Introduction

“The only thing that makes us sleep with full eyes closed”: so a trader in Onitsha
market characterizes the Nigerian vigilante group the Bakassi Boys, alluding to their
brutal but effective tactics in ridding the city of armed robbers (HRW/CLEEN, 2002).
The trader’s implication that the vigilantes intervene to provide security for citizens
where the state fails to do so points towards the significance of vigilante groups as
responses to states’ failure and inability to provide security.
In this paper, I discuss state security failures and citizen responses in Nigeria and
Sierra Leone, two states which despite their distinct circumstances have engendered
citizen movements for the provision of security in the form of vigilante groups and
civil militias. I show how state failure and the breakdown of the rule of law in Nigeria
and Sierra Leone has contributed to the rise of vigilante groups and civil militias,
looking in particular at the emergence of the Bakassi Boys in south-eastern Nigeria
and the Kamajor Militia in Sierra Leone throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Moreover, I demonstrate how these groups can be seen as both legitimate and
effective in the eyes of the citizens they are designed to protect, in contrast to the
state, with which many Nigerians and Sierra Leoneans have had an ambivalent
relationship.

The emergence of the Bakassi Boys in south-eastern Nigeria has been welldocumented (Baker, 2002a) (HRW/CLEEN, 2002) (Ukiwo, 2002) (Harnischfeger,
2003) (Smith, 2006) (Meagher, 2007). While vigilante groups operate throughout
Nigeria, others focus more on ethnic or regional claims for self-determination and
recognition; the Bakassi Boys are fairly unique in their focus upon crime-fighting.
They originated in Aba, in Abia State, where armed robberies during the 1990s were
endangering the personal safety and livelihoods of market traders. In 1998, following
a particularly brutal murder of a trader, traders embarked on an operation of seizing
and executing suspected armed robbers, until nearly all suspected criminals had been
executed or had fled the state.
Following this operation’s success, a semi-formal group composed of many of the
traders who had taken part in the uprising was inaugurated, and was supported
financially by contributions from traders. This group became the Bakassi Boys; its
operations subsequently expanded to Anambra and Imo states, and gained significant
support from state governors. The group punished suspected criminals with a range of
penalties, often involving torture or public execution, and were highly successful in
bringing down crime rates. However, following condemnation of their extra-judicial
and brutal violence (HRW/CLEEN, 2002), and concerns about the manipulation of
the group for political ends (Office of Communications, 2003), the federal
government officially banned the Bakassi Boys in 2002.

In both cases, these civilian security forces were formed in response to the state’s
inability to provide adequate security for its citizens. The weaknesses of West African
states challenge their claims to sovereign authority, to such an extent that analysts
contend that several West African states have ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ (Sawyer, 2004)
(Omeje, 2005) (Reno, 1995); this state failure has, as Zartman (1995) predicts,
inhibited their capacity for security provision. There are of course degrees of failure:
though the Nigerian state has significant problems, it cannot be said to have ‘failed’ to
the same extent as Sierra Leone, which barely functions as a state, impaired by years
of conflict.

However, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, in common with other West African states, have
faced political and economic instabilities which have undermined their authority,
stemming from flawed domestic policies, resource fluctuations, Euro-American
foreign policy, the imposition of structural adjustment programmes, resentment
against the state as a result of inequalities derived from patrimonial resource and
power distribution, weaknesses and inefficiencies inherited from colonial
bureaucracies, popular disenfranchisement resulting from military regimes and
personalized rule, and the rise of informal markets and shadow states.
The Nigerian state faces the additional difficulty of functioning as a federal republic,
uniting states which are in some ways very disparate, particularly in terms of divisions
between the Muslim and Christian populations and between the 250 ethnic groups.
Ethnic and/or regional separatist movements such as the Yoruba OPC, the Igbo group
MASSOB and the northern APC undermine the federal government’s claim to
sovereign authority; the Biafran civil war of 1967-1970 demonstrates the threat to
state authority from separatist rhetoric.
Similarly, movements such as MOSOP and MEND, who make claims for autonomy
in terms of issues of land tenure and resource ownership in the oil-producing Niger
Delta, challenge the federal state’s claims to sovereignty over land and resources. The
implementation of Sharia law in twelve northern states has also weakened the federal
government’s claim to sole legal jurisdiction over the state.
It is within this context of the federal government’s diminished sovereignty that its
ability to provide security for its citizens has reduced. The Nigeria Police Force is a
federal force, and this has created tension between state and federal governments;
state governors have argued that ‘they had the right to their own police forces’
(Meagher, 2007, p. 95). Furthermore, the police force has committed countless human
rights abuses and is seen widely throughout Nigeria as being ensconced in patronclient relationships between police officers, politicians and criminals which prevent it
from reliably detecting and punishing crime (Baker, 2002a) (Harnischfeger, 2003).
Even the Police Affairs Minister, D.M. Jemibowon, admitted in 2000 that the police
‘can’t guarantee [citizens’] safety’ (Harnischfeger, 2003, p. 26). Thus the federal
nature of the police force, and the police force’s own inadequacies (a result of low
salaries, inefficient bureaucracy, and their origins as a colonial and repressive force
(Jemibowon, 2003)) result in popular perception that the federal state has failed as a
security guarantor.


https://www.unhcr.org/afr/48f351722.pdf

I signed off this morning and said I will return in 2022, I got this in email last night and thought it is well to return and share.
Im going to sign off now, I will probably just be flexible as need may be considering ongoing changes and agitations in opposition to the sovereingty. This is a very interesting area of politics for me personally.

Go get that pdf link above and read the whole document, very interesting.