Infamous bandits leader Bello Turji embraces peace deal in northwest Nigeria: govt | Tellwell Newspaper

A notorious bandits kingpin with strong following has entered into a truce with local authourities in northwest Zamfara state wracked by years of deadly violence and kidnappings.

Tellwell Newspaper reports that Bello Turji accepted a peace deal by the government to end attacks and kidnappings for ransom, and has turned his guns on gangs who refused to lay down their arms, Hassan Nasiha, Zamfara state deputy governor, said at a security conference in the state capital Gusau on Sunday.

Turji is a 28-year old herder-turned-criminal known for his ruthlessness and pillaging across the northwest.

Criminal gangs known as bandits who raid villages, killing and kidnapping residents as well as burning homes after looting them have for years been terrorizing communities in northwest and central Nigeria.

The gangs who are motivated by financial gains have been forging closer ties with jihadist groups waging a 13-year insurgency in the northeast.

The gangs who are mostly drawn from ethnic Fulani herders maintain camps in the vast Rugu forest which straddles Zamfara, Kaduna, Katsina and Niger states.

Several measures including military operations, telecom shutdown to cut off communication between gangs and amnesty have failed to end the violence, Tellwell Newspaper gathered.

“We have succeeded in reaching a peace deal with Turji, and in the past six weeks not a single person was killed in the areas he operates” Nasiha said at the conference broadcast on local stations.

“Now it is Turji looking for a bandit to kill, if he finds one,” Nasiha said.

In June Zamfara state governor Bello Matawalle asked Nasiha to lead a peace committee to negotiate with bandits following escalation of violence by the criminal gangs.

“We are in a state of war in Zamfara which has been flooded with weapons. It is therefore pertinent to…pursue peaceful negotiations,” Nasiha said at the conference.

The committee reached peace pacts with dozens of gangs who agreed to cease attacks on certain conditions, the deputy governor said.

These include an end to extrajudicial killings of Fulani herders by ethnic Hausa farming communities, the restoration of watering holes and grazing reserves encroached by farmers, as well as the return of their farmlands seized as booty by local communities.

They also demanded the release of their kinsmen arrested by security personnel.

The farmers agreed to stop killing herders if they stopped raiding and burning villages, and kidnapping residents.

The state governor acceded to all the herders’ demands, revoking all grazing reserves turned to farms and returning them to the herders while directing traditional chiefs to return watering holes and farms to them.

“We asked security agencies to screen the herders in their custody to hand them over to us to release them to their kinsmen, except those accused of serious offences,” Nasiha said.

There have been several peace deals with bandits in Zamfara and neighbouring Katsina state where local authourities desperate to end the conflict made amnesty offers to the criminal gangs in exchange for surrendering their arms and renouncing violence.

In Zamfara bandits received money and cattle as compensation for handing over weapons but the peace deals did not last.

In a celebrated peace deal in February 2021, another notorious bandits leader Awwalun Daudawa along with his six lieutenants accepted Zamfara state government’s amnesty offer and surrendered his weapons.

Daudawa, who masterminded the kidnap of more than 400 students from an all-boys boarding school in nearby Katsina state the previous December, reneged on the peace deal and returned to the forest with his gang two months into the deal.

He was killed days later in a gunfight with another criminal gang over stolen herd.

In September 2021, governor Matawalle who was frustrated by series of failed truces declared he would no longer grant amnesty to bandits for their refusal to honour their pledge.

In June 2020, Katsina state governor Aminu Masara said he would never again negotiate peace with bandits after he failed to sustain a peace deal his government sealed with the criminal gangs in his state.

Bulama Bukarti, Africa analyst at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, warned that Turji was unreliable and could not be trusted to keep to the peace deal.

“Turji has never paid for his atrocities. He has violated similar “peace deals” in the past,” Bukarti wrote on Twitter.

“This is a deal that was stitch(ed) up by desperate politicians in a rush to score cheap political points for the coming elections,” Bukarti said.

According to the analyst, the peace deal with Turji would only embolden other terrorist groups in the region.

“It’ll send a terrible signal to other terrorists: ‘you’ll get a good deal if you’re as brutal as Turji’.”