During the Kiriji War of the nineteenth century, a grim parable of war came and became a subject of racial slur and morbid joke. An Oyo-Ibadan warrior, disarmed and cornered by an Ijesa fighter, collapsed to the earth and begged for his life. The Ijesa man, scornful of pleas, mocked him with a cruel logic: he threw his machete at the captive and ordered him to beg the blade, not the man. “Ada lo a bè; èmi kó a bè.”
The unarmed warrior rose, took the weapon, and killed his captor. The war taught its lesson: in the theatre of enemies, negotiation, just as begging, is surrendering the weapon that will undo you.
Sheikh Ahmad Abubakar Mahmud Gumi is a trained soldier and a medical doctor. He left the Nigerian army as a captain. Two days ago, Gumi was on Facebook calling on Nigeria to arm the enemy with begging and surrender. He wrote: “They say: negotiation doesn’t work. It’s a lie. It worked with militants in Niger Delta creeks. Rather, it is war that doesn’t work, 16 years we’re still fighting BH (Boko Haram) and 11 years fighting bandits. It’s stupidity doing the same thing and expect different results.”
Imagine if Gumi had remained in the army, and had risen to become a General and Chief of Army Staff, and was asked by his Commander-in-Chief to fight and defeat Boko Haram in the North East, bandits in the North West and kidnappers in Niger, Kogi and Kwara States. What would have become of that Commander-in-Chief and the order he gave?
If you think Gumi would have carried out that order and spare his lord, the president, it means you haven’t been following his consistent advocacy on how to treat terrorists. He wants negotiation with the enemy as the sure way to peace.
He didn’t start today. In a February 2021 interview with the AIT, Gumi came out with a weird suggestion that bandits destroying his North were taught kidnapping by Niger Delta militants: “They learnt kidnapping from MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta). I do not see any difference. They were the first victims of rustling, their cattle is their oil,” he said.
In a May 2021 BBC report, Gumi was quoted comparing terrorist bandits with coup plotters: “If the country could pardon coup plotters who committed treasonable offences in the era of military administration, the bandits can as well enjoy similar forgiveness even better under democratic rule,” he said.
In that same report of more than four years ago, he said what he has been saying repeatedly recently: “Kidnapping children from school is a lesser evil because in the end, you can negotiate and now bandits are very careful about human lives.”
Nigeria dodged a bullet in Gumi exiting the army before his Iroko became problematic, exacting tributes. How many more Gumis do we have in the officer corps of the Nigerian Army? Imagine him rising to the very top, becoming a General, and making a case for the enemy.
Born in 1960, Ahmad Gumi arrived as son of the late Sheikh Abubakar Mahmud Gumi, one of Northern Nigeria’s most influential and outspoken Islamic scholars, who also served as Grand Khadi of the Shariah Court of Appeal. From anyone from such a lineage you would expect moral clarity, intellectual rigour, and principled leadership. Those are expectations that make today’s Gumi’s public interventions impossible to treat lightly.
Anyone who chose an early formation as Gumi did clearly chose a path that combined science, discipline, and service. The sheikh studied medicine, then enlisted in the Nigeria Defence Academy, and served as a medical officer in the Nigerian Army Medical Corps. Rising to the rank of captain, it is given that his training was to heal and also to understand the brutal arithmetic of conflict. At the NDA, people who know say every cadet was taught that violence against the violent is neither abstract nor negotiable. The soldier-doctor is schooled in a hard truth: forces that threaten life must be subdued decisively, they are not candidates for indulgence and accommodative rhetoric.
Gumi’s academic journey and his present politics are diametrically irreconcilable. After retiring from military service, Gumi relocated to Saudi Arabia where he immersed himself in Islamic scholarship. In Mecca, he earned a PhD in Usul al-Fiqh, the principles that govern Islamic jurisprudence. I do not think people of knowledge would dismiss this credential as casual. My findings tell me that his specialisation, Usul al-Fiqh, “concerns itself with moral reasoning, justice, public interest (maslahah), and the limits of tolerance in the face of disorder.” People of knowledge say his area of Islamic scholarship prioritises justice for the victim, and guiding societies away from chaos. They say his background makes his advocacy for negotiating with terrorists troubling, troublous and self-deconstructing.
It is hard to hear or read Gumi and not see contradiction hardening into failure of his callings: he was trained to protect life and confront mortal threats without illusion. He was also schooled to appreciate the value of justice.
The more we read some people’s lives, the more we see contradiction in starker hues. Where in his religious books, including jurisprudence, did Gumi read sanctifying terror and asking society to wear “soft gloves” when faced with those who murder the innocent and destabilise the society? Should we not tell Gumi that to blur the line between justice and appeasement is to betray both the uniform he once wore and the faith he now invokes? Someone who saw me write this said that in matters of terror it is neither courage nor wisdom to preach accommodation.
It is suicidal to confuse mercy with surrender. We saw it in the Kiriji War story above. The enemy appeased today is the death of tomorrow.
Why is it difficult for Gumi and his supporters to see that Boko Haram, banditry and other criminal gangs in Northern Nigeria are not pursuing the same objectives as the militants of the Niger Delta? Terror organisations destroying the very basis of the existence of Gumi’s society are not misunderstood political movements waiting for a conference table; they are a machinery of horrendous violence who kill and abduct without borders. They are forever dangerous to freedom and to, even religion.
Governments across continents have long understood this danger. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher vowed to never negotiate with the IRA terrorists: “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” she declared. US’s George W. Bush bluntly insisted that: “You’ve got to be strong, not weak. The only way to deal with these people is to bring them to justice. You can’t talk to them. You can’t negotiate with them.” His position echoed the same logic as Thatcher’s. Scholars such as Paul Wilkinson and Walter Laqueur argue that talks with terrorists confer recognition, and recognition, like sunlight to mold, allows terror to spread. As some others observed, terrorism seeks legitimacy more than victory; it longs to be seen as a political equal rather than a criminal aberration. To grant Gumi’s wish is to reward criminals and criminality; defeat and destroy society.
History and scholarship teach that there is a moral grammar to politics, and terrorists deliberately violate it.
Paul Gilbert is a British moral and political philosopher who has been very stellar for his work on terrorism, political violence, war ethics, and the moral limits of negotiation. My reading of his works shows that he has written extensively to draw a very thick line between terrorism and legitimate political struggle. He argues that because terrorism targets civilians, it collapses the moral conditions that make dialogue, compromise, or negotiation intelligible. More directly, it is his position in a 1994 article that by engaging in violence against civilians, terror groups had breached the “conventions of debate required for negotiations”. Another scholar, Jan Narveson, also hold that ‘terrorists’ put themselves in “Hobbes’ state of nature with respect to us” and thus do not deserve a roundtable treatment. “Engaging with terrorists would translate their violence into a legitimate means to be heard and thus lead other groups to engage in similar activities.” That quote, if you don’t mind, you find with other viewpoints in Harmonie Toros’ ‘We Don’t Negotiate with Terrorists!: Legitimacy and Complexity in Terrorist Conflicts’.
In plainer terms, what Gumi professes is equal in criminal foolishness as one bargaining with the arsonist while the house is still burning.
Gumi, soldier, physician and religious scholar, wants Nigeria to turn crime into curriculum. He must stop what he is saying or be asked to stop. In his prescription is quiet injustice to those who choose peaceful paths. The state should stop pretending that it does not know how to tell him that what he preaches is that violence pays.
Some would say that his call is a camouflage for politics. Gumi wants to negotiate with criminal bandits. Negotiate with whom among the disparate leaders of the terrorists? Does this explain why previous peace agreements entered into with bandits by the north failed? In the North, communities organise colourful engagements with those destroying them today; tomorrow they receive death from those who visited yesterday. Yet, one of their leaders say they must keep negotiating. The enemy is right inside their bedroom.
Why would a religious leader seek to make a political class of kidnappers, and elevate terrorists to statesmen? In a normal society, it won’t be difficult to accept that negotiation with terror undermines citizens who pursue change without violence, telling them, after the fact, that bombs speak louder than ballots. Rejecting Gumi and his doctrine of negotiation with terrorists will not be a rejection of peace, it will be a defensive wall against assaults on peace and justice. Anyone who is not a lover of terrorism would know that criminalization, not conversation, is the language the rule of law understands.
People who wage war against society deserve war. To approach the enemy with votaries of appeasement is to strengthen them to do more harm. We must never be forced to misunderstand who the enemy is. Peace, like poetry, has rules; when those rules are shattered by criminal bloodshed, the answer is justice and protection, not glass-clinking at the negotiating table.
In the savannah lived a hyena who seized the riverbank and called himself its lord. When drought came and society was starved of the river’s nourish, other animals sent the tortoise to negotiate access, carrying calabashes of honey and promises of peace. The hyena laughed, took the gifts, and demanded more; each concession tightening his grin. “Talk is cheaper than teeth,” he said, and the river remained closed.
At last the terrorised animals learned what the tortoise had not: the hyena fed on bargaining itself. Each plea taught him the shape of their fear. So the herds moved together, guarded the springs, and starved the hyena of leverage. Access to the river opened again, not because words softened the hyena, but because unity denied him profit. And the forest remembered: when a predator thrives on terror, negotiation becomes its meal.
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