Many faces of Nigeria’s banditry

Understandably, politics and security challenges have taken the front burner of national discourse in recent times, relegating, in the process, economy to the rear. Politics as the determining factor in governance dominates everything and sets the tone for the performance of other sectors. Security is the basis of the confidence for people to engage in their daily tasks – cultural, economic, political, religious and social, etc. However, the economy also influences politics and security. It is obvious that banditry is the topical security issue as a clog in the wheel of political and economic change.

We daily witness effects of the country’s stagnated economy, increased poverty and misery, inflation in double digits, increasing unemployment and a general environment that seems not to support innovation and creativity.

The failure of governance and security in the country has now produced the fastest growing sector of our economic and social life properly described as the bandit economy. It bears reviewing the various manifestations of the bandit economy, which is all about violence and committing crimes such as extortion, authority stealing, treasury looting, robbery, and murder, either as an individual or in groups.

Violence is not limited to physical violence, it could be structural violence and others based on abuse of power and asymmetric information holding, based on official position, to the detriment of the population. Bandits are above the law and no one dares rein in on them. They are purportedly faceless, yet some prominent Nigerians speak for them.

Banditry is a new economic growth pole where returns far exceed investments. In this economy, there is no need for registration with the Corporate Affairs Commission, no need to look for and hire technical and qualified staff; also, there is no need for office space and machinery. One does not need any formal education to practise the trade and reap big profits. All the practitioners need are some Ak-47 guns and bullets, refuse to speak English and speak a language which needs an interpreter for a majority of Nigerians to understand, get notable and otherwise respected personalities to speak and ask for amnesty on their behalf from time to time.

From time to time, the directors of this very lucrative industry pick up (or do we say kidnap) hundreds of pupils and take them to purportedly unknown locations, threaten fire and brimstone and that hell is about to convulse to give up its inhabitants and the whole nation is on its knees begging for mercy.

Eventually, money exchanges hands or prisoners are swapped and the government becomes uninterested about the entire transaction, promising to release the facts and truth to the populace which it will never do. The students are eventually released and the whole circus goes on and on. Intelligent estimates indicate that this industry is worth hundreds of billions of naira and its key directors earn billions every month.

Another arm of the bandit economy does not need guns or instruments of physical violence. They propose to earn big sums of money in revenue heads in the federal budget. One of the revenue proposals is called stamp duty.

The operators of this system make proposals and pass them through the Executive Council of the Federation and later send the proposal to the National Assembly who also sits and approves of the same. The President later assents to the bill to become law at an elaborate ceremony where the media takes the shots and celebrates the passage of the budget. Then, government magic starts. During the report on budget performance including revenue heads by the Minister of Finance at the 2021 budget presentation, Nigerians were told that the stamp duty had not yet been brought into account and so nothing was recorded for it from January 2020 to the presentation of the budget in October 2020. Fast forward January 2021, when the same minister was presenting the 2020 budget performance after the President’s assent to the 2021 federal budget, not a kobo had accrued from the expected N200bn. No word about accruals for a tax everyone pays on a daily basis and which was even underestimated in the first instance. And all Nigerians are quiet. The same banditry proposes to earn N500bn from the same stamp duty in 2021 and it will be business as usual.

Another set of the bandits find themselves in various positions of governance including the National Assembly where former governors are earning larger-than-life pensions and gratuities whilst still earning current humungous salaries from the federal public treasury. Court judgements to the contrary which declared their incredible authority stealing illegal means nothing to them and no one can force this set of bandits away from their feeding bottle that contains the blood, sweat and the life sap of poor and miserable Nigerians. The poor citizens of their states have no survival rights and they can be owed wages of N50,000 a month till eternity. When they complain and go on strike, they are deemed unpatriotic and undesirable elements.

Banditry is still responsible when a major petroleum producing nation keeps selling crude oil and importing refined products. Many contracts of turnaround maintenance for refineries have failed to turn around the refineries but rather turned around the economies and pockets of the bandits who awarded the contracts and their collaborators who got the contracts and pocketed the money. The same banditry is responsible for crude oil theft which is reported in hundreds of thousands of barrels every day when there are over five agencies purportedly supervising and policing the production, loading and sale of crude oil.

It is time to make all bandits to face the music, whether they are armed with guns, pen and pencils or state authority. Nigeria cannot survive the combined firepower of the various manifestations of banditry. This firepower bleeds the economy, governance and politics.

It is the duty and obligation of every citizen to understand the various manifestations of banditry and how they are inextricably linked. This will empower the citizens to confront these forces of underdevelopment through all legitimate processes aimed at freeing this generation from individuals and groups who have no iota of respect for the humanity and dignity of others.