Nigeria Times

By Idoko Ainoko
Someone said the other day that, “We can never go back to the old days prior to 2015, ” and I asked what he meant by that. It was when he explained to me that his position is based on the security situation in the country prior to 2015 that I got  his drift.

Prior to 2015, the security situation in the country was so bad that people move about without being sure of the next minute as planted bombs could explode at anywhere and at any time; suicide bombers could crash into any public space at the slightest chance, and terrorists could launch attacks and overrun any town or community they wish. To make matters worse, these heinous activities were not restricted to the precincts of the fringes of the Lake Chad region where the insurgents were concentrated, but were almost everywhere and in almost all regions.

Major towns like Potiskum in Yobe State; Bama, Monguno and Biu in Borno State; Mubi, Michika and Garkida in Adamawa as well as Kano, Kaduna and the FCT became hotspots of terrorists’ activities. 

But 2015 marked a watershed in the improvement of security in Nigeria. 
With the inauguration of the current administration and the appointment of the current service chiefs, things took a turn for the better as the bombs stopped, attacks on towns and communities were highly reduced and restricted to certain places while normalcy returned to all parts of the country. The magic that did this from the benefit of hindsight, is selecting round pegs in round holes in the security network of the country.

All the service chiefs are top security personnel who have backgrounds of sterling performances and service to the fatherland unlike in the past when politics dominated such decisions.
Experts in security say this would be about the first time that the three requirement of courage, confidence and commitment would be given due priority in the appointment of service chiefs.

These three, according to time tested records on security,  form the basis for appointments into the top echelon of the military the world over and that in situations where any of the two are found in a person,  it is considered to be a huge advantage not to talk of  having the three in a personnel.

Any commander in chief whose service chiefs come with the three attributes, is considered as not only lucky but well equipped to take care of any eventuality. With the improvement in the security situation in Nigeria and successes recorded in the theatre  of operations, one can say without fear of contradiction that it was these  three qualities that the  President saw in the current set of chiefs before appointing them.

It goes without saying that it is because they have convinced him that he has made the right choice that he decided to retain as it would not be easy finding these attributes in one fell swoop. The first act of courage demonstrated by the service chiefs was moving to the theaters of operation any time action is needed on the battle field unlike in the past when top security officials sit in the comfort of their homes in Abuja and other state capitals giving orders to troops while making more demands for funds.

The service chiefs repeated this recently when they moved to Katsina in the wake of fresh attacks in the Northwest.  When the President extended the tenure of the security chiefs, it was gathered that the extension may not be unconnected to a job well done by the service chiefs for ensuring law and order and peace of the country.

It was said that their input made it possible for Nigeria to have elections in all parts of the country but ensure it was crises free. Secretary to the government of the Federation SGF , Boss Mustapha had also expressed same sentiments when explaining why the President is more disposed towards  retaining the service chiefs.

He said while the President reserves the right to do as he wished, the security situation in the country requires thorough and meticulous handling. As the security chiefs move to the theatres of operation when the occasion demands, the chief of army staff, Lt. General TY Buratai has been outstanding.  

On assumption of duty, the army chief moved to the Northeast and engaged troops in physical drills and warm up exercises before moving with them to forests and other strongholds of the terrorists. He repeated the act in April this year when the insurgents were regrouping to launch attacks on Nigerian communities and since then, it has been one succes story after the other. This shows rare courage as there are layers of command the General would have relied on to get the job done but did not fear the risk to his life and was physically present at the battlefield.

This is at a time troops were running away from the battlefield due to the perception that the insurgents were better equipped than them. But Buratai, knowing that bravery is more important than any sophisticated weapon, used himself to show example to the troops and since then, the story of the fight has not been the same again.

This naturally comes with confidence as even if the courage was there, the troops would not have been motivated if they have not seen the kind of confidence displayed by the Chief of Army Staff. 

In the Art of War by Sun Tzu, it was made clear that the battle is won or lost at the level of confidence as even when one has the weapon and the confidence is not there, not much can be achieved.  Another thing this shows is commitment to the cause of defending the nation and passion for the realisation of one of the cardinal objectives of this administration, to ensure adequate security for Nigeria and her citizens. 

Without the level of commitment that drives an official to apply his skill and talent to a cause, the story in the Northeast would not have been different. All these have helped to make the war against insurgency and terrorism the success it is in Nigeria today. Indeed Nigeria cannot go back to the pre-2015 era of violence and mayhem as it seems to be in safe hands.

Ainoko is a public affairs expert and wrote this piece from Kaduna.

By Bassey Akpan

For an organization or platform that prides itself as a new outlet, the only thing worse than being unprofessional is when the unprofessionalism is driven by an obsession to settle scores, which could be made even more sickening when such score settling is escalated into a proxy war.

Sahara Reporters, a news platform that is hardly different from the persona of its publisher, Omoyele Sowore, is on this slippery slope and in a rapid slide into infamy owing to the way its unprofessionalism has been made worse in its obsession to settle scores with President Muhammadu Buhari. The sick dimension to it is that one of the ways the publication has decided to prosecute its “destroy Buhari” war is to persistently demonize the Nigerian military, particularly the Nigerian Army. The criminal dimension of this warped enterprise is the series of crimes that Sahara Reporters has committed in the strident bid to cast aspersion on the Army in order to tarnish the record of President Buhari.

Its laughable escapades are limitless, and instances abound. For example, it published the falsehood of the death of Ghali Umar Na’Abba, a former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and that of Sheikh Abdullahi Bala Lau, the National President of Jama’atul Izalatul Bid’a Wa Ikamatus Sunnah (JIBWIS) while the man was busy conducting virtual preaching in Yola. In the desperation to validate its lies as the truth, the website went as far as locating the revered cleric’s death in Jos with photographs of a phantom funeral thrown in to make the inaccurate and false stories look respectable.

Granted that things had not always been the way they presently are between Sahara Reporters and President Buhari, there is no way to make excuses for its pure criminality garnished with a penchant for blackmail. At the height of the Goodluck Jonathan and his People’s Democratic Party (PDP) era, while President Buhari and a host of other then opposition figures were pointing out the failings of that government, Sahara Reporters was on the standby to air these voices. The arrangement served its purpose; a news platform that was then considered several layers below a news rag had the opportunity to report contents that were authentic and backed by reputable names as opposed to the diet of hogwash and leaks from embittered Jonathan cabinet members that it was feeding its readers. It has gone back to that junk status or below the rating of a news rag, only that it actually got worse.

Upon Jonathan’s sack by the electorates, Sahara Reporters, which in reality is a pseudonym for Sowore, perhaps thought that the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria was spoil of war to be shared among just anyone that made haranguing Jonathan a past time. He was reportedly angling to be named the Minister of Information by President Buhari in his first term. Such pipe dreams. What he failed to realize, which Sahara Reporters is yet to appreciate till date, is that President Buhari is not in the mold of “your enemy’s enemy is my friend.” Mr. President, rather than embrace burning coal to his bosom, for that is what giving Sowore any appointment would have amounted to, settled for professionals and upright Nigerians to populate his government. The result of that is the crop of military chiefs that have met Mr. President’s expectations in many areas such that he has retained them even in the face of the campaign of calumny that has been sustained against them by the likes of Sahara Reporters.

Sowore responded to his failure to make the cabinet, and indeed any government appointment, by drawing an imaginary battle line against the government by launching a sustained campaign of misinformation and disinformation against the Army. Perhaps thinking that he has gained a cult following that will enable him leverage his anti-government rants to make a populist hijack of power, Sowore ran as a presidential candidate in the 2019 General Elections and the 33,953 votes he scored in a country of over 198 million and with 82,344,107 registered voters is confirmation that Sahara Reporters’ readership base is overhyped, consisting mainly of persons with questionable intellect and suspicious mental health.

This explains why none of such gullible readers ever challenged or questioned the trail of hatchet jobs that Sahara Reporters is doing against the military. This was the platform that started, sustained and perpetuated the account that the Army killed harmless Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN) militant members even though that group was to be later procedurally declared a terrorist organization. Sahara Reporters ran a similar racket for the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), another group that deservedly earned the label of a terrorist organization, it helped IPOB attribute mass graves from its atrocities to the Army and Nigeria Police Force after gory sights of hurriedly interred bodies were discovered in a forest. Its publisher, Sowore, was to later team up with IPOB’s fugitive leader, Nnamdi Kanu. After a meeting with the terrorist-on-the-lam, Sowore launched the #ReviolutionNow protest that was meant to overthrow a democratically elected government through mob action, a clear indication that he was in cahoots with terrorists with the singular agenda of destabilizing Nigeria.

Its anti-military, anti-Army campaign is so profound that Boko Haram recruiters are reportedly printing its webpages as recruitment literature and collaterals to convince prospective terrorists that Boko Haram has the upper hand in a war it is losing to government troops. If this usage of its content for terrorist propaganda is inadvertent, Sahara Reporters never did anything to correct the impression. Rather, it has shown a commitment to running propaganda for Boko Haram.

These foray into terrorists’ supporting propaganda has been explained away by some analysts as part of an elaborate destabilization agenda that is meant to make Nigeria a failed state. The logic is that the bouquet of foreign donor funding that is propping up the online publication are in reality a laundered form of payment for Sahara Reporters’ contribution to promoting terrorism in Nigeria in addition to being an anchor news platform for releasing contents that are meant to undermine the Nigerian state – a site that publishes contents meant to damage Nigerian institutions such that mainstream news organizations are then pressured as a result of competition to run a toned down version of such stories.

The analysts with this projection are not off the mark. What they did not add to their assessment of Sahara Reporters and Sowore is their demonic zealotry to malign the Nigerian Army as a conduit to get at President Buhari. They shop for stories to paint the military bad and have even been known to have funneled money to vulnerable ones among the troops to incite a contrived mutiny. They have in other instances used costumed actors to stage videos of discontent on the war-front in addition to propped interviews with faceless soldiers or alleged ex-soldiers all with a view to paint the government of the day bad and abuse the military for this purpose.

What Nigerians and indeed the world should know is that believing one line of texts in Sahara Reporters’ publications is to fall for a scam. Let no one make any mistake that the selective attack on the Nigerian militray is anything professional or about the competence of the men and women who are in battle with the enemies of Nigeria day and night. Let no one make the mistake that the persistent attack on the military and government is about good governance in Nigeria. Let no one make any mistake that it is about what the government is not doing or has done. The brief Sowore’s Sahara Reporters has is simple. Demonize Buhari. Make Nigeria bad and let the country go up in flames to please the colonizers that this below-rag-status publication works for.

If the past ten years has taught anything about Sahara Reporters, it is that this organization is incapable of the introspection that will prompt a revert to editorial principles, which it never had for one day since inception. For Sahara Reporters, reporting falsehood is a tradition buoyed by the false sense of being able to abuse the ubiquity and limitless reach of the internet to push its misleading contents at Nigerians while remaining beyond the reach of Nigeria’s legal jurisdiction because it is ensconced in New York, United States, a country against which it dare not publish the kind of incendiary contents it publishes against the President of Nigeria, the state and the military.

But it is time to leverage the relevant anti-terrorism legislation, same way the United States would have done, such that whatever presence the publication has in Nigeria could be held liable for the terrorist activities of its parent office in the US. The authorities should also exploit inter-agency cooperation to thwart the ability of this criminal enterprise to raise money for supporting terrorists with propaganda as it is currently doing – all that is required is freezing its banks accounts while placing the accounts of its staffers on a terrorism watchlist.

Sahara Reporters is at liberty to hold grudges against President Buhari just as it is free to nurse its gripe against him and his government, but wittingly or unwittingly supporting the cause of terrorists in an attempt to demonize the military as a way of maligning President Buhari is a red line that few countries in the world will allow a news publication to cross. Why should Nigeria tolerate such?

Akpan is a pan- Africanist and wrote this piece from Uyo.

By Isaiah Atuluku

With due respect to the Daily Trust newspapers, which is unarguably one the leading dailies in Nigeria today, the lead story of its Monday 29th June, 2020, edition is highly misleading.

While one is not holding brief for the Nigerian military, those of us resident in parts of the country constantly under the attacks of bandits and insurgents wish to be allowed to say something about military operations so as to correct the general impression created by your story, to wit, that the various operations launched by the military under various codenames are all hype and no substance.

While one may not fault the idea of the story to dig deep into details of military operations, the conclusion drawn by the story is faulty in that it did not factor in the gains of the military operations within the five years in question.

Even if the military spokesman was not available at the time of filing the report as your report stated; simple checks by your correspondents, like visiting some of the affected areas or talking to residents  would have revealed the gains made by the military in launching the various operations.

I am a resident of Birnin Gwari in Kaduna State, but I was forced to flee the local government when attacks by bandits became an hourly affair.

But through the launch of some of these operations, even though one cannot claim that normalcy has returned, we most definitely cannot say nothing has been done and many of my relations have returned.

We have seen troops come to our rescue and sometimes even when they suffer casualty, they have not left us to our fate but have been unrelenting is seeing that we are safe and secured.

We the members of the affected communities are so proud of what the military operations have done in our communities that it would be most uncharitable for us to remain mum when such conclusions, like the one in your paper, are drawn about the activities of the military in our communities.

If your reporters have bothered to visit the affected communities, they would have observed that nothing gives the members of those communities more joy than seeing a uniformed security man on patrol.

I can tell you without fear of contradiction that if you place  Ghana-Must-Go bags filled with money at the doorsteps of each household, there won’t be much jubilation as villagers seeing a battalion of soldiers moving around the vicinity. 

This is because the people no longer have interest in anything but to stay alive and it is through these operations which your story is trying to ridicule that some of us are live today.

Aside that, I know that it cannot be true that the tactics in all the military operations have remained the same and that the military authorities only fancies giving them different names, like your report claims. 

This is not correct.  With my little training in crime and crime prevention, I have come to know that no system of crime is exactly the same as each derive from a particular aim, time and measure. 

If crime mutate according to time, location and other factors, it would be wrong to assume that an operation carried out today in a particular location with the same target can be the same with another operation targeted at the same set of criminals on another day even if it is on the same location, not to talk of when the location, time, logistics and peculiarities are different. 

I noticed that your reporters also counted the phases of an operation, as different from the main one it derived from. For example, saying operation Harbin Kunama iii is different from the previous ones under the same code name is wrong because while they are a continuation of the previous exercises, the need to have them classified under a different phase is to indicate that the, the personnel, geography and logistic are different and these are done purely for proper identification and record purpose.

Your report, in the bid to support your claim that the operational code names are numerous also separated the indigenous names with the English translation

For example, Ayem Akpatuma is the Tiv name for Operation Cat Race but it enjoyed a distinct classification in your story.

Even as a layman, I know that the military operations have recorded major successes in execution and I feel that if the only way the military can tackle the diverse modes of attacks on communities is to reinvent itself through numerous operational codes, then so be it.

But let me mention some of the successes of the military in the field operations to show, unlike what your report is projecting, that much has been achieved.

In 2015, shortly after the present crop of service chiefs were appointed, the military under the code name of operation Lafiya Dole embarked on a major operation which sacked the entire Boko Haram terrorists population from their operations headquarters at Sambisa Forest and the military captured and established a base at Camp Zairo.

This was what led to the declaration by the Federal  Government that the Boko Haram has been technically defeated.

In June 2016, the Battalion, 22 Task Force Brigade based on information received that  Boko Haram terrorists earlier dislodged  at Chukungudu and Hausari villages during a clearance operations, were migrating towards Muska village in Gamboru Ngala Local Government Area of Borno State, conducted fighting patrol operations in the area and during the encounter, the troops killed 10 Boko Haram terrorists,  captured 2 alive and rescued a woman with her baby that were held hostage by the terrorists.

The troops also recovered several equipment, arms and ammunition that include 6 AK-47 rifle magazines, 56 rounds of 7.62m (Special) rounds of ammunitions, 1 bundle of detonating cord, a Manual on how to prepare Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs)  2 rifle magazine pouches, a Techno IPad, a Nokia mobile telephone handset and 1 Gionee mobile telephone handset among other things.

Between 2016 and now, the military has recorded various number of victories under the operation but the height of it was in May this year when within two months after the Chief of army staff, Lt. General Tukur Yusuf Buratai led Nigerian troops in major victories, claimed the lives of 1,015 terrorists and also led to the arrest of 84 of their collaborators.

Under Operation Sharan Daji, troops in the North-West zone among other victories also killed 35 armed bandits and arrested 38 of them and handed them over to the police in the various states of their arrest. 

In addition to that, 6,009 various animals were recovered within the zone as well as several AK-47 rifles, dane guns, and a variety of weapons and ammunition.

Under Harbin Kunama, troops in June 2019, killed 24 criminal elements during its operation Harbin Kunama III in Kano, Kaduna and Niger states within one month of operation.

The operation also recovered N1.1 million cash, 56 assorted arms, 374 cows and 104 goats while 20 kidnapped victims were rescued.

Not quite a month after that, troops of “Operation Thunder Strike” and “Operation Harbin Kunama III”  killed five suspected bandits and arrested four others during two separate operations in Chikun and Igabi Local Government Areas of Kaduna State.

In another operation, soldiers also arrested 17 bandits in Katsina and killed one of them during a clearance operation.

After that operation, residents of Dagu village hailed the Army for destroying hideouts of the bandits, who have been terrorising villages in the area.

In June 2019, no fewer than eight bandits were killed and 17 other collaborators arrested by troops of Operation HARBIN KUNAMA III under the 8 Division Nigerian Army, Sokoto, while five bandits’ camps and 25 motorcycles were destroyed in the operation.

This was followed by the arrest of a notorious kidnapping kingpin, Mallam Bawa Gomna and 20 others during operations around Batsari, Jibia and Safana local government areas of Katsina State.

Under Operation Python Dance, troops were able to put to a stop the secessionist bids of some elements on 2017.

In February 2018, effort of the Nigerian Army to fish out criminals and protect farmlands in Benue State and it environ led to Exerciae Ayem Akpatuma which among other things led to the arrest of perpetrators of herdsmen/ farmers clash and put a stop to violence in Benue state. 

Another problem with your report is that while you quoted the National Security Adviser, Babagana Monguno, as saying that the president had in a close door meeting with service chiefs stated that their best was not good enough, your report did not reflect even one in the many instances where President Muhammadu Buhari had commended the military for a good job like when the chief of army staff handed the flag and Quran of the Boko Haram leader to the President. 

I believe the report would have been better of these issues have been reflected or factored in.

Atuluku is a member, militray writers association of Nigeria .