Over a month ago, the Commissioner of Police in Zamfara State, Mohammed Dalijan, announced that a lawmaker, former Local Government chairman and District Head had been implicated in connection with the banditry and kidnapping which has ravaged the state and the North-West for about ten years.

Over the past weekend, the suspects who have been in police custody, were officially named as Aminu Ibrahim, who represents Kaura Namoda Constituency in the Zamfara State House of Assembly; former chairman of Kaura Namoda Local Government Area, Nasiru Muhammad, and District Head of Kaura Namoda, Jafaru Kamburki.

This is definitely a tip of the proverbial iceberg, as Zamfara State is the red heat-map of banditry in the North-West. Bello Hassan, the House of Representatives Member for Zurmi/Shinkafi Federal Constituency, recently disclosed that bandits had displaced “over 50 communities” in Zurmi LGA alone.

Criminals have held Zamfara, Katsina, Kaduna, Sokoto, Kebbi and Niger states in the jugular since 2015. A former Zamfara State Governor even offered to “resign” as the state’s Chief Security Officer while holding on to the seat of Governor, to show his incapacity to contain the insecurity.

His successor, Bello Matawalle, opted to dialogue with the bandits. Under his watch, a bandit kingpin, Ado Aleru, was given a chieftaincy title of Sarkin Fulani by the emir of Sabon Birni Yandoto, Aliyu Marafa.

The arrest of these high profile individuals could mean that the authorities in the state are getting more serious at tackling banditry and insecurity, the major source of extreme hunger in the country.

We call on the Federal Government to subject the suspects to high intensity security processing and dismantle the kidnap and banditry networks in Zamfara and the North-West. There was simply no way that criminality could have morphed to this uncontrollable proportion if powerful individuals in society had not aided and abetted it.

We are convinced that similar high-level collusions exist in other flashpoint states, with the collaborators perhaps operating at higher levels of society.

 It is strongly speculated that collaborators with these criminal networks exist in our security and military hierarchies as well as banking and telecom sectors, hence the bandits’ ability to operate at will.

Without dismantling these bandit networks and reclaiming our ungoverned spaces, the hunger and hardship will push Nigerians to the edge of doom.