Moving to curb insecurity

What brought Nigeria’s president, Olusegun Obasanjo, and his Chadian counterpart, Idris Deby, together in the northeast Nigerian city of Maiduguri on 11 August was the need to stem cross-border banditry by remnants of Chad’s rebel factions. The 90-minute meeting was their second in three weeks, the previous one being in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena. It yielded a decision to begin joint border patrols with a view to restoring peace to northeastern Nigeria and the adjoining region in Chad. “It was basically decided that the two countries will contribute troops for aerial patrols with helicopters to track the movement of these pockets of armed groups that infiltrate our territory,” a senior Nigerian Foreign Ministry official told IRIN. The problem first came to the fore about three years ago, after many motorists fell victim to heavily armed bands of between 10 and 40 men. The marauders, who spoke foreign dialects, usually opened fire on passing vehicles before robbing them. Isolated communities were systematically attacked, usually at night, by bandits who first fired at the villages and then made off with their livestock and grain in the ensuing confusion. On market days, the bandits waylaid traders. Their victims have often included senior government officials on duty tours: the convoys of the state governors of Yobe and Borno have been attacked by the bandits on different occasions. By early last year, the banditry had spread to north-central Nigeria, in particular the highway linking the city of Jos to Bauchi and Maiduguri, and the Jos-Kaduna highway. “Things got so bad that economic activities became disrupted in much of the area as people now became afraid to go to farms or travel, and traders who used to come from the cities to buy agricultural produce stopped coming,” Peter Adamu, a local government official in Taraba State, told IRIN on a recent visit to Lagos. Additional troops were deployed in the area. Using ground patrols and aerial surveillance, they have contained, but not eliminated, banditry. The bandits now operate mainly in the Lake Chad area in Borno State, but appear ready to spread their activities once again if security slackens. Over the past few decades, Chad has been plagued by civil wars during which power has frequently changed hands - between former guerrilla leaders Goukouni Weddeye and Hissene Habre, and in December 1990, between Habre and Deby, his former army chief. Deby subsequently moved to consolidate his hold on power, and the remaining rebel factions seemed to fall apart, but as they scattered, several heavily armed bands infiltrated Chad’s relatively richer neighbour, oil-producing Nigeria, robbing and pillaging to maintain themselves. Some rebel groups who staged a failed insurrection in Niger are also said to have headed southwards into Nigeria. But some Nigerian security sources link the worsening of the banditry in the region to late dictator Sani Abacha’s plan to transform himself from military ruler to elected civilian president. Abacha was said to have encouraged the infiltration of the armed bands and maintained them as a special militia to fall back on if he failed to secure the support of the army in his self-succession bid. With Abacha’s death in 1998 and the emergence of a civilian government under Obasanjo, members of the militia were said to have become more desperate, leading to the upsurge in banditry on the eve of Nigeria’s return to democratic rule in May 1999. In its determination to end the menace, Obasanjo’s government has not only used Nigeria’s military strength, but also gone on the diplomatic offensive, using its leverage on both Niger and Chad to get them to act on their side of the border. The countries have also decided to utilise fully the framework of the Lake Chad Basin Commission, a subregional body to which they belong, to further their security interests.