The Mobility of Terror

Despite being nicknamed the ‘Giant of Africa’ by journalists and pundits, Nigeria is bedevilled by myriad security conundrums perpetrated by non-state armed groups (NSAGs). In the northeast geopolitical zone, such groups include Boko Haram and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). In the northwest and north-central geopolitical zones, NSAGs called ‘armed bandits’Footnote¹ wreak havoc on local communities. Between 2011 and 2019, ‘more than 8,000 people have been killed – mainly in Zamfara state – with over 200,000 internally displaced and about 60,000 fleeing into Niger Republic’ as a consequence of the activities of armed bandits in the northwest region.Footnote² The armed bandits have also killed more Nigerians than Boko Haram, robbers, kidnappers and cultists combined, and were responsible for 47.5% of killings in 2019.Footnote³ Historians, political scientists and anthropologists have shown that armed banditry has existed in the northern region of Nigeria as well as the Lake Chad Basin since the pre-colonial and colonial eras, meaning this is not a novel phenomenon in Nigeria.Footnote⁴ However, with the advent of new resources such as mobile phones, Kalashnikovs and motorcycles, the vicious activities of armed bandits – the coupeurs de route – have intensified in the northern region of Nigeria where there are scarce opportunities for economic emancipation.Footnote⁵

A team of security experts tour the JSS Jangebe school a day after over 300 schoolgirls were abducted by bandits in Zamfara, Nigeria, February 2021. Courtesy of Reuters/Alamy/Afolabi Sotunde

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Because these loosely organised criminal gangs exploit vast forests stretching from northern Nigeria to Niger and connecting to Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic, Mali, Burkina Faso and Senegal,Footnote⁶ armed banditry has been largely explained through the ‘ungoverned spaces’ theoretical framework. Ungoverned spaces are understood to mean areas or places where ‘territorial state control has been voluntarily or involuntarily ceded in whole or part to actors other than the relevant legally recognised sovereign authorities’.Footnote⁷ The scholarly contention is that the rise and persistence of the criminal gangs is due to the inability of the state to govern its forests and monopolise violence on its territory, leaving armed bandits to terrorise residents and road users in local communities in the northwest region.Footnote⁸ It is thus no coincidence that Nigeria has been called a ‘failed state’, as it is ostensibly unable to keep its citizens safe and secure.Footnote⁹ The recommendation of these political analysts is that the state must govern the forests and bushes to curb criminality. While it is of course true that governing territorial spaces is critical to quashing armed banditry, the ungoverned spaces argument is ‘a-mobile’ – not least because it overlooks the significant role of transport and mobility in furthering the activities of the criminal gangs.

This article seeks to uncover the extent to which mobility is central to comprehending and resolving the problem of armed banditry in Nigeria. Drawing on the New Mobilities Paradigm (NMP), the author contends that the state must effectively govern not just the territorial spaces but also mobilities if it is to succeed in curtailing the activities of the NSAGs. This article is divided into five sections. First, the methodology used for the research is discussed. Second, the NMP is analysed in more detail. Third, the article shows how constraints on mobilities explain the rise of armed banditry. Fourth, the criminal gangs’ weaponisation of mobilities to achieve their goals is explored. Fifth, the state’s attempts to govern mobilities are assessed. The article concludes by making a case for the governance of mobilities as critical to neutralising the NSAGs.

Methodology

Due to the security challenges in the northern region, coupled with the restrictions of the coronavirus pandemic, it was impossible for the author to conduct ethnographic fieldwork for this research article. For this reason, research relied on secondary sources such as newspapers, television interviews, radio broadcasts, political commentaries and academic literature that analyse armed banditry and varied forms of armed conflict in Nigeria. The information presented here was analysed in the context of the theoretical work and extant knowledge on armed conflict in northern Nigeria.

Bringing Mobilities Back In

According to the cultural geographer Peter Adey, ‘mobility is movement imbued with meaning’.Footnote¹⁰ This means, according to Adey, that mobility without meaning is nothing more than movement. However, this is not to suggest that mobility has a pre-existent meaning or significance. As Adey clarifies: ‘Mobility does not implicitly mean one thing or another. Mobility is not essentially good or bad. Rather mobility is given or inscribed with meaning and the way it is given meaning is dependent upon the context in which it occurs and who decides upon the significance it is given’.Footnote¹¹ Tim Cresswell contends that ‘[t]he movements of people (and things) all over the world and at all scales are, after all, full of meaning. They are also products and producers of power’.Footnote¹² Mobilities can take several interdependent forms.Footnote¹³ For this article, however, a distinction is drawn between social mobility (the change in one’s social status) and physical movement (the movement of people and objects from one location to another for varied purposes). These two forms of mobility are critical to understanding armed banditry in northern Nigeria, for the phenomenon stems from a lack of opportunities to address social immobility for an occupational group. It depends on a population that is stuck, yet constantly on the move to carve out opportunities for survival. As the next section highlights, a disproportionate number of the armed bandits are former nomads inhabiting a region with little or no economic opportunities, who employ motorcycles to torment local communities in their quest for socioeconomic emancipation.

The NMP was first advanced by Mimi Sheller and John Urry to counter the bias towards the sedentarism implicitly embedded in the social sciences. The social sciences, in their view, had been ‘static’ in that they had ‘largely ignored or trivialised the importance of the systematic movements of people for work and family life, for leisure and pleasure, and for politics and protest’.Footnote¹⁴ The NMP foregrounds transportation and mobilities in the study of social and political life by positing that the movements of people and things almost invariably have meanings and implications. In particular, they argue that automobility ‘impacts not only on local public spaces and opportunities for coming together, but also on the formation of gendered subjectivities, familial and social networks, spatially segregated urban neighbourhoods, national images and aspirations to modernity, and global relations ranging from transnational migration to terrorism and oil wars’.Footnote¹⁵ The NMP accentuates the idea that no place or space is an island; rather, all places, spaces and social relationships are embedded in networks of interconnectivity. Hence, the main point of the NMP is that mobility is central to human survival not least because movements provide individuals and groups with symbolic power to navigate all aspects of everyday life.

Since the advance of the NMP, it has contributed to numerous debates in varied disciplinary fields, including social anthropology, migration studies, urban studies, science and technology studies, cultural studies, tourism and transportation studies, to mention just a few.Footnote¹⁶ However, despite the theoretical importance of the NMP, the paradigm has been largely overlooked in the study of terrorism, insurgency and criminality.Footnote¹⁷ The implication is that the NSAGs are treated as groups specifically tied to vast ungoverned forests. This standpoint is, in this author’s view, misguided, not least because those forests would not be security conundrums were it not for movements in and out of them. The armed bandits are profoundly mobile; their movements in and out of the forests are enabled by physical objects such as automobiles and motorcycles. It is no wonder that they are called ‘motorcycle bandits’. As this article will show, one of the major reasons armed banditry has persisted, despite the state’s high-handed militarised approach, is that the state has failed miserably to effectively govern the mobilities of these criminal gangs, notwithstanding its laws banning the sale and use of motorcycles for commercial purposes in the northwest and north-central geopolitical zones. This article argues that not only are constraints on social mobility at the root of the armed banditry but also that physical mobility fuels the criminal activities of the NSAGs. Curbing the armed bandits’ weaponisation of mobilities and addressing grievances emanating from constraints on pastoralists’ social mobility is thus critical to the termination of armed banditry.

From Nomadic Pastoralism to Criminality

Depending on how one looks at it, armed banditry is the consequence of constraints on social mobility from nomadic pastoralism. Although not all nomads are armed bandits, ‘[m]ost of the actors are Fulani, the ethnic group that spreads across West Africa and is known for being nomadic pastoralists, while the communities being attacked are mostly Hausa farming communities’.Footnote¹⁸ In Nigeria, as well as in West Africa, the lifestyles of nomadic pastoralists are increasingly under threat due to a conjunction of factors such as environmental scarcity, political ecology, population pressures, urbanisation, political corruption and resource conflicts with farmers that have rendered pastoralists poor.Footnote¹⁹ Indeed, while there is no attempt to essentialise the membership of armed banditry, the term ‘armed bandit’ in the northwest zone is, in local parlance, shorthand for nomadic pastoralists of Fulani extraction who have taken to criminality in the absence of economic alternatives beyond cattle herding.Footnote²⁰ The Fulani were originally nomads, but some became sedentary and settled in the urban areas of northern Nigeria after the jihadi conquest – the Fulani War (1804–08) – of the Fulani revolutionary, Usman Dan Fodio. This brought about a distinction within the Fulani, with the nomadic ones choosing to continue herding cattle in forests and bushes while the sedentary ones abandoned nomadism to acquire education and get jobs in government.

What binds the sedentary and pastoralist Fulani is not just the identification with the Fulani culture (pulaaku) but also the ability to speak and comprehend the Fulani language, Fulfulde.Footnote²¹ However, criticisms of the sedentary Fulani for having abandoned pastoralism are not uncommon among the nomadic Fulani who tend to see nomadic pastoralism as constitutive of authentic Fulani identity. The sedentary Fulani are equally critical of nomadic pastoralism and tend not to subscribe to it, even though they may own some cattle.Footnote²² And, whereas the sedentary Fulani are predominantly Muslim and educated, the nomadic Fulani fuse parts of Islamic practices with traditional beliefs and generally lack formal education.Footnote²³ Clearly, although not all Fulani are nomadic pastoralists, there are many nomadic pastoralists among them who comprehend mobility and ownership of cattle as constitutive of Fulani identity. The nomadic Fulani who have turned to armed banditry are the focus of this article.

Mobility is central to the survival of the nomadic Fulani. Kristín Loftsdóttir asserts that the nomadic Fulani ‘base their ethnic identity strongly on livestock holdings and the mobility intrinsic to their economy’.Footnote²⁴ For the nomadic Fulani, cattle represent:

The social mobility of the nomadic Fulani is determined by their number of cattle.Footnote²⁶ Abandoning the nomadic lifestyle is tantamount to a loss of identity as the nomadic Fulani ‘regards cattle as the all-in-all of his life. To him cattle rearing is a way of life rather than an economic activity; cattle are an end in themselves as much as a means to an end’.Footnote²⁷ Even when the nomadic Fulani abandon their cattle to look for economic opportunities in urban spaces, they do not see staying in the city as abandonment of mobility or an attempt at sedentarisation. Instead, they view it as an ‘ongoing journey that will eventually lead them back to the bush’.Footnote²⁸ The nomadic Fulani’s mobile lifestyle has been – for centuries before the foundation of modern African polities in the Sahel and West Africa – adapted to fit variable environmental and climatic conditions. When the environmental conditions are unfavourable, they move in search of greener pastures for their cattle. Transhumance (the seasonal movement of livestock) is patently their survival strategy.

But because nomadic pastoralism is increasingly under threat from various ecological factors – stemming from both environmental and political causes – some nomadic Fulani communities in the northwest geopolitical zone have little or no means for social or upward mobility. Consider, by way of example, the following report:

Deprived of grasslands and grazing areas with which to feed their cattle, and lacking the education required to access jobs, the nomadic Fulani – many of whom are members of the violent criminal gangs in the northwest and north-central zones – exploit their knowledge of the vast forests where they used to herd cattle to make terror mobile. If social mobility used to be coterminous with cattle herding, the age-old practice of nomadic pastoralism now seems neither profitable nor sustainable to the nomadic Fulani, who must therefore find other means of livelihood and economic survival. This constraint on the social mobility of nomadic pastoralists such as the Fulani is the root of armed banditry, as they are willing to do anything to survive whenever cattle herding – their livelihood – is threatened by nature or human intervention.Footnote³⁰ Indeed, when an armed bandit – a former nomadic Fulani – was asked why he took to criminality, his response corroborated how the decision to become a bandit is in consequence of restrictions on nomadism and cattle herding: ‘We are deprived of keeping cattle because of lack of grazing areas. They have taken over the grazing areas, even the grazing routes are no longer there. Soldiers would take over [our] cattle, vigilante[s] would confiscate and gunmen would rustle. We have been rendered poor’.Footnote³¹ Additionally, the response from armed bandits regarding why they engage in criminal activities such as kidnapping, cattle rustling and looting corroborates the problem of social immobility:

Of course, abandoning the mobility associated with the nomadic lifestyle does not amount to giving up mobility in its entirety. That would mean extinction. Rather, the nomadic bandits merely replace the former mobile instrument of upward mobility (cattle) with another (automobiles) while maintaining their original homes in the thick forests. The advantage the armed bandits have over the state’s military is that – having grazed cattle in those forests (which are concentrated around rural, mostly underdeveloped, areas) for decades – they are more knowledgeable about the routes in the forests than law enforcement agencies. The automobiles are weaponised to acquire wealth by other means. The next section expands on how the armed bandits weaponise mobility to achieve their goals.

Weaponising Mobilities

The use of motorcycles or okadaFootnote³³ in Nigeria emerged in the 1980s due to the decline in formal public transport systems in urban areas coupled with economic recession and high inflation.Footnote³⁴ Gradually, motorcycles became the norm for alternative transportation in both cities and rural areas. Those who cannot make ends meet in the harsh economic climate take up okada business as a profession in the informal sector, conveying people from one spot to another at relatively high speed.Footnote³⁵ This is particularly true of the northwest geopolitical zone – the bandits’ abode – which is the poorest of the six geopolitical zones in Nigeria. Indeed:

Some unemployed young men in the northwest zone have taken up okada business to feed their families, pay children’s tuition fees, marry women and pay house rents. As one respondent underlined when asked why he took to the okada business: ‘Since United Nigerian Textile Company (UNTL) was shut down in 2006, I have had no other job. The gratuity paid to me could not even buy a plot of land. So I invested the money in Okada business … From the income generated, I pay school fees of my children, feed them and pay my house rent’.Footnote³⁷

Although the okada business enables the poor to cope with Nigeria’s precarious economic situation, the very same motorcycles – typically Honda ACE 125s – have been used by criminal gangs in the northwest zone for nefarious purposes. Prices range from 400,000 naira ($970) to 600,000 ($1,400) for a motorcycle,Footnote³⁸ and the armed bandits refuse to register the ones they purchase in an attempt to prevent the government from tracking and tracing them.Footnote³⁹ This has made it difficult to arrest criminal elements in the northwest as security officials are neither aware of the number of motorcycles in circulation in the region nor which ones are used to foment terror. It is these motorcycles that connect the armed bandits from the forests to the farms, markets, schools, hospitals, villages and highways where they kidnap residents and loot resources. Arms and ammunition are also transported through the vast Sahelian forests by motorcycles. Without them, the armed bandits would operate much less effectively: they use them ‘because of [their] ease of manoeuvrability. They can storm a town at once and they can move out at once’.Footnote⁴⁰ Motorcycles can also travel on poor-quality roads better than cars, especially in the northwest geopolitical zone where infrastructure is lacking. The motorcycle therefore serves as a vital weapon for bandits, akin to arms and ammunition.

A typical attack involves over 200 motorcycles with two armed bandits on each one. As one security expert noted:

Victims of abductions are conveyed to the forests before friends and relatives are called on to pay exorbitant ransom fees. Indeed, motorcycles have been pivotal to all the successful attacks perpetrated on schools and universities which involve the abduction of students and staff. For example, the kidnapping of 333 schoolboys of the Government Science Secondary School in Katsina state in December 2020 was made possible by the motorcycles.Footnote⁴² Looted goods and resources are similarly taken to the forests using the motorcycles. With such huge numbers of armed bandits – about 400 – available for many attacks on ordinary citizens thanks to the availability of motorcycles, the state’s weak law enforcement agencies are occasionally outnumbered and outgunned.

But the armed bandits do not weaponise only motorcycles; sometimes they also employ vehicles such as trucks and vans for criminal activities. This is usually the case when the armed bandits’ targets are animals – especially cattle. As previously mentioned, cattle symbolise economic, cultural and social capital. Reports show that, in 2015, an adult cow in Nigeria costs about 250,000 naira ($1,000).Footnote⁴³ In this case, trucks enable the quick movement of cattle to the forests before the arrival of security forces. Occasionally, they are used in combination with motorcycles to convey victims from the point of abduction to the hostage zone in the forests, where they are then distributed among different criminal gangs. For example, in February 2021, over 300 schoolgirls were abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School, Jangebe in Zamfara State. Official reports suggest that the armed bandits were able to carry out the attack with Hilux vehicles and motorcycles.Footnote⁴⁴

So critical are motorcycles that victims’ families are almost always required to provide the armed bandits with motorcycles in addition to paying exorbitant ransom fees for victims’ release. For instance, criminals demanded six Honda motorcycles – amounting to 3 million naira ($7,500) – as an additional condition to release 136 kidnapped pupils of Salihu Tanko Islamiyya School in Niger State who were abducted in May 2021.Footnote⁴⁵ Similarly, armed bandits imposed the purchase of 10 new Honda motorcycles on families and relatives of victims abducted from Greenfield University in Kaduna State in April 2021.Footnote⁴⁶

The armed bandits’ weaponisation of mobilities through the use of motorcycles has earned them the title of ‘motorcycle bandits’ – a conjunction which shows how much bandits are almost inconceivable without motorcycles. The lethality of the criminal gangs is largely due to their ability to manoeuvre with motorcycles on bad roads, carry out criminal activities at a very fast pace, and evade capture by and confrontation with the state’s security forces. The criminal gangs are feared and loathed by motorists, other road users and local communities. In fact, due to the perception that they are more powerful than the state’s security operatives, some local communities in the northwest have struck deals with the armed bandits. These ensure that communities are protected by the armed bandits, and the communities, in turn, provide the bandits with money, food and motorcycles.Footnote⁴⁷ Some farming communities also pay taxes to the armed bandits.Footnote⁴⁸ Such pacts have seemingly filled the apparent ‘governance lacuna’ in security provision by the state.

The persistence of armed banditry has had colossal impacts on communities in the northwest geopolitical zone and the entire Nigerian state. The conflicts have produced many internally displaced persons and refugees, with many fleeing to neighbouring Niger for safety. Schools, businesses and hospitals have been shut down due to fear of armed bandit attacks. The closing of some schools, in particular, does not bode well for education in the northwest. It is already the poorest geopolitical zone in Nigeria, with a literacy rate of 29.7% and ‘the highest number of out-of-school children in Nigeria. On top of those who do not attend school at all, millions of children are in the poorly resourced and ill-supervised Quranic school system, or almajiranci, which produces cohorts of unskilled youth’.Footnote⁴⁹ Some farmers and pastoralists have abandoned farming and cattle grazing and taken refuge in neighbouring states or camps for internally displaced persons with squalid living conditions. This negatively affects food security given that Nigeria is already one of the ‘hunger hotspots’ of the world, with millions – especially in northern Nigeria – at risk of dying from famine.Footnote⁵⁰

Moreover, the victims of armed bandits’ abductions suffer physical and psychological harm during captivity stemming from malnutrition, torture, rape, abuse and death. All these concerns prompt the question as to how the state has responded to the crisis. The next section looks at this in more detail.

State Responses to Banditry

Because armed banditry has been considered a problem of ‘ungoverned spaces’, the federal government and various state governments in the northwest geopolitical zone have largely employed ineffective measures to curb it. Such measures could be divided into carrots and sticks. The ‘sticks’ are mainly military and airforce operations, as well as legal measures. Military and airforce operations include Exercise Harbin Kunama III and Operations Puff Adder, Diran Mikiya, Sharan Daji, Hadarin Daji and Thunder Strike.Footnote⁵¹ For these, the military raids the forest enclaves and bushes from which the bandits operate. Whereas the Nigerian Air Force neutralises armed bandits through aerial surveillance missions, the Nigerian Army uses soldiers on the ground to identify hideouts and prevent abductions, looting and cattle rustling.

Legal measures include passing laws to stem whatever fuels the violence, such as the use of commercial motorcycles and illegal mining. For example, in early April 2019, the Nigerian government – persuaded that illegal mining drives terrorist activities in the northwest – banned mining in Zamfara and other states in the northwest geopolitical zone.Footnote⁵² This neither prevented illegal mining nor looting, cattle rustling or kidnapping by the criminal gangs. Of course, banning artisanal and small-scale miners from mining would not resolve the grievances of pastoralists who have joined terrorist groups; rather, it would serve as the breeding ground for poor residents to engage in criminal activities in collaboration with foreign nationals, as is already evident in Nigeria.Footnote⁵³ Restrictions on mining are unlikely to achieve much as socioeconomic opportunities are not created for young people – especially those in pastoralist Fulani communities – in the northwest.

Bans on the use of commercial motorcycles are also included in the legal measures. For example, in May 2019, the Nigerian Army banned the use of motorcycles as a means of transportation in the northwest zone in a bid to curtail armed banditry.Footnote⁵⁴ However, the bandits have strong ties to motorcycle vendors in the underground economy who supply them with unregistered motorcycles.

States in the northwest have also tried to curb armed banditry by shutting down telecommunication services. They were temporarily shut down in Zamfara, Sokoto and Katsina, and the sale of petrol in jerry cans was banned in September 2021 in an attempt to further blunt the mobility of the bandits. But these measures simply pushed them to neighbouring states, where they continued to wreak havoc on local communities.Footnote⁵⁵ The measures also severely impacted the lives and livelihoods of residents in the concerned states – especially those who depended on telecommunication services to support themselves. Depending on how one looks at it, the ‘sticks’ have largely failed to extirpate armed banditry in northern Nigeria.

The ‘carrots’ include the state negotiating with the criminal gangs and offering them amnesty or state pardon. For example, the governors of Zamfara, Katsina and Sokoto negotiated with the armed bandits in 2019. However, the peace deal was rather short-lived as the armed bandits returned to their criminal activities some months after they were granted amnesty. The failure of the amnesty programme has been attributed to the fact that the armed bandits ‘lack central command and a common goal, so it has been difficult to bring them all to a common negotiation. Moreover, agreements made with one group are not binding on others’.Footnote⁵⁶ Treating them as a single group with one leader has been profoundly counterproductive. There are also concerns that most of the recalcitrant criminals never gave up their arms and that the guns-for-cash programme emboldened the bandits with more money to purchase more arms, and more motivation to raid villages and communities with gross impunity. Rewarding bandits who surrendered their arms with money and cars caused panic among residents that their criminal lifestyle may be indirectly legitimised as a means of earning a living. This is precisely why Obi Anyadike posits that ‘the money incentivised gun ownership, creating more criminals, which a negligent state government then failed to pay. Some bandits – being bandits – also cheated and only pretended to quit, returning to crime full-time when the cash ran out’.Footnote⁵⁷

While these measures are undoubtedly remarkable, they have been largely unsuccessful because of the federal and state governments’ lack of engagement with social mobility – which is not just at the root of armed banditry, but also fuels it. In other words, the Nigerian government’s ‘governmobility’Footnote⁵⁸ strategy for curbing armed conflict in general – including terrorist activists perpetrated by jihadists such as Boko Haram and ISWAP – has been centred on placing restrictions on physical mobility without a concomitant engagement with social mobility through socioeconomic interventions. A group of bandits that reneged on the peace deal noted their social immobility and did not wish to accept any more deals if they did not come with socioeconomic interventions for pastoralist communities in the northwest geopolitical zone: ‘In some of our communities, there is no potable drinking water, no accessible road, no good health care delivery service or any form of social facility and until the state government addresses these problems, we will not embrace the peace accord and reconciliation’.Footnote⁵⁹ Put simply, the Nigerian state has responded to armed banditry with violence. This is reminiscent of Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare’s argument that the Nigerian state is characterised by violence as it treats every problem as a state of emergency:

Merely bombarding forests and placing bans on motorcycles and illegal mining can hardly solve the problem of armed banditry. Indeed, by banning motorcycles used by ‘marginal men’Footnote⁶¹ to eke out a living as part of its governmobility strategy, the Nigerian state reproduces social immobility by pauperising young people who depend on motorcycles for their daily sustenance.

There are three reasons why the state’s governmobility strategy has failed to meet expectations. First, although the armed bandits use the forests for their varied criminal exploits, they are not sedentary but profoundly mobile and thus not confined to the forests. They disguise themselves as members of the local communities they attack, impose taxes on and make pacts with. In many cases, the bandits have informants within the local communities who keep them abreast of the activities of security officers, which in turn gives them the opportunity to either ambush the security officers or quickly flee into the forests on motorcycles.Footnote⁶² Such mobility (and flexibility) seems to portend the armed bandits as ‘invisible creatures’. The state currently lacks the resources to monitor bandits’ mobilities within local communities and villages to identify such informants and sympathisers. Second, even though motorcycle use has been interdicted in the northwest geopolitical zone, the criminal gangs have strong ties to motorcycle vendors in the underground economy who supply them with unregistered motorcycles.Footnote⁶³ The state lacks the resources to curb this and is also largely unable to prevent their supply through ransom payments. Third, constraints on the physical and social mobility of the nomadic communities (many of whom are members of the criminal gangsFootnote⁶⁴) in the northwest geopolitical zone in terms of cattle herding and the availability of grazing lands have not been addressed by the state. The amnesty programme failed in large part because the armed bandits felt that it did not address their grievances, and would not enable the nomadic communities to thrive and acquire social, cultural and economic capital. This was emphasised when some of the bandits were asked why the peace deal with the government failed. They responded that ‘An agreement was reached but you left that person in the forest with a gun and nothing to substitute. What do you expect? How do you want that person to survive?’Footnote⁶⁵

That the state has failed to address the underlying ethnic grievances due to constraints on pastoralists’ opportunity for social mobility worsens the problem. The combination of these three issues, which stem from overemphasising ‘ungoverned spaces’ and placing restrictions on physical mobility while underemphasising social mobility, indicates that the state’s current policies to halt banditry are misguided.

Conclusion

This article charts a new path in the analysis of armed banditry in Nigeria beyond the conventional ungoverned spaces thesis. To end armed banditry and everyday criminality in the northwest geopolitical zone, the Nigerian state must foreground both physical and social mobility in its war on terror. This could be done in three concurrent ways. First, the state must monitor movements within local communities and villages in the northwest geopolitical zone to identify members of the criminal gangs who disguise themselves as ordinary citizens. To do this, the state must impose legibility on society not least because the armed bandits are not confined to the forests but live and move about freely. Second, the state must ameliorate its strategy in curbing the sale or provision of motorcycles to armed bandits. In fact, this is one of the most critical factors that could go a long way to stem their reign of terror. Finally, addressing issues of mobility also means that the state must review the constraints on the pastoralists’ social mobility that continue to produce the armed conflict. This could be through the provision of grazing areas and ranches for nomadic communities to continue herding cattle – a lifestyle and source of economic livelihood increasingly threatened by ecological factors linked to environmental and political factors. The state must also prosecute – and, where appropriate, reintegrate – criminals, address ethnic grievances, and provide education, healthcare and social amenities to communities in the northwest geopolitical zone. These socioeconomic interventions would enable social mobility and prevent the descent into anarchy from political violence such as war, terrorism and insurgency in northern Nigeria. ◼