Prior to the invitation extended to him by the Department of State Services, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi, the Chief Imam of the Sultan Bello Mosque in Kaduna, had carried on as if he could not be called to order. He had around him this air of arrogance that is rooted in the exaggerated respect, even reverence, that Nigerians generally tend to show to religious leaders.
Nigerians of diverse religious orientations and from different parts of the country have in recent times wondered what type of immunity Shiekh Gumi enjoys that has prevented security agencies from pulling him in for investigation each time the sheikh chooses to speak on his pet subject of banditry and insurgency in the North and other parts of the country where the marauding armies of terrorists that call themselves cattle herders have exported their brand of violence.
Not only does Gumi demand a soft landing for these merchants of gratuitous violence, he mollycoddles them and practically puts the blame for their outlaw activities on just about everyone and anyone except the culprits. His is a case for appeasement and he does not hesitate to take it upon himself to speak for and in the name of the criminals in a manner that has won him the complete confidence of the outlaws. His extreme, narrow views on issues of religion have combined with his self-imposed role of spokesperson for criminal herders, bandits and insurgents, to strengthen the popular perception that he is controversial which in some quarters is the same thing as being fearless.
So, he jumps into issues and makes invidious, bigoted pronouncements that are devoid of concerns for their security implications. He seems to have some insider knowledge of the activities of the bandits in the North and has had cause to spend time with them in their forest hideouts on a couple of occasion. Together with sidekicks like Yusuf Usman and Tukur Mamu, he seems bent on stirring some kind of ethnic or religious war in his unsubstantiated vituperations about discriminatory treatment of Northerners, specifically the Fulani, and adherents of the Islamic faith. He is unashamedly biased to his self-created North in his utterances and is increasingly playing the part of an agent provocateur in his condemnation of the present APC-led government.
When one hears Sheikh Gumi, and his friend Yusuf Usman speak about the state of the Nigerian economy or Abuja’s response to insecurity in the last nine months of the Bola Tinubu administration, it is as if these men slept through the entire eight years of the Muhammadu Buhari administration when insecurity of all forms loomed large and finally took root in the country. Nor has Gumi bothered to say a word about the complicity of the Northern political and religious elite in the creation of the state of insecurity that pervades the region. His fingers are always pointing at people and institutions outside the North. This, again, he did after the abduction of hundreds of school children from Kuriga Government Secondary School and LEA Primary School in the Kuriga area of the Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State.
Gumi chose to point fingers and locate the cause of the problem elsewhere. Enamoured of the sound of his own voice, he spoke off key as if the announcement of yet another case of mass abductions is a thing of celebration. Of course, the fact that it provided him another opportunity to be relevant may be enough cause for him to celebrate but he need not seek scapegoats far from his own doorstep. Gumi, like many Northern leaders has, however, succeeded in transforming a self-created regional problem into one that Nigerians from every part of the country must pay for.
While the fact that a part, any part, of this country appears to have lost every trapping of law and order- while the fact that people could in broad daylight be abducted or killed in their own homes should worry every one of us, the apparent complicity of the Northern elite in the lawlessness should make the issue less of national concern or embarrassment and more a matter of the regional and communal responsibility of those concerned.
The people should get together, think deep and decide on what they actually want- appeasement by reckless payment of ransom, confrontation or both. So far, appeasement or so-called negotiation has failed all across the North. No sooner are the criminals appeased than they return to their vomit. Banditry or insurgency will end in the North the day the Northern elite in general and the communities concerned in particular decided that they have had enough. There is a lot about what is going on in the North-West that should tell anyone perceptive enough that the leaders lack both the will and desire, not the wherewithal, to put an end to their misery. They have both the yam and the knife in their hand and they must decide what their own fate should be.
In case a reminder is needed, Northern leaders have held power far longer than Nigerians from other regions and the sheer irresponsibility of their handling of the condition of the Northern talakawa that went from bad to worse under their corrupt, profligate watch, is the main reason the region has become the frontier of lawlessness that it is.
A corrupt feudal system anchored on misguided religious values that allows the immiseration and exclusion of the majority from the gains of civilisation (especially value-added Western-style, not religious, education) cannot but result in the anarchy that is the hallmark of life in the entire North. The children of the excluded majority are the bandits and insurgents that have retreated into the forests in an open stand-off with their erstwhile tormentors. Yet Gumi wants Nigerians to accept that that is a problem for every one of us.
At this point, the Northern elite should take responsibility for the monster they gave birth to and have nurtured to adulthood. This is more so now that banditry and insurgency have become multibillion-naira businesses for the Northern traditional, religious and political elite.
With the overwhelming concentration of all security establishments, military, paramilitary and intelligence agencies in the North, and under Nigerians of Northern of extraction, discussions of insecurity should by now be in the past tense. Given its frequency, there is no way hundreds of people, adults and children and even animals, could be regularly freighted in convoys of vehicles across state boundaries, as would be required for such operations for hundreds of kilometres, without detection or interception except the local populations are complicit.
The likes of Sheikh Ahmad Gumi and Yusuf Usman with associates like Tukur Mamu can’t be arbiters or negotiators in crimes that undermine their innocence or impartiality. Gumi needs to be investigated further.
