Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, in response to the recent mass kidnapping of 279 schoolgirls in the country’s Zamfara state, ordered security agents “to shoot any person or persons seen carrying AK-47s in any forest in the country.”
Buhari also directed a ban on “all mining activities in Zamfara State, as well as the imposition of a no-fly zone over the state,” his office said.
The then first lady’s daughters were about the same age as the abducted girls. Barack Obama’s wife posted this picture on Twitter along with the text: “Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families. It’s time to #bringbackourgirls. -mo”
Celebrities wanted to #bringbackourgirls
Malala Yousafzai
The young Pakistani was shot by the Taliban for attending school, and promoting girls’ education. Yousafzai also joined the campaign, telling CNN that the abducted girls are her “sisters” – the name Boko Haram has been translated to “Western education is sin.”
Celebrities wanted to #bringbackourgirls
Hillary Clinton
The former United States secretary of state started her career working for the Children Defense Fund, and her first scholarly article on “Children Under the Law” is still highly regarded. She called the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls an “act of terrorism.”
Celebrities wanted to #bringbackourgirls
Anne Hathaway
The award-winning actress has been involved in children’s and human rights charities. She and her husband Adam Schulman took part in a rally to support the #bringbackourgirls campaign.
Celebrities wanted to #bringbackourgirls
Angelina Jolie
The actress and United Nations special envoy also supported the campaign. “I’m absolutely sickened by it,” she said of the kidnapping. “And the thought of them out there right now, terrified and being abused, and sold … it’s infuriating, and it kind of goes beyond understanding that somebody could do this,” Jolie said on French television.
Author: Robin Eberhardt
Cash reward
The gangs are often driven by financial motives to kidnap children and others, and hold them for ransom.
Since the kidnapping, Nigeria’s north has seen a sharp rise in abductions that often target schoolchildren.
The mass abductions often draw condemnation of the international community, putting the government under pressure to act.
Buhari on Friday ordered his new security chiefs to restore security in the north before the start of this year’s rainy season in mid-May.
If Buhari’s new directive comes to fruition and eventually succeeds in restoring security in the restive regions, farmers in the north will resume their activities by May.
Village murder
About a week ago, this author was informed that armed bandits had killed 15 people in Amarawa — a village at the border of Nigeria and Niger — during the early hours of March 1.
Wearing armored vests and helmets for protection, my TV crew and I drove from Zamfara’s capital, Gusau, to Amarawa in Sokoto State.
The journey took us five hours by road. When we arrived, the community members had just finished a burial ceremony.
Parents and relatives hold portraits of their girls five years after they were abducted by Boko Haram
Our protagonist, Alhaji Dan Juma, was already expecting us to tell his story as he began to relate the attack — during which his son, his brother and other 13 people had been murdered.
“They came around 2:30 a.m. They killed my son and my brother and took [another] brother,” Juma told me in the Hausa language through a translator.
“I pray for the government officials to protect the interest of the people, for God’s sake,” Juma pleaded.
Gunmen killed Juma a day after I spoke with him. They had contacted him demanding ransom money to secure the release of his abducted brother.
They had collected 5 million naira (€11,000, $13,123) from him and then killed him and the brother he was trying to rescue.
Juma’s death is similar to what many Nigerians in the north go through. But such stories barely make it in the news.
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
Flight, freedom, success
When Nneka came to Hamburg’s Altona neighborhood at the end of the ’90s, Germany seemed peaceful and full of a freedom that she had never before known. Here she met like-minded individuals and quickly found her way into the local music scene. Her breakthrough came in 2004 when she opened for Sean Paul at a concert in Hamburg’s urban Stadtpark.
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
Where conflict rages
Nneka’s childhood was far from easy. The musician was born in Warri, a city of some 500,000 inhabitants located in Delta State, one of the nine federal states in Nigeria that make up the oil-rich area around the mouth of the Niger river. The city’s ethnic makeup is predominantly Ijaw, Itsekiri and Urhobo — groups that are often engaged in conflict with one another.
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
Lots of oil, little money
The different ethnicities fight in part over who controls oil production. According to some statistics, Nigeria has the 10th largest oil reserves in the world. It is consistently Africa’s largest oil producer, and some 70 percent of the country’s budget comes from the industry. This money does not reach the delta area, however. Instead, environmental pollution threatens humans and animals alike.
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
Singing against terror
In addition, injustice and corruption in Nigeria has fed the growth of the Islamist terror organization Boko Haram in the country’s north. Nneka takes them on in her politically and socially critical song lyrics. In “Pray for You,” the faithful Christian lambasts the group for its murders, but sings that she nonetheless prays for these perpetrators, whose acts have led to much mourning (above).
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
A call to take responsibility
The singer uses her worldwide fame to broadcast her message about how international companies reap profits without involving local populations, and how oil destroys relationships and society. But Nneka also preaches that inhabitants of the African continent must take responsibility for current conditions and stop blaming colonial powers. “Wake up Africa,” she sings in her song “Africans.”
Artists After the Escape: Musician Nneka from Nigeria
‘It is about loving yourself’
Nneka’s lyrics don’t just focus on political and social wrong-doings, however. Morality and the importance of family are recurring themes in her tracks as well. She also sings about her feelings of being torn as a German-African and the contradictions between both her cultures. The singer has come to the conclusion that, “It is about loving yourself in the end.”
Author: Annabelle Steffes-Halmer (cmb)
Losing control
The perpetrators are often gangs of bandits taking advantage of inadequate policing and the easy availability of firearms.
The banditry violence, unconnected to the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast, began as a farmer-herder conflict in 2011 and intensified between 2017–2018 to include cattle rustling, kidnapping for ransom, sexual violence and killings.
One resident told DW that bandits were taxing farmers in exchange for safety — a sign that the government has lost control.
About 21 million people living in Nigeria’s Zamfara, Kaduna, Niger, Sokoto, Kebbi, and Katsina states are hugely affected.
Heart of the issue
Criminal groups often target people who can pay a large ransom, but they also carry out many more attacks and demand a lower ransom per victim — amounts of around $1,000, according to a report by SBM Intel, Nigeria’s leading geopolitical intelligence platform.
Bandits complain that the central and state governments abandoned them in the last 20 years, saying there were limitations on grazing rights.
Herders face excessive taxes when trying to sell their livestock at the market and sometimes encounter extortion or brutality by military and police personnel, according to Shani Shuaibu, a journalist who was recently granted rare access to bandit hideouts in Zamfara state.
“They say their children are not employed and they’re not going to school,” Shuaibu told DW.
“I asked them: are you guys educated because the government offers employment to graduates. That’s the problem. We are not educated. If we are educated — can we venture into banditry?”
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
‘Deliberate wanderer’
Akinbode describes himself as a “deliberate wanderer” who “makes” rather than shoots photographs. He’s based in Berlin but often travels in Africa, bringing his medium-format camera to places such as South Africa and Mali, where this photo was taken. He was awarded the Goethe medal in 2016, participated in documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017, and has exhibited around the world.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
Documenting a changing city
From his series “Sea Never Dry,” Akinbiyi depicts Bar Beach near the Nigerian city of Lagos. Formerly a popular beach with city dwellers, since he shot the images in 2006, the beach has been destroyed to make way for building materials for Atlantic City, a Dubai-reminiscent high-end development built on reclaimed land. With 18 million inhabitants, Lagos is considered a megacity.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
Depicting public life outdoors
The women in the picture are wearing white to show their affiliation with Pentecostal churches. Church masses and celebrations, which can involve hours of singing and disturb neighbors, explains Akinbiyi, were held in public spaces including Bar Beach before it was closed to the public. On the weekends, worshipers would even spend the night on the beach following the celebrations.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
Urgent photography
Shot in the city of Lagos, under the sign “Urgent photo here” sits a photographer who sets up a small shop, offering his services for those who need passport photos for the nearby embassies but have little time to spare. Akinbiyi’s work featured in the exhibition frequently depicts the use of photography in different contexts.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
Exploring Berlin’s ‘African Quarter’
This photo from the series “African Quarter” shows a controversial street sign in the Berlin neighborhood covered up with a replacement name. The original, Petersallee, refers to the German colonial ruler, while the temporary replacement sign bears the name of Witbooi, an African resistance fighter. Akinbiyi has been photographing life in this neighborhood since the 1990s.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
Noticing the poetry in decay
This photo booth in the Berlin neighborhood of Kreuzberg again plays on Akinbiyi’s interest in exploring the medium of photography. Akinbiyi noticed that this booth, which was recently boarded up, was frequently used as a toilet or place to shoot up by neighborhood drug users. Many of his photos that show the world exactly as it is without sugarcoating reality.
Akinbode Akinbiyi’s photographic poetry
The art of happenstance
Capturing coincidence is part of how Akinbiyi works. Whilst shooting an image of an advertisement of new buildings to be built on an industrial construction site in Berlin, a man walked into his shot and fit perfectly into its composition. He explains: “I happened to be standing there trying to make this photo and he came into it. This is what I call serendipity.”
Author: Sarah Hucal
Breaking the cycle
Security expert Rabiu Adamu called for dialogue that will lead to the disarmament of the bandits. In the event that peace talks fail, the former military officer suggested a radical approach. “Use maximum force to fight them. I’m talking of maximum force with modern equipment. That’s the best way to put it,” Adamu told DW.
Zamfara’s information commissioner, Sulaiman Tinau Anka, admitted that stabilizing the north will take some time.
“It is not something we can finish within a year. It’s a gradual process. So gradually, all those bandits will be repented and come back to their normal activities.”
The military has launched repeated operations, but all too limited in scale to secure the state’s 40,000 square kilometers.
Ground-attack jets have bombed bandit hideouts, but boots on the ground and a political response were needed, analyst Adam argued.
