Another Failed African State

The Nigerian authorities say a faction of the Boko Haram jihadist group .....

Bandit Country

..... teamed up with Nigeria's notorious criminal kidnapping gangs to attack a high-speed train in March 2022. 

They had mined the rail link between the capital, Abuja, and the northern city of Kaduna on the evening of 28 March, forcing the train carrying 362 passengers to stop. Nine passengers died during the attack and some 168 people were reported missing afterwards by the state rail company.

Amongst the hostages were a Bank executive who has subsequently been freed after a ransom was paid, and a pregnant woman who was freed on compassionate grounds, but at least 39 men and 18 women plus five children are still alive and in the bandits hands. The resumption of the services has been postponed indefinitely as of May 2022.

Kidnapping for ransom is now commonplace across Nigeria. A report by security research and intelligence firm said that in the first three months of 2022, more than 3,500 people had been killed, and many more kidnapped for ransom by armed groups in Nigeria.

Two Catholic priests were kidnapped in Katsina state in the north of the country. They have not been released. The head of the Methodist Church in Nigeria was abducted along with two other clerics in the south-east of the country. He said that he paid $240,000 (£190,000) to be freed with his companions. 

In June 2022, armed men entered St Francis Catholic church in the town of Owo during a Sunday service. They fired into the congregation, and then kidnapped a priest, as well as some other church-goers. A local doctor at the hospital, was quoted by the Reuters news agency, as saying that at least 50 bodies had been taken to two hospitals in the town, and that children were among the dead.

In August 2022 Gunmen in north-west Nigeria's Katsina State have abducted at least 50 civilians from the village of Bakiyawa.They killed one person and wounded at least seven others before taking the hostages ... security forces had clashed with the heavily armed gunmen, but as usual were outgunned by the hostage takers.

It has been announced that in future military aircraft will escort the trains once repair work on the 190km (120-mile) Abuja-Kaduna rail track is completed. It is not known exactly when services will resume. But frankly, this will not guarantee no more attacks ... in 2021 a military jet was shot down by one of the gangs.

A serving army general was killed in 2021 on the main road from Abuja to central Kogi state and his sister, who had been travelling with him, was kidnapped, while also in 2021, 13 military police were killed in an ambush in Zamfara state, when at the same time at least 150 villagers were abducted.

The ransom demands for all the hundreds of  school children kidnapped, are always too high for the parents to afford, while the authorities insist that they will neither pay ransoms nor negotiate with criminals. The gangs even demand bags of rice, beans and cooking oil from relatives to feed their captives. The situation has deteriorated to such an extent that many schools spread across at least five northern states have been closed by the authorities as they are unable to protect them.

You have to wonder if any black African or  black diaspora led society can successfully operate, when from the largest African states such as Nigeria, and South Africa, through to the smallest diaspora states e.g. Haiti or the British Virgin isles, are all plagued with rampant lawlessness, nepotism, political criminality, corruption, drugs and gangs. 

After all, the very least you can ask for and expect from your government is safety and security, and most of their countries can't offer even that bare minimum, with for example there being around 15 countries with active armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa in 2019: Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Sudan.

It almost seems to me, to be an inevitability, that given long enough, this continents states have always declined into these ungovernable positions ... history has consistently shown this to be true.