Member of the House of Representatives representing Gummi/Bukkuyum Federal Constituency of Zamfara State, Suleiman Abubakar Gumi, has raised the alarm that bandits are now targeting male children.
He disclosed this in Abuja over the weekend, in a chat with journalists, noting that when the terrorists entered any household, they would check the children, spare the girls and kill the boys.
“You know we lost about 56 souls in one attack and a lot of properties and people are living from hand to mouth and still the little they have is being destroyed, their animals killed or carted away, children, especially male children are killed …
“There’s a town in Anka Local Government, and one in my own constituency – Bukkuyum and Kuffa. Kuffa is in the main town where people are, so they went for a meeting and the town was left open and informants in their usual manner, informed the bandits and they came and by the time the vigilantes returned, they were ambushed and most of the casualties are those vigilantes in Anka …
“Bukuffa is also a notorious place where they cannot infiltrate normally. So, when they got the opportunity, they entered and they were looking for every male child to kill. No matter how small, they would open and see if it’s a girl, they would leave, but if it’s a boy, they would bring him out and kill him.
“And they were looking for men mostly and then the women flee. So, that change in tactics is telling us that something has changed too. I’m not sure if it has to do with the declaration of them as terrorists, but it might be because if you declare someone a terrorist, that means the strategy, your own rule of engagement changes and that means they have to change their own rules of engagement too,” Gunmi said.
However, Gumi affirmed that the army and police were overstretched, noting that the authorities must restrategize to win the war against banditry.
“The government is doing a lot. Recently, the governor of the state, His Excellency, Bello Matawalle went to Niger Republic. This is another strategy to cut the supply of arms and ammunition because Niger is the main route for weapons proliferation. If we can get Niger Republic to block all access to all entry points, then what the bandits have will definitely depreciate and naturally the fight too will cease. That’s one angle.
“The Military is over-stretched, the Police can’t be everywhere and if we can get the vigilantes to guard the villages that are within the outskirt of local governments and bigger cities, then we would have a very good arm of security for people that are not covered by the security agents.
“… going by… what is happening in Zamfara, we have two sets of bandits: we have those that are just trying to defend themselves from being profiled because of the actions of others, and they are forced to pick arms to defend themselves. And at the end of the day, they all go back to banditry because once you seclude yourself in an area where you cannot have the economic gains, what do you do? The easiest thing is to kidnap and get money to buy more weapons and feed your army.
“So, if we can get those ones to stop their act and come back to the main folk through some form of amnesty, then what is left in the forest can be easily dealt with. Those original bandits we can kill, you can show them that government is stronger than any individual in this country … it is the only way we can have peace. Let them see the force of the government, then they will accept peace by force. Otherwise we will just go into a killing frenzy, they kill, we kill, they kill, we kill and before you know it a lot of people will lose their lives before we achieve peace.
“… So we have to sit down and re-strategize and find ways which we can stop this carnage,” Gumi added.
