[OPINION] Bandits value life more than the government

By Abimbola Adelakun

Last June, dozens of armed men stormed Yelwata, a farming village in Benue state, at midnight. By the time these raging marauders of darkness receded with the light of the dawn, about 160 Nigerians of all ages lay dead, brutally massacred. Even in Nigeria, where mass killings have long become routine, that was too much. The alleged perpetrators are presently undergoing trial, thankfully, but the first set of unfortunate and irresponsible responses to that attack came from the Federal Government. Presidential aide Bayo Onanuga was quick to put out a press statement asking the victims to reconcile with their killers. I could not—and still cannot—even process the degree of administrative thoughtlessness and moral detachment that not only informed that kind of reasoning but also did not incommode Onanuga from cranking out his thoughts on a typewriter and sharing them with the public.

The second irresponsible response to that massacre is the recent announcement by the Benue State Government that they have so far disbursed N56m to 1,000 households affected by the massacre. According to them, each of the 1,000 households received N50,000 as part of a cash transfer intervention. Yes, you read that correctly. Each family—not even individual victims o! —is getting roughly $35. For the Benue state government to announce that, shame must have died in the State House. Please recall that media reports indicated that some people lost five children, and some families lost as many as 12 members in that massacre. Now, do the maths on what $35 comes to per person, and you will be dismayed at how much your life is worth to the Nigerian government. The Benue State Government is also being rightly asked to account for the N1.3bn they publicly received—we do not know whether others pledged and donated privately—and which should have been sufficient to donate at least N1m to each of those households.

But even if they had given a million naira each, it would still have been grossly insufficient to compensate the people for what they lost in lives, livelihood, and the social life of their community. N1m would be a pittance; N50,000 is a gross insult. Whoever signed off on that sum and was not ashamed to announce it to the public should be made to spend a night with the bandits and be compensated with the same amount. They should take that shameful amount of money and see what they can do with it. It would have been far more respectful to the victims if they had made off with the money or refused to pay them. If this were a country where people file class-action suits against their government for failing in its duty of protection to its citizens, the state would have been forced to compensate the Yelwata community with far more. Even if the people are not litigious or motivated to fight, should their governor not be humane enough to advocate on their behalf? These are people on whose mandate you should be standing, and you must think of a wholesale indemnification of their losses. That pitiable amount does not even begin to assuage the trauma they have endured, some of which might never heal.

Ironically, this is a country where public administrators at all levels are never shy about generously overcompensating themselves, even for the many inanities they pass off as acts of governance. When they are in government, they pay themselves and their cronies under all sorts of frivolous banners that enable them to draw humongous amounts of money out of the public treasury. Even when they are leaving the office, they still do not let go of their thieving claws on public funds. They, along with conniving lawmakers, ensure they manufacture the legislation that allows them to unconscionably bankrupt the state on their way out. But when it comes to anything that will benefit the public, especially those who have been the victims of their institutional incompetence? Funds suddenly become scarce; even the legislation that would enable improvements in public welfare is deemed outright unconstitutional.

This is why I say—tongue in cheek, yet very seriously—that bandits typically place far more monetary value on human lives than the Nigerian government: when they abduct Nigerians and demand a ransom, they do so in millions and billions. They place a higher price on the life of each person they have snatched than even the government does. This does not make the bandits ethical in any way; I will not make the mistake of construing them as people who value life because they do not.

Yet there is something to be said about a situation where the government regularly pays the bandits in billions of Naira to stave off their criminal activities or get them to return abducted victims, but cannot even pay the Nigerian citizen to whom they are principally responsible. Who should be the bigger priority of the government? The people of Yelwata, who, in addition to being citizens deserving of a better life, are also farmers who can regenerate the life of their community, or the armed bandits who will spend the money they get from the government to buy more weapons and degenerate more communities across the country?

What is even worse and ultimately regrettable about these perverse transactions is that bandits receive the billions they demand—from the government—while their victims are expected to make do with a mere $35! What that means is that the Nigerian state basically sponsors bandits against Nigerians but cannot bring itself to similarly empower their serial victims. The lopsidedness of their institutional thinking has made the state systematically rig the system against its own citizens. The same Nigeria that has failed to organically invest in its citizens for them to grow, thrive, and flourish as they are meant to, now pays heavily to the monsters it bred. Yes, as despicable as the bandits are, they are the grotesque creation of Nigeria and its many administrative deficiencies. They are the children whose future Nigeria stole, whose lives they devalued, and whose humanity they depreciated. Now that they have grown into monstrous mongrels, they invoice the country, and it has no choice but to pay and even overpay them. The child whose ethics we did not build has grown and is now selling off the house we built in the stead of their nurture.

A thinking country will reflect on these issues and develop a reform agenda. A serious country will sit down and think of how to redress the gaps that the constant insecurity has caused, how to regeneratively compensate the communities, and salvage the future from this orgy of violence that has been consuming us for many years. But why bother with the hard task of reflection when our leaders can simply throw money at the situation? Day after day, incident after incident, Nigeria proves to be more interested in applying a balm to the gashing wounds of our national existence than in pushing itself to create a national redemption plan. For Benue to have compensated the families of Yelwata with $35, it means they are waiting for the children robbed of their families and their sources of communal reproduction to grow up with a grievance against the state, wantonly demand the nation to pay for what it denied them, and they will just hand out money like they know how to do.

Culled from The Punch