Quick one on the Wadume thing
This morning, my man Justin Ijeh pointed out that the Punch was mischievous with this headline as the soldiers who killed the policemen in the Wadume case have not exactly been set free. I disagree with him, and yes, I know that as usual, I’m being cynical. But any way you cut it, the story is a very bad look and given our history, I’m not surprised that an organisation such as HURIWA suspects a far-reaching effort to give Wadume and the soldiers involved a soft-landing. Yes, it pays to be cynical in Nigeria, and the Punch report is not off the mark in my view.
Just two weeks ago, my organisation published a report on the economics of kidnap in Nigeria. ₦7 billion worth over the last decade and this is for kidnaps that were reported. Kidnaps that didn’t get reported, or where ransom payments were undisclosed, did not make the cut.
This bears it out that a lot of money is being made in that industry, and money by its nature does not sit in one place, it buys protection and favours. How else do you explain that someone like Wadume got soldiers to kill policemen sent to arrest him, and then got set free?
Had it not been the massive outrage that greeted the whole incident, Wadume would very likely have been moving around Taraba, plying his trade. Heck, given that at 87.7%, Taraba has the second-highest poverty rate in Nigeria, by now he may well have diversified and moved his trade to Plateau or Benue, which both have security problems and significantly smaller poverty ratios than Taraba.
In a country that has a high rate of kidnap, this is the clearest evidence yet that we have a major problem of collusion between government security agents and kidnappers, yet what does our AGF do? He removes the names of all the soldiers from the charge sheet citing bureaucracy. Again, forgive me for being cynical, but given how long this has gone on, and all the higi-haga that happened before we even got to this point, it sounds to me like the beginnings of a slap on the wrist. Remember that yesterday was 15 years since the Apo-6 were killed, and we have not had justice for them, likely because they were killed by security agents.
If memory serves, we are meant to be in a democracy, which means the military ought to be suborned to civilian authority. This means that those men should have been (at least) temporarily discharged from the army to clear their names first, and that is at the very least. What I think should have been done is they should have been dishonourably discharged after a court-martial, then face trial like anyone else. Not this excuse of bureaucracy. What does that even mean?
This apparent unwillingness to keep them on the hook speaks very badly of our future security prospects. When the eye of justice is not fully blind but has favourites, then there is a scramble to become one of the favourites.