Headline : Zaria conversations on improving security and national unity, By Jibrin Ibrahim

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I spent the week in Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, making two presentations and engaging the academic community in broad debates on the crises facing Nigeria and West Africa. My first presentation was on setting eleven benchmarks for enhancing security and national unity. The Nigerian state is undergoing a three-dimensional crisis. The first one affects the political economy and it is generated mainly by public corruption, which over the past four decades has created a run on the treasury at the national and state levels, threatening to consume the goose that lays the golden egg.

The second one is the crisis of citizenship symbolised by ethno-regionalism, the Boko Haram insurgency, farmer-herder killings, agitations for Biafra, militancy in the Niger Delta, and indigene/settler conflicts. The third element relates to the frustration of the country’s democratic aspirations, in a context in which the citizenry believes in “true democracy” but is confronted with a reckless political class that is corrupt, self-serving and manipulative. These issues have largely broken the social pact between citizens and the state. That is why today, Nigerians find themselves in a moment of doubt about their nationhood.

The first benchmark is a concerted state and society effort to stop the current drift towards anarchy. As a people, we love living near the precipice and the risk is that our dangerous behaviour could one day push us over. It has been said that in Zamfara State alone, there are no fewer than 30,000 gunmen spread across more than 100 camps within and around the state, killing, kidnapping, raping people and burning their food and housing. General Abdulsalam Abubakar, the chairman of the National Peace Committee, told Nigeria that there are about six million weapons circulating in private hands in the country.

We are at a point in our national trajectory where young Nigerians feel sufficiently marginalised from the STATE and SOCIETY to procure arms and engage in self-help, which they define variously as banditry, scotched earth attacks on innocent village communities, accompanied by mass rape and other forms of sexual violence, in addition to the killing of security agents, and even declaration of an Islamic Caliphate in Nigeria. There are too many groups that have discovered that obtaining an AK47 can be their pathway to wealth because they are not in government, where you can be wealthy by stealing without arms.

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