World Geostrategic Insights interview with Brig. Gen. Saleh Bala (Rtd) on attacks by criminal gangs and terrorist groups in Nigeria, the operational capability of the Nigerian army and police, and the reasons for the spread of jihadism in the Sahel.
Brigadier General (rtd) Saleh Bala is the chief executive officer of White Ink Consult, a private defense and security research, strategic communications, and education consulting firm based in Abuja, Nigeria, and founder of the White Ink Institute for Strategy Education and Research (WISER), in Abuja, an institute that focuses on executive-level and middle-management capacity building on security governance strategy and national security policy. He is a veteran of many military campaigns, and his last military assignment was as Chief of Staff of the Nigerian Army Infantry Corps Center (2012-13).
1 – The daily violence by criminal gangs and jihadist groups in northern Nigeria is now closing in on the capital. Pressure to address insecurity is mounting from all sectors of Nigerian society, while Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari, seems unable to curb the violence and restore an acceptable level of security in the country. What do you think are the causes of this situation? Are there still chances to tackle violence and insecurity in Nigeria?
The recent past attacks around the Nigerian federal capital territory suburbs by criminal gangs, with the ultimate daring attack by ISWAP on the Kuje Minimum Correctional Center was quite embarrassing to both the Nigerian government and its citizens. We must remind ourselves, first that ‘surprise’ remains the foremost force-multiplier element of violent non-state actors. Again, the attack was planned more for the release of their fellows detained in the Kuje correctional center than for any other purpose, as much as the diversionary attacks they had carried out on the Suleja Barracks in the outskirts of Abuja, and some military checkpoints along the dangerous Abuja – Minna and the Abuja – Kaduna highways.
Those attacks would have just been so that the Nigerian Army will disperse and concentrate its attention and forces to the defense of its external installations, to enable the ultimate attack on the defined target with no or little resistance. Abuja hasn’t really been the fortress that most assume it to be, as much as it should be for its status as the nation’s political capital. We must remember that even in the early years of the insurgency experience, there were the bombings of the UN Building, the Nyanya Bus station, the national police headquarters, EFAB Plaza and the Eagle Square bombings.
Even the Lungi Barracks Mammy Market was attacked in the past. Indeed, it would have been expected that those attacks should have made the defense of Abuja tighter, especially in light of intelligence and even open-source reports of buildup and likely attacks on Abuja and around the FCT. Yet we must again remind ourselves that however credible intelligence is, you can only act decisively when you have adequate response capability. But of course, there were several measures that were taken in the period past that included barricading of public buildings, and deployment of forces countermeasure technology in and around the city and high-traffic commercial areas.
These measures had to be relaxed after the absence over the years of any such audacious and destructive terrorist attacks. It is only reasonable that in order not to prolong the sense of siege on citizens across Nigeria, particularly for an international city like Abuja, that those warzone-like military defensive measures were relaxed, so residents and visitors can have a sense of freedom and confidence, as they go about their lawful businesses. It is sad that the immediate past breaches would raise such concerns that could have encouraged the government to go back to the restrictive measures, as were in the past, when roadblocks and stern-looking forces presided over the city.
The recent attacks indeed proved the relentlessness of the armed criminals and Islamist terrorist insurgents to take advantage of the overstretch of the entire Nigerian security architecture, in terms of men and ordnance to deliver effectively on the National Security Strategy that is aimed at defeating the over 11 years of the Boko Haram insurgency and its spill-off effects across the country. The Islamist insurgency has given inspiration to other violent extremist groups in northern Nigeria, like the Fulani; a mainly traditional nomadic pastoralist ethnicity, who since independence have hardly been given a sense of belonging by the Nigerian state, in terms of special and enduring government programmes to support their nomadic pastoralist life style in the immediate, middle and long terms, within a strategy with an end state to transform their custom of nomadism to a modern sedentary one.
It is my view that, unlike the common simplistic impression in some quarters, the presidency of President Muhammadu Buhari has not ‘failed’ in providing security to Nigeria, in relation to the limits of the capacity and capability of the Nigerian state in its present state of development, if assessed along its present economic, technological and myriad social and political challenges, as well as the prevailing and mounting toxic mix of ethno-religious and criminal enterprise motivated violent extremist security challenges.
The challenges which are mostly exacerbated by the forces of climate change and poor governance across the Sahelian states. Nigeria cannot be isolated from these effects that cuts across the region. There is certainly much that can be done to comprehensively address the insecurity problems in Nigeria, but not to obsessively focus on the security of Abuja alone. A secured nation is not about the impregnability of its political capital, as much as this is symbolic of the state’s resilience, but rather the safety and security of its entire citizens both at home and abroad, under all circumstances.
So, rather than the easy regime-security thinking, which throws up a secure Abuja as the main for Nigerian security, the fundamental human security thought should dominate the concern of citizens and governments together. We Nigerians, our leadership and foreign partners must address ourselves to the centrality and importance of collective and sustainable human security, as we progress in nationhood. This thinking prioritizes development through the provisioning of democratic governance goods in terms of equity and justice, and the resilience essentials to citizens, as in good education, health, water, housing and dealing with the intractable youth bulge and unemployment conundrum at the front burner. However, before that can be achieved, it is important to upscale the capacity of the Nigerian state to build its current military and law enforcement forces to such credible levels to prosecute well-coordinated kinetic actions to suppress and defeat the criminal and insurgent terrorist threats across Nigeria, and also participate similarly in coalitions across the West African region.
2 – Since the beginning of the fight against Boko Haram, the Nigerian Army has faced internal crises that have compromised its ability to defeat the insurgents. Recently, the Army Chief of Staff made a major reshuffle of senior officers. According to the high military hierarchy, the new reforms and appointments within the army aim to reposition the force to achieve operational effectiveness. What is your opinion?
The Nigerian Armed Forces, nay the Nigerian Army are not known to me to have had any ‘internal crisis’ in a sense as to challenge its internal cohesion and mission purposefulness such as would break its leadership’s will and those of its personnel to prosecute military operations to defeat threats. Of course, the military has been having capability challenges over the years in terms of adequate and appropriate weapons, equipment, and mobility platforms, including intelligence to combat the asymmetric challenges of fighting an unconventional adversary.
We must however remember that Nigeria is an industrially and technologically challenged developing nation that depends on the developed nations for supply of arms, ammunition, and all levels and types of equipment for the functioning of its security forces. Such dependence opens Nigeria unfavorably to the constraints of the politics of international arms trade. Nigeria has suffered two seriously negatively impactful sanctions by Western nations at stages when the defense of its sovereignty was most threatened, and leaving it to grapple with alternative expensive sources of most poor quality arms and equipment to capacitate its forces.
The first time was during the General Sani Abacha presidency years, when while Nigerian forces were just returning from the ECOMOG security commitment in the wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the nation was faced with the border conflict with Cameroon over the Bakassi Peninsula. But because of the controversy over the execution of the Niger-Delta human rights activist, Ken Saro Wiwa, Nigeria was isolated by the Western leadership of the international community, blocking all effort to refit its armed forces for the tasks at hand. Government then had to find alternatives in Russia and some former Soviet nations, as well as to China, India, and Pakistan.
After expending much of its equipment and even personnel in Liberia and Sierra Leone, it has since been difficult for the armed forces to adequately rebuild itself. Same is the recent case since the Boko Haram crisis, when again Western nations citing human rights abuses by Nigerian forces would not sell lethal equipment and support to Nigeria. These two situations have indeed had much impact on the capacity and capability building of the Nigerian Armed Forces, its ability to combat threats, and even also maintain its leading role in international peacekeeping. Military procurement has indeed substantially been at the crux of the problem of the Nigerian Armed Forces to duly defeat the criminal and terrorist challenges facing Nigeria.
There is no doubt that leadership forms a fundamental ingredient for successful mission planning and prosecution, but what is its extent when leadership is challenged by the lack of appropriate force levels and equipment to prosecute missions? Be that as it may, I respect the fact that the rotation of strategic leadership at operational and tactical levels are important in bringing new and fresh thoughts and command styles to operations, but certainly leadership is not the one item for assuring success and its sustenance. In most cases, however, where there are too frequent transitions of commanders, the refinement of strategies could be disrupted consistently and with telling negative effects to strengthening operational and tactical outcomes.
While recent expenditure for procurements by the Buhari Administration have helped enormously in securing some armed land and aerial platforms, as well as the critical small arms and ammunition scales, which have been deployed to the crises across the nation, the change or rotation of leadership has also injected new ideas and added vigor with credible results on operational success. The upscaling of air operations, especially in the Northeast and the irritating kidnapping for ransom, highway robbery and banditry in the Northwest and Northcentral has also been credible. This is very commendable, indeed. It is for this that just as the pressure of operations in the Northeast on the Islamists is causing massive capitulation and surrenders, the tempo in the Northwest, Northcentral and the Southeast is similarly being felt.
While the military is doing its best at the moment, just as it always has, in spite of constraints, the government must pay attention to capacitating the police to take up the internal security law and order challenges, which unfortunately the military with its overstretched capacity has been shouldered with. If the Nigeria Police can be capacitated and politically motivated, such a situation will free and allow the military to concentrate on dealing with the military grade challenges, as constitutionally mandated, and doctrinally prepared.
3 – It’s not just Nigeria, the jihadist scourge seems to be spreading at an exponential rate across the African continent, now reaching many countries that had long been spared. In addition to the Sahel, which has already been conquered, jihadists are now sweeping across the northern, central, eastern, and western regions of Africa. What are the reasons for this dynamic? And what are the possible African-wide solutions to curb this threat?
It is easy to forget the climate change and southwards natural movement of the Sahelian boundaries, as push factors to the threats that are being experienced by all nations in the region. With the human displacements following this reality as communities migrate southwards to the more favorable geographical areas that support livelihood, so also do the criminal gangs and the Islamist terrorist group that pry on lives. The nomadic pastoralist groups are also caused to increase the flow of their movements in their numbers further south in search of water and pasture for their animals.
Pasture and water resources, which are fast depleting across their ancestral Savannah belt and driving them into the southward Forest regions, has caused the increase of clashes between the nomadic pastoralists and the sedentary farmers, and with more lethality because of the easy availability of illicit military grade modern automatic weapons. Urbanization is another factor with the expansion of towns and cities that have taken over old cattle routes and also moved farmlands further into and across grazing lands. Aside from the climate change push factor, the problems of large ungoverned spaces and porous unguarded borders conjoin to allow the insurgent and criminal gangs unfettered movements and safe havens for operations. Again, the ethno-religious angle to the threats is further increased by the sense of injustice to particular ethnic groups whose sense of nationality is not influenced by the arbitrarily drawn colonial boundaries, but by the ancient ethno-linguistic geography.
Any action by either state or another ethnicity that even in perception proves as persecution in injustice on a group, becomes an attack on its entire regional identity. Such is the reason why the Fulani, Dogon, Tuareg, Kanuri, Hausa and such ethnicities that spread across state boundaries are usually the most common members of the insurgent groups across the Sahel. To appreciate this, one just needs to take a look at the ethno-linguistic map of Africa in its entirety and throw over it an overlay of the conflicts on the continent, in order to fully understand the reality.
Again, the solution resides in sustainable human-centric development, which will address those grudges and grievances that radicalize the mass into violent extremism. Again, states must work together in coalitions to address the common problems of development that affect their people. For an example, governments of the Lake Basin states were unfortunately only truly realized of the need to take seriously the regional mechanism, which was established to address the sustainable common usage of the waters of the Lake and the land resources around it, when the pressure of the Boko Haram terrorist insurgency became present and creditably dangerous to the individual and collective security of their sovereignties. It was similar for ECOWAS when the challenge of Liberia in the 90s came up, and ECOMOG had to be raised.
In such thinking therefore, regional and the continental multilateral bodies will need to be strengthened and given prominence to address the security challenges across Africa. Where there are special needs, regional defense mechanisms like the G5 Sahel, the MNJTF, aside the African Stand-by Forces mechanisms of the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) must be encouraged, by proper policy development, funding, and political motivation.
The understanding of the world’s developed nations is also important to find the financial and technology support for Africa to comprehensively deal with its myriad security challenges. With its enormous reserve of strategic mineral resources, flora and fauna, as well as its vibrant population, a peaceful and secure Africa in no doubt of immeasurable importance to global peace and security.
Brig Gen Saleh Bala (Rtd)