Why militancy may return to Niger Delta, by Ledum Mitee

Ledum Mitee needs little or no introduction. An environmental activist, he is a delegate at the on-going National Conference and Chairman of Nigeria Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative, NEITI. As successor to the late President of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), he narrowly escaped former maximum ruler Sani Abacha’s hangman. He spoke to Sunday Vanguard on controversial issues at the confab and the high level of insecurity in the North. What can you say about the high level of insecurity prevailing in certain parts of the country? It is quite disturbing that in recent times, we have found ourselves in this kind of situation. Terrorism and general insecurity have become the number one problem the nation is facing today. My regret is that so much politics has been introduced into the issue. When there is a serious situation like this, I think politicians should become statesmen. Everyday, what you hear is one party blaming another and the other responding. This kind of situation makes me feel sick. I think the people who are being killed everyday in the North-East, Nyanya and Jos are ordinary Nigerians who may even be supporters of the two rival parties in the country. Ledum Mitee We should put politics aside in order to tackle the situation effectively. I think the security agencies should do more in terms of intelligence gathering. This is because the Boko Haram terrorists seem to be telling us that they have the capacity to strike anywhere. I think that to a large extent, the intelligence gathering capacity of our security agencies has not been fantastic. However, there have been noticeable flashes of hope which I think we should also commend. I don’t think we should only condemn their efforts. For instance, the fact that they were able to arrest the masterminds behind the Nyanya bombing within a short time is commendable. They even tracked one of them to far away Sudan. That is quite encouraging. I also understand that they have arrested some suspects in respect of the recent Kano bombing. I think this shows that they have achieved some successes. When you also consider the fact that Boko Haram is demanding that some of their members who are in detention should be released, it means that there have been some successes in arresting the terrorists. But what is worrying is that we thought at some stage that the terrorists had almost been overwhelmed but in recent times their attacks have become intensified. I believe that Nigerians should also assist in this fight against terrorism. In the first place we should stop the blame game and start dealing with the situation we are facing. We should device ways of passing information to the security agencies. Another aspect of the problem is that Nigerians as a people are very impatient. I say this because if you could recall, there was a terrorist attack during the marathon in Boston, United States about a year ago. One thing I noticed then was that the people did not abandon the marathon. They continued. The message they sent to the terrorists was that ‘in spite of what you are doing, you can’t intimidate us’. That was one lesson that I learnt from that incident. The lesson was that we must stop the terrorists from achieving their goal which is that of intimidating us. Secondly, the people of Boston were prepared to make some sacrifices. The whole city was shut down because their police was looking for two terrorists. But if Abuja is shut down because of the bombing in Nyanya, you know what will happen. Nigerians will start to scream. For instance, after the first bomb blast at Nyanya, people began to complain over the security checkpoint that was put along the Nyanya-Abuja Road. If you stop Nigerian motorists along the road and ask them to open their car booths for routine checks, people would complain. But the truth is that the security operatives may need to subject us to some type of discomfort in order to do their jobs of providing security. Nevertheless, the security agents must also be reliable and trustworthy for the people to be able to relate with them. It is quite worrying when you hear that even within the security agencies there seem to be leakages of information. This is not good because when someone wants to pass information to a security agency, you want to be sure that the person you are passing the information to would not compromise your safety. These are real challenges and I would like to appeal to Nigerians that this is not the time for the blame game. We need to see what we can do to get ourselves out of this situation. A terrorist may attempt to strike 99 times and fail but when he succeeds once, it may appear as if the security agencies are not working. We may not know how many strike attempts by terrorists have been foiled by the security agencies. Such foiled attempts don’t make the headlines.