On 17 January 2017, a Nigerian Air Force (NAF) fighter jet mistakenly dropped bombs on settlements harbouring Internally Displaced Persons’ (IDPs) in Rann, Kala Balge local government area of Borno State. Fifty-three persons died on the spot while no fewer than 200 others, including humanitarian aid workers of the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), were seriously injured. President Muhammadu Buhari made the usual pledge at the time to investigate “this regrettable operational mistake”. But nothing happened in the aftermath. And apparently no sufficient lessons were learnt by military authorities because we continue to witness these avoidable tragedies.
Last Sunday night in Tudun Biri, Igabi Local Government Area of Kaduna State, dozens of people were killed, and hundreds of others injured when a military drone bombed a gathering of residents who were reportedly celebrating Maulud. I commiserate with people of the affected Kaduna community even as we continue to hear heartrending stories about the plights of the survivors. The federal government has issued the usual ‘call for probe’ statement, but I strongly urge President Bola Tinubu to demonstrate how he will be different from his predecessor who was characteristically aloof in moments of national grief such as this. I also call on federal and state authorities as well as public-spirited individuals to come to the aid of those who sustained injuries to help mitigate their sufferings. Given that we are dealing with people on the lower rung of the social ladder, the tendency is to quickly forget about them and move on in a nation where the lives of ordinary citizens count for little.
Let me be very clear here. Anywhere there are military operations, there are usually collateral damages. And we must commend our armed forces for their sacrifice over the years as we confront insurgency, banditry and sundry other criminal cartels who work against the peace and progress of Nigeria. The concern is that this is a recurring tragedy, and no explanation has been made, even though hundreds of lives have been lost in the past decade. That is where accountability by the military comes in. In its report on Monday, ‘Daily Trust’ newspaper documented 15 military air strikes on civilian populations between 2014 and 2023, that have led to hundreds of fatalities.
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Perhaps more revealing is the ‘Special Report’ by Reuters (one of the largest news agencies in the world) in June this year. Authored by David Lewis and Reade Levinson, the report highlighted what was described as a pattern of deadly aerial assaults by the military on civilian populations in Nigeria. “An airstrike near the village of Akwanaja earlier this year (January 2023) shows how Nigeria’s military, which is backed by the United States and other powers, has repeatedly conducted attacks from the air that have killed civilians. Engaged in a war with Islamist insurgents in the northeast, the air force is often called on to tackle criminal activity like banditry in areas far from the conflict zone,” the report claimed in the introduction. “A Reuters analysis of violent incidents documented by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), a U.S.-based crisis monitoring group, found that more than 2,600 people had been killed in the last five years in 248 air strikes by the Nigerian Air Force outside the three northeastern states engulfed in war…Most victims are identified in the database as belonging to ‘communal militia,’ a broad term that in Nigeria can include anyone from community self-defence groups to criminal gangs known locally as bandits. The incidents documented in the database were not independently confirmed by Reuters.”
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