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Today: Jídé Salawu, writer and editor at Olongo Africa.

Issue No. 457

Insult and Impunity in Nigeria
Jídé Salawu

HYDRANYM No. 27: Vote!
The Editors

Insult and Impunity in Nigeria

by Jídé Salawu

Just about a year ago, I called my uncle in my hometown, Shao, which is just south of the Niger River. Our call started on the usual notes: asking about home and family, the Adventist church, and the general state of the town. As political and economic insecurity continue to ravage Nigeria, Shao is also changing, and I wanted to know more about the safety measures being taken at home. 

Sobi Barracks, one of Nigeria’s largest infantry barracks, stands at the southern end of Shao. But even with this heavy presence of military neighbours, an Indigene of Shao was kidnapped last year; he was released after paying a ransom. 

My uncle and I discussed how the villages are now at the mercy of terrorists, both inside the government and out. We touched on the aforementioned kidnapping and abduction, and I warned him to reduce his own travels on Kwara roads; the abductors, I fear, can move undetected because of the porosity of Nigeria’s security system. Shao is surrounded by vast shrublands and rural settlements that have become a refuge for outlaws. As a gateway to the north, the town’s Jebba Road has thus become a target for kidnappings and robberies.

In Nigeria, to be a farmer is to put your life at risk, whether you are a large-scale or subsistence farmer. I live in perpetual anxiety for my father, who insists he wants to farm and keeps acres of cassava and guinea corn in my hometown. I tell him never to stay on the farm until late evening before returning home. News of farmers being killed or abducted has become part of the daily headlines now. 

One of the English words I learned early was “impunity.” An old word in English, with the first OED citation in 1532, from Thomas More, speaking against “the impunity of all mischievous people.” What I have known about this word, about the impunity of mischievous people in Nigeria—greedy, corrupt, and violent people—keeps evolving.  

Nigeria has fought terrorism on a large scale since 2009, when confrontations between Nigerian security forces and the insurgent group Boko Haram left more than 1,000 dead. But terrorists have ravaged rural areas of the country for many years, and the violence cannot be explained away as one single crisis of religious genocide; the atrocious takeovers of Christian-dominated villages in Southern Kaduna, for example, are responsible for many deaths. In other words there is an overwhelming ethnic and religious angle to terrorism in Nigeria, but there is no single explanation for it. 

In many ways, Nigeria itself invests in the mass deaths of its own citizens by starving the public of a functioning infrastructure. They are denied appropriate medical care, education, food, and social amenities, and beyond this, citizens are exposed to violence from all kinds of kidnappers and extortionists, including the spectacular violence of the Jihadist terrorists. Nigerians are subject to what amounts to their own government’s state-sponsored violence, because the concepts of citizenship, and of the government’s responsibility to its citizens, have been lost.

Since the British left it over sixty years ago, Nigeria has lived through many iterations of democratic disillusionment and the broken promises of many military messiahs. The country is a conflation of overlapping and conflicting ethnic, religious, economic, and cultural interests; it is a story of political illusions and lies, sustained on fragmentalism, class apartheid, and ethnocentric desire; a hegemonic state, created by and for colonial interests, and sustained by its one percent elite. Nigeria has no binding principles that safeguard it as a nation, and has no place of ideological process for the development of such principles. It is an autopilot state with its political elites sitting in the cockpit, pretending to man the controls. 

This is the fertile soil in which impunity can thrive. In the criminal paradise of Nigeria, terrorists brandish the ransom paid by victims on TikTok and dare the government to stop them. Politicians conduct their corrupt activities in broad daylight, reckoning themselves sacred cows who are above the law. Politicians keep the security apparatus for the protection of their own families, while the masses exist in every kind of precarity, on the fringes of life. 

Local political and religious stakeholders often perceive the terrorists as their kin and protectors, like mafiosi with regional loyalties. Consequently some leaders, in keeping with their ethnic and religious sentiments, agitate for amnesty for their local terrorists, painting them as aggrieved fellow-citizens who should be forgiven by the government. Thus we have been treated to the obscene spectacle of terrorists meeting with politicians to hold “peace talks,” with the military and the police in attendance, and all shaking hands with the country’s purported enemies. Impunity is what Nigeria praises, it is the area in which the country innovates; its justice system is set up to blame the victims, and rationalize criminality away. 

This perpetual anxiety in which the country keeps its citizens also endangers diasporic citizens who have been asked to return home. But who will return to such a home? My hometown, Shao itself, has now become a den of criminals, and bandits are not far away in every Kwara border. My uncle encouraged me to think about my cousins, and why I should help them find their feet in the diaspora. I told him firmly that is not an option I am interested in. I really want to see Nigeria work. For years now, I have been thinking about the social crisis awaiting Nigeria because of the countless families, colleagues and friends thrown into disarray as they flee abroad in search of safety. Many of us, living in countries thousands of miles apart, may not see each other again.

For many in the diaspora the dream of return is evaporating, as the nation has left its subjects behind. Hopes for the country’s growth into a healthy democracy that improves the lives its people exist only in fiction. The only way out is the complete demolition of the longstanding, deeply rooted structures of impunity.

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