As the Chief of Army Staff that shepherded Nigeria through its first military to democratic transition, General TY Danjuma (rtd) will probably always have a good place in the reckonings of Nigeria’s democratic history. Few have made the contributions in public service that he has from the years after Independence to the first years of the fourth republic, having served as President Obasanjo’s first Minister of Defense.

The implication is that when the retired general makes comments on issues of national security, they get quickly picked up and have significant influence on the polity.

This effect has played out from his recent address at the maiden convocation ceremony of the Taraba State University. He alleged that the Armed Forces have been colluding with armed bandits to kill Nigerians, abetting what he called an “ethnic cleansing” in his home state. The solution, he says, is for people to rise up and defend themselves; otherwise, they will all die one by one.

Within minutes of the video of his comments appearing on social media, it became a point of debate and an added armoury to the arsenal with which ‘the wailers’ would send President Buhari back to Daura in 2019. For a figure as established and well connected as General Danjuma to go public with such a bold claim, the reasoning goes, he must know something every Nigerian should absolutely believe and hold dear as the final nail to the coffin to the Buhari presidency, following those previously placed by former generals Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida.

However, while acknowledging the reputation and attributing good intentions to the elder statesman, it would be rational to carefully examine the merits of the comments without giving into the sentiments that make it politically convenient at the present time. If his words are true, it surely portends grave implications for the Buhari administration, as well as the Nigerian state in general.

There is no expatiation on his description of the killings as an “ethnic cleansing” in his speech, but it would not be the first time these sentiments are expressed about the herders-farmers fatalities that have happened around the Middle Belt especially this year. Various citizens and residents of Benue state have used the term, alleging a conscious move by herdsmen of Fulani extraction to wipe them off as a people. The Tor Tiv, Prof James Ortese Ayatse, described the Benue killings in January as ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Tiv nation, and the Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose has often re-echoed those expressions. The number and frequency of the killings have been truly atrocious and there is the argument that many deaths have occurred unreported, usually the natives under attack by the herdsmen (usually Fulanis) being the major victims. Without decisive action taken by the presidency and security agencies so far to bring a definite stop to the menace, the claim of ethnic cleansing appears to be a natural consequence of the reality that the population of a particular people continues to diminish under the sword of another people.

That said, a resounding implication of the military as collaborators with the rampaging bandits requires objective evidence beyond the observable reality of continuous killings, even if one-sided. The Nigeria Army has its history of faults and weaknesses and have been fingered in atrocities in the past, from the allegations of mass burials of member of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria in 2015 in Zaria, to stings like ‘Operation No Living Thing’ in 2001 in Zaki Biam. Perhaps being the Minister of Defense during the latter atrocity and having been a man of the force, Gen Danjuma’s assessment may have borrowed more from his experience than from certain knowledge of the present realities. The sensitivity of military intelligence places a limit on the amount of information he could divulge, and the purpose of the comments could be to excite the emotions that says “something bad is happening but I cannot tell you how”. But if he cannot give details and while they are not available to anyone, the awareness created and the call to self-defense could lead to antipathy towards the military and may be a motivation for anarchy.

The Defense headquarters has described his comments as “unfortunate”, though stopping short of casting dirt on the retired general’s badge of honor. Against his call for people to defend themselves, the Ship House has warned that it would not treat reckless arms-bearing with levity. Behind the scenes, though, it could prove a wake-up call for the Military to undertake a far-reaching review of its methods in the Middle Belt, ensuring that officers performing Exercise AYEM AKPATUMA are not in fact implicitly granting any leverage or latitude to the killers. There could be a number of reasons for this, the more significant being the failure to relieve the herdsmen of their patrol Kalashnikov rifles. Where a referee allows a gun for one party in a two-man knife fight, he has had a say on the expected result.

And the chief referee here is not the soldiers on the streets of Jalingo, but the Commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces, who is supposed to belong to nobody but to everybody.

Alexander Onukwue