The 2023 Christmas eve’s wanton massacre of more than a hundred innocent and defenseless Nigerians in Plateau State by armed criminal bands is one of the many gory wastages of precious human lives by anarchic scoundrels marauding parts of the country with little or no meaningful responses from the nation’s security establishment. The failure of the Nigerian government on this equal protection constitutional obligation has become a huge cause for worry. It is obvious that the unarmed innocent citizens are at the mercy of their killers because their assailants are armed to their teeth while they are not.
It is even more worrisome that these attackers proceed to forcefully seize and occupy the ancestral homes, farmland and whatever they find in those places that they have “conquered” all to the shame of the nation’s security establishment that is constitutionally charged with the responsibility of safeguarding the lives and property of every citizen within the nation’s boundaries.
As long as this imbalance in weaponry persists, the killers shall always have their way, more so, as the government has over the years proven itself incapable or unwilling to step in decisively and maintain some degrees of martial equilibrium in the one-sided orgies of life wastage and dehumanization being perpetuated by one group over the others. The idea of Internally Displaced Persons, IDPs, within the territory of Nigeria is unmistakable evidence of the abdication of the constitutional duty of the government to protect lives, if only to avoid the likely scenario of unending revenge, counter-revenge and other cyclical reprisals.
The only probable reason why these criminals can so easily invade these communities at will and with aggravated bravado is the fact they know that their victims have no means for their own defense and also that there are no institutional security agencies on the ground that are willing and able to prevent them. That is why Nigeria must find a way to check this one-sided killings and the genocidal wiping out of unarmed persons for whatever reasons.
These criminals who are mindlessly harassing, murdering and displacing these people from their homes are not in any way superior, wiser or stronger than their victims. The operative element in the horrible relationship is the superior firearms which the killers have illegally acquired and which the victims have no access to due to the existing legal and administrative constraints militating against their right to armed self-defense.
The Constitution of Nigeria and, indeed, the law of nature, recognise the instinctive human inclination to self-defense. The right to life is meaningful only if the holder has the means to effectively defend his life against an attacker whose only reason to want to waste his precious life is that he alone has a gun while his target is unarmed.
It is an indictment of the greatest measure that the Nigerian State would allow such a constitutional abomination to occur and persists unchecked as it seems presently. No one Nigerian group should be able to attack and drive away another group by force of arms without the State intervening authoritatively and decisively to restore the victims to their original homes and businesses and then proceed to punish those who committed the heinous crime through the application of the full amplitude of state lawful coercive powers.
“It is the same opportunistic logic that emboldens armed robbers who, in some bizarre cases, arrogantly send advance notices of their pending invasion and the citizens’ only option is to either run away from home or, in some pitiable instances, wait and pray that if and when the criminals come, they might limit themselves to just taking away their properties and spare their lives instead. The gruesome reality however is that, sometimes, they take both their lives and their properties!”
We have said it over and over in the past that “in many respects, Nigerians are today in similar, if not worse, situation of distrust for the government to protect their lives and property than that which confronted the Americans more than two hundred years ago. Their solution then was to promulgate the Second Amendment to their Constitution which provides, inter alia, that: “A well-regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
This amendment has woven itself into the fabric of the American society so deeply that abandoning it now has become exceedingly difficult in spite of the rising incidents of avoidable gun violence in that country due to the uncontrolled availability of guns.
“No matter what position one takes on the contemporary jurisprudential/ideological acrimony surrounding that clause, it remains the undeniable fact that as a result of the common understanding that everyone is entitled to own a gun in the US, the kind of swagger with which criminals arrogantly stroll into homes, towns and villages in Nigeria slitting the throats of innocent humans like rams and chickens can never happen there because everyman’s home is his garrison”.
As I have previously argued, the necessity for the right to bear arms is predicated on the level of insecurity in society. Ordinarily, the responsibility to safeguard the realm is that of the State within the Rousseauean philosophical framework of the proverbial Social Contract.
On the contrary, these bandits have managed to arm themselves to their teeth and it would seem as if the balance of power, vis-à-vis arms monopoly, has shifted in favour of the bandits who appear to be better equipped in term of arms and ammunition than the nation’s defense and security apparati. The only way to change the unfortunate situation is to proceed on an organised and regulated arming of the victim populations across the country. The arms so issued would be promptly accounted for and returned to the state’s amoury once the threat has been eliminated by the awareness that anyone can fire a gun.
That will at least result in a balance of power situation of mutual deterrent as against the unfair advantage that these sectarian and ethnic killers have presented us with. Whatever may be the motive for this carnage, whether economic, social or religious, they are able to carry out their nefarious intents because they are the only ones with arms.
As we have mentioned here before, “The only reason why criminal bands like Boko Haram have been able to terrorize and annihilate so many innocent citizens across a large swath of the nation’s territory is the fact that their victims have been largely unarmed and defenseless. Idiots, good-for-nothing drunks and drug addicts who are recklessly totting AK-47 rifles and other assortment of arms and ammunitions have been gleefully attacking and wiping out villages and towns without much of deterring resistance from the attacked communities or protective interventions from the government”.
“This has created a clearly unequal battleground situation in which the terrorists always enjoy unfair advantages and are routinely coming out of all encounters as the “conquerors” over the innocent victims. This unimpeded criminal advantage which they have been allowed to enjoy over innocent Nigerians must stop. Judging by the relentlessness with which they conduct their evil acts, it certainly calls for a new way of looking at society by all concerned for there to be an end or some check to the brutality.”
“It would have been a different thing altogether if the security apparati had been sufficiently alive to their institutional responsibility of checking these barbaric carnages being indiscriminately inflicted on the nation by those sectarian perverts and societal misfits masquerading as jihadists or herdsmen. That they are now able to roam so freely, intimidating and terrorizing communities and, indeed, the Nigerian State so casually, is due primarily to the fact that they alone carry arms while others do not. Ordinarily, the responsibility to provide security to the law-abiding citizens is that of the State which is formally represented by the government. The unfortunate reality today is that such civic expectations have become suicidal for the average citizen who cannot provide himself private security as the government has lost the capacity to protect them.”
In the absence of a credible official protection for the citizens, commonsense dictates that they should assume the natural responsibility of self-preservation. The right to bear arms should therefore be restored to those who are presently been terrorized by their armed neighbours. To dismiss this commonsense approach would be a communal suicide in the face of a clear and present danger.
