A half century of banditry in Nigeria, By Chidi Odinkalu
Since well before Nigeria’s return to elective governance in 1999, the country has been overtaken by a progressive escalation of what Hannah Arendt in her classic On Violence called “a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics”. In contemporary Nigerianism, the word for this is “banditry”. “Bandits” is a conveniently capacious bogeyman for insecurity in Nigeria that precludes necessary questions as to the provenance of the descent into lawlessness. It captures diverse elements that may include terrorists, cultists, herdsmen, kidnappers,criminal gangs, and militants. Originally applied to the motorcycle gangs who perpetrate carnage in different parts of Nigeria’s North-West, bandits have now become the trope for an intolerable toll of destruction by mostly non-state entities as well as the inexplicable haplessness of Nigeria’s Federal Government that has never been known to cringe at the thought of exterminating significant numbers of its citizens. This lamentable situatio...