Nigeria: Curbing the Influence of Non-State Actors

Many cheered when the self-acclaimed prime minister of Biafra and provocateur terrible, Simon Ekpa, was eventually arrested in faraway Finland.

After repeated calls for his arrest for inciting hatred and killings in the South East, the Finnish authorities arrested him and began prosecuting him for promoting terrorist acts. Before his arrest and ongoing prosecution, his hateful pronouncements caused a lot of damage in the South East.

Clearly, Ekpa and others like him are symptomatic of a leadership vacuum, one that draws from the failures of leaders across the board. For clarity, agitations for better living and fair treatment of citizens aren’t bad or illegal in themselves. Such causes are usually noble and non-violent.

Nothing justifies the indiscretions of the likes of Ekpa, which have wrought untold pain and anguish on the polity via the hate they incite while mouthing off the oppression of the people. What’s worse is forcing citizens to adopt or believe in a quest through violent means.

Nevertheless, the question remains why people like him were able to hold the minds of some citizens captive so that they could subsequently cause upsets in the polity.

Sociopolitical leaders are perceived to have failed to rise to the challenge of moral leadership in the social and political sphere.

Amid the debate about traditional rulers having some constitutional role, it seems that the system is losing its moral and cultural appeal with the masses.

Political leaders abandon their areas of superintendency for weeks on end and complain about ungoverned spaces in the face of security and social crisis.

To make matters worse, elected office holders barely go to interior areas in their states during campaigns for election and make high flying promises. After then, having occupied office, they willfully forget such places exist in the state.

For most governors, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) is their operational base. The culture of governing their states from Abuja has become a style, with the excuse that a governor can oversee his state from anywhere. This willful negligence of duty has been a long practice, and it seems to be on the increase.

This failure of leadership has caused a huge disconnect between the leaders and the people, who have been neglected for far too long, negatively impacting the trust quotient of elected and opinion leaders.

From normalising failed campaign promises to using state institutions to deliberately convey untruths, citizens have become disillusioned and gullible to non-state actors who profess a scintilla of truth, no matter how twisted.

Citizens have increasingly developed itchy ears for persons who give them alternative information to what the government says. Nothing defines a simmering socio-political crisis more than the above scenario.

Of course, Nigeria’s security intelligentsia cannot be exonerated for how these non-state actors have continued to thrive in the system. The need for a total shift in orientation cannot be overemphasised. Governance has to be deliberate and not cruise control or business as usual.

The clamour for an approach to governance that ensures quality leadership has raged for decades. However, a leadership recruitment process–as seen in our political party system–appears to be captured by a set of unbridled power mongers without an agenda for development.

This crisis needs to be assessed critically to ensure that only persons with clear ideas of positive governance get to contest elections and occupy offices. Political parties must also look beyond enormous fees for their elective forms. They must begin to pay more attention to the weight of candidates’ ideas rather than how heavy their financial chest is.

Our royal fathers have been doing well, but we need them to do more. Their role as custodians of the people’s culture and tradition cannot be misplaced in the race for dominance by political activists in the guise of democratic practice. We urge them to continue to interface between the state and their people but also provide strong moral bastions and critical cultural structures to help their subjects resist the lure of non-state actors seeking to exploit them.

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The intelligence system, as part of Nigeria’s security architecture, needs to be more conscientious and proactive in their professional attitude towards these irritants who dominate the non-state actor space. Intelligence gathering by security agencies through community-relations engagements should be more constructive and tailored to win over the people.

While it is convenient to cheer Ekpa’s arrest and arraignment, if the vacuum that he filled isn’t occupied constructively and positively by state actors, another Ekpa would emerge, one that might, God forbid, be more daring having learnt from the mistakes of their predecessors in the game of mischief and death.

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