Banditry in the North is not a struggle

 My attention has been drawn to the recent statement credited to Bashir Dalhatu, Chairman of the Arewa Consultative Forum, suggesting that the Niger Delta Amnesty Programme should serve as a model for addressing banditry in Northern Nigeria.

This comparison is deeply flawed, intellectually dishonest, and utterly insulting to the Nigerian people.

The Niger Delta struggle was a fight for resource control, environmental justice, and socio-economic rights in communities devastated by decades of oil exploration. It was a rights-based agitation rooted in marginalization and constitutional injustice.

Banditry in the North is not a struggle. It is criminality. It is terrorism, kidnapping, extortion, murder, and the mass destruction of innocent lives and livelihoods.

To equate the two is to legitimise terrorism and blackmail the Nigerian State into rewarding armed violence.

What do the bandits want?

Who wronged them?

What ideology, grievance, or constitutional injustice are they fighting for? None.

They are killing Nigerians for profit. They are abducting schoolchildren for ransom. They are taxing farmers. They are burning communities. They are collaborating with foreign criminal networks. That is not a “struggle”; it is sheer terror.

It is therefore an act of low analytic reasoning and a dangerous precedent to propose that Nigeria should bribe killers under the guise of “amnesty”.

If bandits receive amnesty today, tomorrow every unemployed or misguided young man will believe that the fastest route to government funding is to pick up arms against the State.

Nigeria must never reward criminality.

Nigeria must never equate militants fighting for constitutional rights with terrorists fighting for ransom.

Instead, the government must prioritise:

• Strengthening intelligence operations
• Decisive military action
• Community policing structures
• Prosecution of financiers and collaborators

Rehabilitation ONLY for repentant persons who surrender before committing atrocities

Genuine socio economic development plans for affected communities

Anything less is a betrayal of justice and a mockery of citizens who have suffered under the cruelty of bandits.

Nigeria deserves peace built on justice not peace built on rewarding those who shed innocent blood.

Chief Malcolm E. Omirhobo

Human Rights Lawyer & Public Interest Advocate