I HAD ONLY FIVE BULLETS LEFT

People also call me Ahmadu Baushi, which means hunter. I started this work in 2001; I’ve been doing it for about 25 years.

Initially, it started with me being a hunter. Later, we decided to form a local committee for security headed by some of the elderly people in the area, including one retired General.

I worked with many security agencies, including the Civil Defence, up to being one of the forest guards and a volunteer who sacrificed his life to fight any criminality. We’ve continued with the consent of the traditional leaders and government security agencies, who usually support us, and we also support them in operations and other activities.

Usually, if we go to a new community, even as hunters, we introduce ourselves to the community leaders to avoid being suspected.

This place was initially a forest when we relocated here. During that time, the place was not safe and there was a man called Musa Ma’aruf whose house criminals came to on each Saturday or Sunday. As the problem increased, we decided to strengthen our volunteer work and registered with a police outpost near us and that’s how we continue patrolling at night and conducting surveillance from every angle of the area.

With the coming of banditry, things started to get worse in every one of our communities and we keep expanding our work to different neighbourhoods and even faraway communities.

I’ve fought a lot of bandits during my work. I can remember one attack where I narrowly escaped death but alhamdulillah, there were no casualties among us.

The incident happened a few meters away from a community called Nahuta. There is a bandit camp there belonging to a twin bandit group called Hassan and Husaini. We were moving toward the camp; unknown to us, they lay down, planning to ambush us. We spent more than three hours fighting them.

I have never experienced any fear and anxiety like that because I was leading and it got to the point that all my equipment was nearly finished. I think I only had five bullets left and the bandits were inching closer. I was really devastated, thinking of what to do. If I decided to run or look for help, they would kill me and overpower us. And all the guns we were using were Dane guns, and it’s really a shame for me to run as a leader.

We don’t know why, but fortunately, with God’s intervention, they started retreating and left. I came back home imagining how it would have been if they had not moved back.

I lost a lot of colleagues and friends. Most of them were not with me and they lost their lives. But the most painful one I will never forget is that of Baushi Dan Fulani, who is my very close friend in the Yan Tumaki community.

He had the same experience as me, spending more than three hours exchanging fire with them. Unluckily, his stock ran out and they arrested him. At that time, they tried any means to kill him by shooting guns, using a machete, and beating him, but nothing happened to him. So, they decided to tie his two hands in one place and his two legs in one place and they tied him to a bike, which they rode in the farmland and forest. His body and head kept hitting rocks and other ridges in the farm until he died. They stayed there with his corpse for about six days, expecting other people to come to carry it, but nobody went.

After those six days, we went to look for the corpse, but he had decomposed and started smelling. We had no option but to bury him there. This is one of the miserable deaths of a colleague I will never forget. In Yan Tumaki, everybody can tell you about this incident because he’s a well-known hero and fighter.

At the same time, I have a lot of operations I feel happy with because we recorded a lot of success in multiple places. I can’t count the number of bandits I’ve killed personally; they are many.

In terms of injuries during fights or operations, I never had any injuries; as you can look at my body all over, I don’t have injuries. I only had one problem where I fell from a bike and had an injury in my knee. I have no injuries apart from that.

The only challenge is we don’t have proper support from the government. Sometimes, even in the recruitment of people into community vigilantes and forest guards by the government, they sideline us and recruit some people who are not even part of us or don’t have expertise in the work, which has led to the deaths of many of them. So, for that, the government has to consider people with experience and knowledge of the terrain.

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As narrated by: Ahmad Abba – 45 (Gabasawa, Katsina).

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This snippet is published as part of the series, What We Lost to the Bandits.