Residents Of 30 Niger Communities Return Home Six Years After Bandits’ Attacks

Residents Of 30 Niger Communities Return Home Six Years After Bandits’ Attacks

As peace gradually returns to over 30 communities of Munya Local Government Area of Niger State, six years after they were sacked by armed bandits, locals are returning to pick up what is left of their homes.

The calm experience in these communities at the moment follows the sustained presence of joint security men in the general forest area.

Channels Television visited some of these communities located at the heart of Sarkin Pawa Forest which until recently was under the control of different bandit leaders.

To confirm that peace had indeed returned to the communities, the Channels Television team drove for over 65 kilometres from the Sarkin Pawa headquarters of Munya Local Government Area of Niger State to the Mangoro community through the notorious forest which is a popular haven for bandits operating along the Niger- Kaduna corridor.

And on both sides of the road, we captured abandoned telecommunication masts, and deserted communities, some of which the local vigilante told Channels Television, were used for over five years as bandits’ hideouts and shelter for their kidnapped victims anytime they struck around Kaduna and Niger states.

Notorious bandit kingpins like Bello Turji, Dogo Gede, and others had made the forest home before they were finally sacked.

For more than six years, socio-economic activities around adjoining small towns that were not attacked by bandits dropped affecting livelihood.

One of those affected is Esther Aboyi who runs a commodity business in the area. She told Channels Television that she had not been able to leave her community like she used to since the attacks.

It is affecting us because sometimes when we can’t go out for our businesses. This hasn’t made life easy for us,” she said.

“Sometimes whenever we want to go out, we would hear that the bandits have blocked the road, and we have to go back. Sometimes we would want to sleep, and we would hear that the bandits had arrived, and we would have to run away from our homes in search of a safer place to stay. That is how we have been managing our lives”.

In another account, one of the returnees, Sunday Moses told Channels Television that, “Our houses have been burnt down, and we want the government to rebuild them for us. We need water. We need schools, we need a hospital because we don’t have any here again”.