Date Published: 07/20/10

South East Nigeria & Criminality

Gov. Theodore Orji, Abia State	Gov. Peter Obi, Anambra State	Gov Ikedi Ohakim, Imo State	Gov. Martins Elechi, Ebonyi State	Gov. Sullivan Chime, Enugu State

Nature of criminal activities in the South-Eastern states of Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo attained barbaric stage in the last few years and presently calls for global concern. Abia, which prides itself as God’s own state tops the chart among havens for criminals in the oriental states with Ebonyi at the lower table, apparently out of the state’s near absence in the commercial activities index with its attendant high poverty rate. Daylight armed robbery last for hours with private businesses and financial institutions as prime targets. Homes and even churches spontaneously receive touches of the bestiality from these men of the underworld. Families wake daily from torturous nightmares in the hands of these gun wielding barbarians.

Towering high among these criminalities and of greater concern to local and international interests is the wave of kidnapping raging through the climes of Igboland. Presumed in some quarters to be an offshoot of the Biafra war and, recently, a spillover of violent arms struggles in the creeks of the Niger Delta by deprived and paranoid groups allegedly seeking redress to decades of neglect by the Nigerian state, who insatiably fleece the regions resources to build a Nigeria where the geese that lay the golden eggs are raped to nothingness, this menace seem to have become an oriental norm. While more people argue the cause or origin of this monstrous trend, or its sponsors, the reality that is staring at and scorching each of us, the concerned, the victims, is that, like armed robbery, kidnapping has come to live with us.

I was not born within the years Nigeria invaded Biafra and not until eight years after the hostilities did I start my sojourn through this fairy space called Nigeria, but studies of events prior to the war years show that small firearms proliferation was not the craze. A lot of them were fabricated and procured especially in Biafra to complement the scarce ammunition in a war where the ‘rebels’ relied solely on God and the mere will to survive and therefore executed the thirty months war with anything that could inflict injury, death or even fear, as evidenced in the use of cymbals and steel bands to simulate intense shelling.

Three long gruesome years gone, survival remained paramount for average Biafran families especially the youths who excruciatingly tore through the rainforests, out of the war, hungry and hopeless. If there was a genuine call for disarmament after the war especially as it involved the Biafran militia or the civilian population, I was not there to ascertain its effectiveness or success. From this population and of course, soldiers who fought on both sides, it is certain that quite a number of arms were never recovered. What measures were put on ground to regulate the activities of ad hoc engineers who ingeniously fabricated those arms during the war? Soon after, there were cases of vehicles transporting people or materials meant for the reconstruction of war-torn Biafra being walleyed by armed bandits. Those vehicles were either looted or diverted at gun point. The economy was just picking up from the ruins and money was not concretely in circulation. Those who had guts and the gun saw an easy ride to riches and till today, the police is yet to burst the chain of armed banditry in the East and everywhere in Nigeria. These acts were complemented with ritual killings to facilitate robbery and other heinous crimes. Praise singing musicians did not help matters as they sang these cannibals to high heavens for their inexhaustible wealth. Igbo youths joined the nnukwu mmanwu (big masquerade) wagon in droves. The coming of the Bakassi Boys, an unpopular choice, who matched barbarism with barbarism, could not contain the storm. More arms and more people to carry them. The police and soldiers who, since the end of the war, had been idling in our barracks had at occasions been found to be among the sponsors and executioners of organized banditry.

Since independence, everything about Nigeria seems to speedily race in the wrong and negative directions, in parity with the hastily advancing technological world. Armed banditry becomes more sophisticated as the days roll by. Proliferation of firearms assumed unprecedented height, with these inglorious bastards stockpiling and distributing through channels yet to be disclosed to wearied Nigerians by the men paid to guard our territorial bounds, waters and airports.

While the ease brought to living in Nigeria with the introduction of GSM telephony cannot be overemphasized, it is worthy of note that it also triggered a tsunami of criminal intents. Kidnappers, armed robbers, traffickers in humans, con men, ritualists, assassins, vandals (the list is just inexhaustible) all found the trades simplified.

To unleash terror on the opposition, or create pandemonium while ballot boxes are snatched, silence the opposition or even assassinate opponents, contenders to our political offices resort to arming the Nigerian youth who readily maraud this gravely stage to earn peanuts with which he sustains his life in perpetual disillusionment. Whatever the beneficiaries of these arms do with them after the elections takes not a night’s sleep off the eyes of the sponsors. We have cases of armed youths becoming the albatross for the sponsors as evident in the Niger Delta crisis and the current robbery and kidnap imbroglio in the South East. Our leaders must own up to this, sincerely find a lasting solution to this embarrassment and apologize to Nigerians. Maybe amnesty could also be extended to our repentant prodigal brothers.

Mention had earlier been made of ritual killings and trade in humans. Families have had to swallow the orgy sights of mutilated bodies of relatives by ritualists who hover the Eastern landscape in their flocks. Yearly, hundreds of these mysteries die unravelled. Recently discovered randomly at locations in Abia and Enugu states and screamed boldly on front pages of Nigerian newspapers are factories where babies are manufactured for sale to buyers with a range of purposes. In those baby factories were poverty stricken teenage girls who run away from hapless parents to take refuge where young Nigerian men who had not found use for arms opt for handouts in exchange for their services of sapping their youthfulness in making our girls pregnant, to keep the baby production lines profitably busy. Upon delivery, the babies are yanked off breastfeeding mothers who in turn get their pay for a nine-month long pain of childbearing and the reality dawns: Future becomes bleaker and the last sap of hope drained. Prostitution becomes the last and only hope. The baby production and marketing racket plays a major role in this prostitution line, too – readily prompting bogus promises of a better life in lands far off and, certainly, where these promises are merely a mirage on a parched desert.

Everywhere and everyday, it is crime, crime, and more crime. It is an endless discourse in virtually all spheres of living in Eastern Nigeria, not ignoring the sound argument that criminality is a global trend. It is not peculiar to the Igbo clans. Our concern here is that the stories are presently bold and screaming, with special attention to Abia, my own state, where living has almost been consumed by this hydra-headed monster. Cultism, piracy, adulteration of products, obtaining by trick, rape, sorcery, etc, are all detestably parts of the present Eastern Nigerian trademark.

In as much as governments in the local, state, and up to the federal levels are plunging headlong into preparations for the consolidation of political structures in the bid to ‘capture’ their domains in the next elections, they would only keep circumventing matters as gravely as the insecurity of life and property of citizens. While approaches such as the recent visit by the Inspector General of Police, Mr. Ogbonnaya Onovo, to confer with the Abia state governor, Chief Theodore Orji and other South East governors and traditional rulers on measures to free the four journalists kidnapped along the Aba - Ikot Ekpene road are commendable, it is not enough action to rout this ugly trade. His house to house combing of communities within the crime areas could only proffer a temporary measure but the multiplier effect would make crime fighting in the region more complex. How disciplined and informed are the men IGP Onovo is dispatching for that assignment? Or are we watching the unfolding of another scenario, reminiscent of the Odi thing?

Core problems, especially of national interest, call for peculiar and core solutions and in these cases of kidnapping, ritual killings and armed banditry, stringent measures ought to be in place, far beyond reinforcing the police in the East by 10, 000 men. Occasions were when I found myself in the midst of policemen who would rather quit the job than be on a transfer list to less profitable regions like the South-East. And if per adventure these crops of officers get moved to the ‘less profitable’ regions, those of us from across the Niger know the story. Whose life and property would they ply that terrain to protect when they have to work hard to maintain the standards they left in their families and relationships back in Lagos and elsewhere? By hook or by crook, man must wack! They join the tune when they cannot beat the criminal tempo. They get drowned in the fouled system to remain afloat in Nigeria’s troubled economies.

Who says community or even state policing is not a better 21 st century option than the beleaguered conventional and now obsolete federal structure? Our pronounced diversity religiously, culturally and politically demands this if we hope to take any progressive step in the direction of crimes reduction, especially in the Eastern enclave, where settlements and commercial activities are known to be in nuclear units and population is dense. We know ourselves and the numerically insignificant foreigners in our midst. It worked for my village in the past. We knew all the criminals and each of their tendencies. If a goat got missing, we readily knew it was Nnanna. If a woman was raped, we knew the culprit(s) would not be outside the confines of Okeke or Okoro’s den. We knew those who walleyed our visitors with toy guns and those yam thieves. Those who practiced sorcery to kill or maim, we had their list – evidently! Their days were numbered and the last came when the community had to sacrifice those who could not escape our dragnet in hell. Did I hear you chorus jungle justice? Well, who cares? Heaven helps those who help themselves, period! Their families watched or participated in enforcing the jungle justice because, like Nigeria, we had degenerated from moral decadence to barbarism.

The next set of vandals that came all the way from Onitsha to roll away the cables through which my people toiled to shreds to bring electricity to my neglected community met same jungle justice, if that’s the phrase you chose – six of them, courtesy of our effective community policing and mastery of our terrain. My village was rewarded by the state government with drums of cables and a brand new step-down transformer for that feat, unprecedented in the history of Abia state and vandalism. The voice was unanimous never to hand in our terrors to the authorities because previous experiences taught my people bitters lessons when criminals only returned to our soils from the Arochukwu prisons, hardened and more determined to inflict pain.

With an ill equipped and highly corrupt police as presently constituted, efforts aimed at the direction of stemming the high wave of crime in the region would be a swim against the tide. A crime bursting and overzealous cop who had spent all his service period in the North or elsewhere, and who never got acquainted with the complexity and density of settlements, terrain and high humidity would find an assignment like routing criminals well grounded in the eastern rainforests impossible, except he was posted on tip-off to a crime spot. This lack of information or basic knowledge of the operational base, coupled with ill equipment and deep-rooted corruption take these officers off their original assignments. They resort to abetting the crimes they were posted to rout or adopt extortionist measures to survive in the ‘less profitable region.’

It is incontestable that while this writer restricts his discourse to the East, criminals operating in that sphere are not all Easterners. It is common knowledge that criminals, like singer masquerades, do not have a definite arena. They are mobile and move quickly to regions where their footprints have not been felt soon after their operations in an area come under the searchlight and hiding places begin to come close in.

The resolution by the state governors to confiscate the C of Os of properties found to be used in abetting crime in the East is another step in the right direction but still calls for more stringent measures. This could be facilitated through community policing, still. Dr Orji Uzor Kalu, the immediate past governor of Abia state, before the expiration of his tenure, had decimated the component constituencies into smaller units called autonomous communities, presided over by traditional rulers, the Ezes. I believe that action was multi-dimensional. It not only put to rest, decades of chieftaincy tussles among communities, it also brought governance to the roots. Those properties or criminal’s hideouts are located in the domains of these traditional rulers. My own Eze has the identity of his subjects in his finger tips, even those of us that dwell in the cities. He knows the background of every adult and could readily pick out a foreigner. Nothing happens around our community, up to the bounds, eleven kilometers away from his throne, without his knowledge. The community is well policed, by my people who are generally farmers. The palm wine tappers and palm tree climbers provide sure aerial coverage of our entire landscape and our hunters traverse the lands day and night. Every strange movement is promptly reported, same reason the clampdown on the vandals was a huge success. Age Grades below 60years take turns to keep watch in and around the community while others go to work and it has been a routine since time immemorial. Primitive, you’d say. What aspect of Nigeria is civilized, after all?

Governments in the East could go a step further by calling those Ezes to question for happenings in their domains. They can’t be totally ignorant of the activities or suspected movements in their area. Governments should also be sincere and proactive in their educational, job creation and economic empowerment policies aimed at driving moral decorum back into the skulls of our restless youths.

While measures are experimented with, in our bid to return to normalcy and embrace honest ways of money making, I call on my Eastern brothers and sisters to stop this craze and choose the path of honour, where hitherto Igbos belonged. The world over, we are known to be enterprising and resilient. We are known to excel in all honest fields.

Brethren, we have God and men on our side. Let’s return to glory. Patience is the key.

Uka K. Ugwa is an upcoming Social Commentator and writes from Lagos, Nigeria

Uka Kalu Ugwa

(08036019934, 08098985081)