distinction between those who gave it life and others who did not.
It burnt both friends and foes. Boko Haram and their current cousins called bandits were in a sense the children of fire created by the neglect of politicians from the North.
They thought they could fight and somewhat douse the fire they had started by pitching them against a political leader from the South if not the entire Southern region.
But that effort failed abysmally as the group turned the heat on the Northern elite, from emirs to politicians who came under deadly attacks.
Buhari, very much the spokesperson of Boko Haram like Ahmad Gumi is today for bandits, himself came within an inch of an assassination attempt.
It was the same Jonathan that he and his ilk sought to pitch against Boko Haram that came to his rescue, beefing up security around him and provided him brand new vehicles to boot.
There was nothing the political North didn’t do to destabilise the government of President Jonathan all in a bid to truncate his administration that they considered illegitimate.
Today some of them are struggling to bring him back as a one-term president in a game of power that will see another Northerner return to Aso Rock Villa in less than five years after Buhari.
It has been revealed by no less an insider of the Northern oligarchy than Kawu Baraje that the North went as far as importing foreign elements, specifically Fulani mercenaries, into the country in a prescient attempt at laying the ground for an ethnic war.
Since Baraje’s astonishing revelation no Northern politician has been bold enough to deny it or the logical claim that should follow from that of their complicity in the present state of insecurity in the country.
So, when it appears like the Fulani are being profiled given their heavy involvement in virtually all cases of kidnapping today, we must not forget the sordid history of hate behind it.
For the imported Fulani mercenaries of 2010 through 2013 have refused to leave Nigeria having made lemonade out of lemon and created a home for themselves from their state of destitution after a Fulani man won the election of 2015.
The North never envisaged a situation where Jonathan would leave power without a bloody national showdown. But they reckoned wrongly.
Jonathan conceded to Buhari but the imported dogs of war have remained and cannot leave without someone exposing their present and, especially, past sponsors now in power.