Tsabre, Birnin Magaji, 14 August 2022 – Ismail Ahmad dashed out of his house, a premodern dwelling constructed mostly of mud, into the quiet predawn and headed to the mosque in this Zamfara community, North-western Nigeria.
Hardly had the congregants finished their obligatory prayers that early morning when the 78-year-old district head and imam held the microphone to make a chilling announcement. It was time to work for terrorists, locally called bandits, again, he said. Without hesitating, the villagers trooped out to labour in the terrorists’ farm fields.
For the Tsabre villagers, their slave labour would never end until the bandits were satisfied. From dawn to dusk, they would work for the terrorists every day during farming seasons and get nothing for their labour.
“The bandits set a timeline for work and ask everyone to go there,” the district head told PREMIUM TIMES. “Our lives are in danger but we have no other place to go.”
Like Mr Ahmad’s Tsabare community, other citizens caught in the troubled North-west region are engaged in forced labour by armed groups. As the Nigerian state leaves these rural populations unprotected, terrorists turn them into a resource for generating funds. The money is used for the sustenance of the seemingly intractable wave of violence and extreme human rights abuses, PREMIUM TIMES’ investigation showed; a rare revelation of an aspect of terrorism financing and human rights violations in the North-west.
The Nigerian constitution prohibits forced labour, excluding compulsory work mandated as a consequence of a court order or sanctions by armed forces in the line of their duties. But in this area, the country’s laws as well as civil administration have become rarely effective, replaced by brutally oppressive rules of violent non-state actors.
Locally known as yan bindiga or yan ta’adda, many of the terror warlords are strategically stationed in the Mashema forest of Zamfara, near the Niger Republic, and in the Sabon Birnin area of Sokoto, stockpiling firearms and overtaking ungoverned spaces from authorities. Thus, affected communities are left to choose between dancing to the tune of armed groups or dying helplessly.
Earlier this year, the Nigerian government declared the bandits as terrorists but the labelling barely changed anything. Perhaps angry about the new designation, the criminal gangs launched more deadly attacks, killing up to 200 Zamfara villagers and displacing thousands of them.
Central to the survival and resilience of the bandits is how they raise and spend money to oil their violent crimes. In addition to kidnapping for ransom and forcibly extracting levies from communities left unprotected by the state, they engage in farming, which involves forced land capture and slave labour like the experience of Tsabare villagers.
“These farms do not belong to the bandits,” Mr Ahmad said of the armed groups now in charge of his community’s governance and economy. “They collected the biggest and most fertile of the farms — especially those growing rice, good maize and millet.”
Alhaji Shingi: Grabbing peasants’ farm fields to finance terror
When asked to name armed bandits terrorising his community, Mr Ahmad stuttered; too scared to describe the oppressors. He then held the reporter’s cloth softly, asking him to bring his right ear closer. “It’s a secret,” he whispered. “These are the gang leaders terrorising this community: Alhaji Sheu Shingi, Nashama and Alhaji Shehu Bagiwaye.”
On August 21, PREMIUM TIMES tracked down and interviewed the villagers in the Birnin Magaji communities. What Mr Ahmad and other villagers did not know, however, is that the terror activities of the bandits they were scared to name are an open secret. Kingpin Shingi and his cohorts live in Gurami and Mai Jan Ido, two forested communities, where they control hundreds of armed bandits, imposing taxes on vulnerable communities and grabbing hectares of farmlands in Birnin Magaji.
Before the military missile hit him dead in January this year, Alhaji Auta was the leader of the bandit group in the forest but Shingi had since taken charge.
“The northwest’s problem is not ‘ungoverned spaces’, as wonks like to say, but spaces governed by criminal sovereigns,” said James Barnett, a conflict researcher who interviewed militant Auta before he was bombed by the Nigeria Airforce fighter jet. He had documented his encounter with the entrepreneurial bandit for the magazine New Lines.
“After another 20 minutes of travelling on the bikes, we arrive at a small cluster of trees nestled between some maize fields. A couple of dozen well-armed young men are milling about, lounging on parked bikes or leaning against trees, smoking weed and cigarettes. Many of them look like teenagers,” he added.
‘Teenage bandits armed to supervise us on farmlands’
Weeks preceding August 14, kingpin Shingi had telephoned Mr Ahmad – the Hakimi (the district head) of Tsabre – to inform his people that the terror group would need the villagers’ services on their farmlands. Mr Ahmad obliged by announcing via the community mosque and meeting the heads of eight villages under his control. Then, young and old, women and children in the community were forced to work without pay for weeks.
“In fact, they don’t provide food for us no matter the length of our labour on the farm fields,” Habibu Lawal, one of the villagers, told PREMIUM TIMES. “If you’re tasty while working for them, you’ll be asked to look for a nearby river to drink water and come back immediately.”ⓘ
Dozens of villagers spoke to PREMIUM TIMES, recounting their experience slaving for the terrorists. The punishment for resisting working for the gun-wielding men could be death, the villagers said, and one could be whipped with rods for “being lazy on duty”.
“Whenever I am to work on their farms I hide my phone beneath my cap,” Sani Aliyu, one of the victims, recalled. “If you’re caught using your phone to call or do anything, you’ll be beaten up by teenage bandits armed to supervise us on the farmlands.”
The bandits’ criminal enterprise in Birnin Magaji means a monopoly of farming activities. Rice, guinea corn, millets and soya beans are cultivated on farm fields under the control of the militants, villagers who have worked for them, told PREMIUM TIMES. During the harvest period last year, they said, the terrorists came on motorcycles and Hilux vehicles to convey farm produce out of the community.
“Last year, we loaded bags of rice, millets and soya beans on motorcycles and Hilux vehicles,” Mr Ahmad said, corroborating testimonies of several villagers interviewed for this investigation in the community. “They left with hundreds of bags of farm produce and didn’t give us anything — not even a bag of rice.”
‘Black and Standa’: Nigerien terrorists recruited to terrorise Nigerian villagers
Musa Salihu, 45, now a resident of Zurmi town of Zamfara, is now broken-hearted. He was a successful farmer back in his village in the Tungar Fulani area until armed bandits took control of the community to unleash violence on them and seize their farmlands.
Life became miserable for everyone in the village, Mr Salihu recalled. Ravaging bandits would pillage their village, kill at will and extort the community residents. “When I could no longer bear the persecution, I left the village for the town to look for work,” said Mr Salihu, looking pale.
Last year, he returned to the village to continue farming when the reality of living in town jobless hit him. One day, he was on his farm in Tungar Fulani when a man wielding an AK-47 rifle appeared to claim ownership of the farmland. The man’s name, Mr Salihu said, is Bashar Dan Niger – one of the notorious bandits ravaging the community.
The bandit would not only seize the farm field of the poor farmer, but he would also give him some tedious work to do. “And I was forced to go build a thatched house for them on the farmland. I obliged because if I had refused I would be a dead man now,” he recalled.
Bashar is one of the bandits recruited from the Niger Republic by a famous terrorist duo, respectively nicknamed “Black and Standa” — a label depicting their notoriety for bloodshed and criminality in the area. Like Shingi, these two kingpins operate freely in the rural communities of Zurmi and display bloodsucking firearms against civilian villagers.
But in 2020, a military offensive launched against the terrorists in Zamfara pushed the Black and Standa terror group to the neighbouring Niger Republic, according to interviews with locals and security agents familiar with the bandits’ operations. But the militants regrouped in Niger’s Maradun deep forest, in the country’s south-central border with Nigeria and continued to unleash mayhem on innocent civilians.
Before then, however, the bandits had terrorised the villagers of the Maradun’s Niger area, repeating the war-grade violence meted on Nigerian communities. In 2021 alone, the terror group stole nearly 3000 animals, kidnapped over 90 Nigerien citizens and collected up to 50 million CFA from victims of abduction, according to Le Souffle de Maradi, a local newspaper in the Niger Republic.
The Global Protection Cluster, a humanitarian non-profit in the country, reported 76 banditry incidents in Niger’s south-central region, including rape, assaults and cattle theft, and 29 kidnappings. Nigeriens interviewed in this region told PREMIUM TIMES they fled their homes for more garrison areas when armed bandits denied them access to their farm fields and dwellings.
From Nigeria to the Niger Republic – and back
In August 2021, Operation Faraoutar Bushiya troops, a contingent of over 1000 Niger soldiers invaded the Maradun forest to flush out the Nigerian bandits wielding arms to harm the country’s citizens. Distressed by the military attacks, the Black and Standa bandits and their boys left the Maradun forest in Niger and relocated to a Nigerian area, Mashema forest, a militant community bordering Sokoto, Kaura, Katsina, and the Niger Republic.
Before they were finally dislocated from the forest in Niger, the terrorists had taken advantage of extreme poverty and unemployment to recruit those Nigeriens described as “street miscreants” into the terror group. Now armed with heavy military weapons, the Nigerien recruits are terrorising innocent citizens of Zamfara, especially in the Zurmi area.
The Tungar Fulani villagers interviewed said the “boys” recruited by the Nigerian terror group are sent to go around to execute the bandits’ cash-for-peace policy and capture fertile lands in the area. They could kidnap anyone from his home and ask him to work on the terrorists’ grabbed farmlands for days, the villagers said.
“The Niger’s bandits always hold guns and canes to flog us while we farm for them,” said Mr Salihu. “They don’t even give us water, don’t even talk about food. And if you don’t go to the farm, you will be punished.”
Mr Salihu’s travails mirror the hardship innocent Zamfara citizens are made to face by Nigerian bandits working in cahoots with terrorists in and from the Niger Republic. Sadly, the Zurmi villagers said, the terrorists have taken over 80 per cent of the farms in the area, leaving the civilians with just 20 per cent of farm fields to cultivate.
The Black and Standa terror group controls over 600 footsoldiers – a mixture of Nigerian and Nigerien bandits — competing with Dan Karemi, another bigwig terrorist in Zurmi with over 1000 fighters. Tales of cattle theft, land grabbing and forced labour keep emanating from the areas held by the “criminal sovereigns” but these stories are hardly documented because the affected communities are hard to reach.
“We put our hopes in God and not the government,” said Mr Salihu, teary-eyed. “We used to complain to the last emir until we realised it wouldn’t help. We now depend only on Allah. Anybody that can stay will stay, if you can’t, you flee.”
Bello Turji: A regime of terror and bloodshed in Sokoto
As the district head of Gangara town in the Sabon Birnin area of Sokoto State, Usman Aliyu hates to hear terrorists have deposed him. Last year, the traditional ruler’s ego was flattened by notorious terrorists, led by kingpin Bello Turji, who invaded his territory and took over the governance and economy of the town.
Before he was finally denied the rulership of the community, Mr Aliyu said he had been the target of many bloody raids orchestrated by Turji’s terror group. On 1 April, for instance, he returned to his home from a community meeting to see that his house had caved in from bullets the menacing bandits fired.
“That day, we lost 27 persons and they took more than 500 animals away,” he recalled.
But why are bandits targeting the traditional ruler of this town?
Gangara is a big area with three central mosques, six election polling units, hectares of farm fields and a booming weekly market rivalling the popular Shinkafi market in the neighbouring Zamfara State, residents said.
In September 2021, armed bandits riding motorcycles invaded Gangara and forcibly uprooted the residents. For weeks, the area was sleepy after bandits displaced the people. In October, however, the terror gang called the people of Gangara for a peace pact. Mr Aliyu refused to attend knowing he was the bandits’ primary target.
At the meeting in the Saturu village of Gangara, witnesses said, five armed bandits were present as Turji’s emissaries. The terrorists agreed to live with the people in the community provided they abide by their rulings.
Feeling unsafe, the people asked the bandits to provide security measures to ensure there would not be subsequent attacks upon their return. The community representative then appointed Ɗan Baƙƙwalo, Turji’s right-hand man, to take over the leadership of the town, since the district head was nowhere to be found. Dan Baƙƙwalo was made the leader of the community on account that he would protect the people from attacks being a powerful and deadly terrorist.
Terrorists ‘protecting’ civilians in Sabon Birnin
Dan Bakkwalo would now oversee issues concerning adjudication, security and collection of taxes in Gangara. But he gave some conditions: no police officer, military personnel or vigilante group members would be allowed henceforth in this town. Celebrating his new ad hoc title, as endorsed by kingpin Turji, the terrorist returned the N1.5 million the community had earlier paid to the terror group as a protection levy, asking them to use the fund for the repair of mosques destroyed during one of their raids.
Since then, Mr Aliyu had been banished from living in his community. He had not been interviewed by the media since the news of his ousting broke. But in August, PREMIUM TIMES tracked down and interviewed the man in a location we are not disclosing for security reasons.
Over one year after he was sent into exile by the bandits, the local leader still does not believe he has been deposed. “I don’t know about the stories going around that I have been removed and replaced by a terrorist,” he told PREMIUM TIMES, wearing a smiling face but apparently worried. “The real reason that Dankkwalo is in Gangara is to protect the people. The terrorist was chosen because he is feared even among the bandits.”
A few weeks into the verbal accord with the villagers, Ɗan Baƙƙwalo breached the peace pledge he had with them. On many occasions, he would dispatch letters across communities in Gangara and Sabon Birnin, asking villagers to pay millions as taxes. In our previous report, we documented how the Turji-led criminal gang pocketed N70 million protection levy from besieged communities last year. Sometimes the terrorists sit with the people and talk like there is peace but they are mostly hostile, residents said.
Jama Black, one of Turji’s boys, is notorious for seizing lands belonging to the villagers to farm groundnuts and millets, some of his victims said. He had also seized the land the state government had marked for building a primary health centre in the Gangara community.
“There was a time he (Jama Black) brought a car and took some of the people to go farm for him,” Aminu Dahiru, one of the locals forced to work for the terrorists, said. “We have no option, we just want to be safe.”
Asked if he would return to his community anytime, Mr Aliyu said he could not live in a community ruled by guns. “I can’t stay with people surrounding me with guns,” he said. “All the times they attacked the village, they came to my house. There is no part of my house that hasn’t felt a bullet. Why won’t I leave the village for them?”
Inside the multi-billion commercial farming financing northwest terrorists
Zamfara is a predominantly agrarian state. With about 90 per cent of its resident into farming, the state depends largely on agricultural activities to fuel the local economy. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, for instance, the state generated over N4 billion from agricultural activities, according to the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS).
In what economic experts described as the deadly backstabbing of the state government, armed bandits taking root in Zamfara agrarian communities have commercialised farming, amassing millions to finance their terrorist activities. But what is the worth of bandits’ commercial farming in the northwest, especially in Zamfara, the epicentre of the crisis?
In 2021 alone, Shingi, the terror kingpin ruling communities in Birnin Magaji, cultivated over 1000 bags of millet, 600 bags of beans, 600 bags of maize and 700 bags of soya beans, according to interviews with villagers and associates of the militant group.
Last year, PREMIUM TIMES found, the price of a bag of millet cost N19,000 on average while bags of maize, beans and soya beans cost N20,000, N29,000 and N38,000 respectively. By our calculations, the Shingi criminal syndicate made N75 million from his illicit farming proceeds to sustain terrorism activities in the area.
“I can confirm to you that these bandits have great interest in farming because it is very lucrative,” an associate of Shingi’s terror group told PREMIUM TIMES. His claim was corroborated by interviews with locals in the ungoverned spaces ruled by the notorious terrorist. “It is their new way of sustaining themselves apart from kidnapping for ransom.”
Last year, the Zamfara government disconnected communication networks, shut down markets and declared a curfew for weeks in the state to destroy the logistical capabilities of bandits. What the authorities failed to understand was that the terrorists had their ways of circumventing the stringent measures put in place to deal with them.
Before then, terror kingpin Shingi had stockpiled foodstuff he had looted from villagers’ farm fields to feed his boys, those familiar with his activities told PREMIUM TIMES. With over 600 foot soldiers, the notorious bandits’ syndicate bypassed the authorities’ measures against the state’s terrorists.
“The reason why bandits now take farming more serious is that last year, Shingi said that had God not aided him and his group to stockpile foodstuff, they would have died from hunger,” the insider said.
Hundreds of marauding bandits in Zamfara and Sokoto outsmarted the authorities’ months-long military campaigns. Instead, innocent citizens who should be protected were subjected to starvation and more deadly attacks by terrorists. The military operation targeted at the terrorists also affected the economy of the state and skyrocketed the cost of living of the largely poor people.
Terrorists survived the military onslaught by relying on their multi-million farming trade. The black and Standa terrorists, for instance, were smuggling millets and soya beans to sell in the neighbouring Niger Republic via the Mashema forest in Zamfara, villagers said. It is the same story for Turji, who has taken over the economy of Gangara and other communities in Sabon Birnin. PREMIUM TIMES’ findings showed that different bands of bandits make millions trading farm produce from one state to another in the region.
‘Terrorists paying Zakat to Zamfara emirs’
During our stay at Birnin Magaji, a graveyard allegation was commonly found on the lips of victims interviewed: bandits pay annual zakat, an obligatory tax required of rich Muslims — and one of the five pillars of Islam — to the emir of the town. A long-standing friend of Shingi’s terror group confirmed this claim.
“These bandits are very particular about giving zakat,” he told PREMIUM TIMES. “Alhaji Shingi also doesn’t play with zakat payment; he pays to the Birnin Magaji emir.”
Although the Emir of Birnin Magaji, Husein Usman, failed to honour our interview invite, PREMIUM TIMES’ on-site reporting with several sources, including a former bandit, revealed that his council received the zakat offering from Shingi’s terror camp. The former bandit, who describes himself as a “repentant bandit” added that other terrorists in the state also pay zakat to their emirs as Muslims. “It is a compulsory thing for them,” he said.
However, it isn’t the first time traditional rulers were accused of abetting terrorist operations within their geographical settings. In July alone, 11 emirs in Zamfara and Katsina were sacked for allegedly working with bandits against the vulnerable people they were supposed to lead.
PREMIUM TIMES placed several calls and messages to Mamman Tsafe, the security commissioner of the state, but he failed to respond to our public service inquiries.
