‘Nobody is sure of tomorrow’

Abstract

This study investigates factors underlying adoption of safety behaviours among vicarious victims of Boko Haram terrorism in Sabon Gari, a predominantly Christian community in Kano State. Using the Health Belief Model, data were generated from non-indigenes in Sabon Gari. Findings indicated that participants felt susceptible to being direct victims with expressions such as ‘nobody is safe or sure of tomorrow’ because of their identities as Christians and non-indigenes. Loss of lives, destruction of business, weakened bonds, and feelings of imaginary dangers captured perceived severity. Perceived cost of adopting safety behaviours included an outright ban on evangelism, utilization of visitation and isolation. Adopting cues to action, participants avoided crowded places, and relocated family members to reduce collateral damages of anticipated victimization. Implementation of personal (avoidance of vain talks) and institutional preventive measures (purchase of scanners and organization of security training) constituted control measures to prevent victimization. In conclusion, perceived susceptibility facilitated adoption of safe and secure behaviours.

Keywords

Boko Haram terrorism non-indigenes Nigeria perceived susceptibility

Introduction

Kano State, reputed to be the commercial nerve centre for the whole of Northern Nigeria, is gradually losing steam due to unending bombing by the Boko Haram terrorists. Kano attracts a pool of industrious and migrant traders both indigenous to Kano/the North or from outside. Because one of the agenda items of Boko Haram since its debut in 2009 is to Islamize Nigeria, non-indigenes (mostly Christians) residing in that part have become prone to attacks. In Kano, the majority of the bombings have been carried out in Christian dominated areas such as Sabon Gari. Sabon Gari means the strangers’ quarters of a town. On 20 January 2012, Boko Haram terrorists launched an onslaught on the metropolitan city of Kano claiming 162 lives (Ndahi, 2012)¹. This attack was to avenge the persecution of its members in the city. The spiritual head of the sect, Abubarkar Shekau (quoted in Vanguard, Ndahi, 2012) had threatened in a mail to the Kano State authorities that ‘unless urgent steps are taken, the group will launch endless and violent attacks on Kano and its environs because of arbitrary arrest and persecution of its members’. When deaf ears were turned to the threat, the sect increased its operations. On 18 March 2013, a motor-park bombing in Sabon Gari claimed 60 lives and destroyed four luxury buses. In March 2013, 22 persons became victims of bombing in Kano while on 29 July 2013, 20 people were killed in the Sabon Gari area of Kano with four bombs being detonated in the neighbourhood (Uzodinma, 2013). On 23 June 2014, another bomb explosion occurred at the School of Hygiene killing 8 while 20 persons were injured. While some other parts of Kano had skeletal attacks, Sabon Gari has experienced more.

The primary focus of this study is on the vicarious victimization by Boko Haram among non-indigenes in Sabon Gari² in Kano State. This focus departs from existing works on Boko Haram which tended to highlight the causes, history and consequences of Boko Haram activities. Even the studies that have touched on victimization typically have treated victims as homogenous. Non-indigenes³ in Sabon Gari are a unique population to study because of their vulnerabilities: they are mainly Christians who have been part of the targets of Boko Haram; they are not likely to access social protection, and they have a history of hostilities from the indigenes. Furthermore, there are social demarcations along the lines of land possession (indigenes or non-indigenes) and religious divides (moderate Muslims/radical Muslims/liberal Muslims). We contend that citizens are differentially affected by Boko Haram activities according to several factors, one of which is being in a neighbourhood created for strangers (non-natives).

Kano State has a significant history of violent riots rooted in religious fundamentalism. While the notion of violent riots and protest cannot be said to be an affair solely found in the northern part of Nigeria, more religion-influenced riots and violence have occurred in northern Nigeria. Writing on Boko Haram, Adesoji (2010) avers that though the Boko Haram phenomenon was not the first attempt at foisting a religious ideology on a secular state, it nonetheless broadened the context and content of Islamic revivalism. Adesoji adds that the causative factors that precipitated the Maitatsine riot are not totally different from those for Boko Haram. Many scholars have identified predisposing factors, such as economic dislocation, deprivation, income inequalities and illiteracy, as well as poverty facilitated by drought and deepened social exclusion. Other contributing factors include the rejection of the secular nature of the Nigerian society and the impact of the success of the 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini revolution in Iran (Albert, 1997, 1999a 1999b; Clarke, 1987; Falola, 1998; Hickey, 1984; Hiskett, 1987; Ibrahim, 1997; Isichei, 1987; Kastfelt, 1989; Lubeck, 1985; Stock, 2004; Usman, 1987). A more recent study by Meagher (2014) identifies economic marginalization, governance failures, extremist operations and security failures as four explanatory factors accounting for Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria.

Like the members of the Maitatsine movement of the 1980s, many of the members attracted by Boko Haram are animated by deep-seated socioeconomic and political grievances, such as poor governance and elite corruption; as John Campbell (2014) notes, ‘Boko Haram, once an obscure, radical Islamic cult in the North, is evolving into an insurrection with support among the impoverished and alienated Northern population’. Agbiboa (2013: 147) notes that ‘Boko Haram members saw themselves at odds with the secular authorities, whom they came to view as representatives of a corrupt, illegitimate, Christian-dominated federal government’. He opined that the overriding goal of Boko Haram is to wrestle control from the Nigerian state and to impose a Sharia legal code across the entire country. The cocktail of political corruption, chronic poverty, and youth unemployment in northern Nigeria continues to fuel members and supporters of Boko Haram. According to Isa (2010: 329), Boko Haram communities have been wrecked by ‘poverty, deteriorating social services and infrastructure, educational backwardness, rising numbers of unemployed graduates, massive numbers of unemployed youths, dwindling fortunes in agriculture…and the weak and dwindling productive base of the northern economy’. In all, Boko Haram could be said to have sprouted and gained strength owing to relative deprivation (Abigboa, 2013). Cotee and Hayward (2011) consider that participation in terrorism could be a reflection of existential frustration through which involvement in terrorism provides opportunities to actualize desires not available through legitimate means. They argue further that terrorists find expression in participation in terror groups spurred by their motivation for excitement, quest for ultimate meaning and the desire for glory. The intended consequences of their actions are the making of direct and indirect/vicarious victims.

The research literature separates direct and vicarious (indirect) victims of terrorism (Pemberton, 2011). According to Pemberton (2011), terrorism involves the deployment of violence against direct targets to threaten and frighten as well as influence a wider group of indirect or vicarious victims. Pemberton (2014: 369) further argues ‘that the main distinction concerns the peculiarly public nature of terrorism, in which the attack on the direct victims is intended to influence a (far) larger group of so-called vicarious victims. This means that the public is likely to experience terrorist attacks as attacks on themselves’. Other studies have shown that terrorists do not only succeed in inflicting pain on their targets but also extend the damage to others (see Cohen-Silver et al., 2002; Gerwehr and Hubbard, 2007; Wayment, 2004). Victimization experiences are open-ended and may even be subjected to re-evaluation. Victimization is closely tied to experience and may instill fear in people (Hale, 1996; Nofziger and Williams, 2005), and a victimization model generally includes the concepts of perceived vulnerability, personal victimization and vicarious victimization. In addition to the impact of direct victimization, fear of crime researchers have studied indirect or vicarious victimization and found a strong relationship between vicarious victimization and fear of crime (Hale, 1996), such that vicarious experience of crime victimization significantly increases fear of crime. This might be because vicarious victimization that comes from other people, such as relatives, friends or neighbours, is more common and widespread than direct victimization (Park, 2005).

The Health Belief Model (HBM) as a security model

This study adds to a number of pieces of research which have used the Health Belief Model (HBM) to explain behaviour change in domains other than health, where the original version of the HBM was used (see Rosenstock, 1974). In a recent study, Davinson and Sillence (2014) employed HBM to explain financial safety behaviour in technology mediated financial transactions. Following their initiative, with slight modifications, this paper applied HBM to explain adoption of ‘safety’ behaviours in terror zones. HBM was originally based on four constructs: ‘perceived susceptibility’ (which refers to the perception of residents that they may not be able to defend themselves against a criminal, which makes them feel vulnerable to crime victimisation); ‘perceived severity’ (the perception of residents about the dreadfulness of Boko Haram); ‘perceived benefits’; and ‘perceived barriers’. Subsequently, newer versions of the model added ‘cues to action’ and ‘perceived control’. Benefiting from the application of this model to the study of behaviour change in contexts other than health settings, we employ HBM to explain the chances of a person living in Sabon Gari thinking he or she can become a victim of terror attack (perceived susceptibility), his or her perception on how devastating the attacks of Boko Haram may be (perceived severity), what the benefits are in conducting behaviour safely (perceived benefits), what costs would be incurred in conducting oneself safely (perceived cost), when it would be suitable to behave securely (cues to action) and finally, whether terror attacks can be prevented by adhering to and behaving safely (perceived control). These constructs are important in explaining how individuals behave in a terror zone.

Methods

The research design adopted for the study is exploratory. The study was conducted in Sabon Gari in the Fagge local government area of Kano State. Kano is one of the states which have consistently come under bomb attacks by Boko Haram terrorists in Nigeria. It is interesting to study because it is an area that is dominated by non-indigenes. In the selection of the participants for the study, a non-probability sampling approach was adopted in the form of purposive and snowball sampling techniques. It was purposive in the sense that only residents in the stranger quarters (or Sabon Gari) were included in the study. In other words, the researchers chose only those who met the purpose of the study while snowball sampling was employed to reach participants due to the sensitivity of the issue of Boko Haram in the location. In all, thirty (30) participants agreed to participate in the study. They comprised male (16) and female (14) non-indigenes resident in Sabon Gari. The participants included businessmen, businesswomen, pastors, contractors, petty traders, teachers, housewives, a pharmacist, a doctor, an evangelist, an auditor, a comedian, and food vendors who were met in different locations such as religious grounds, offices, shops and homes, and the interviews were conducted in these locations. They were carefully selected and contacted in order to have a general overview of feelings of insecurity and the adoption of safety behaviours. All of them were vicarious victims. Getting people to participate in the research was not easy. In fact there were two men who refused to allow the interview to be recorded but insisted we jotted down their responses. Despite assurances from our contact person who connected us to them, they said the matter was too delicate, thus nobody was willing to take chances. We considered this an interesting approach to adopting secure and safe behaviour.

The socio-demographic data generated show that 13 respondents fell within the age category of 51 and above, while 7 respondents were within the age category of 31–40 years, 5 respondents within the age category of 21–30 years and 5 within the age category of 41–50 years. The sex distribution shows that there were a total of 14 female and 16 male respondents. The marital status of the respondents was that 23 respondents were married, 6 respondents were single and only 1 respondent was widowed. The religion distribution showed that 29 out of the 30 respondents were Christians and only 1 out of the 30 respondents was a Muslim. This is because Sabon Gari is mainly dominated by Christians and the few mosques found in the area served mostly the northerners living in the area.

The method of data collection involved conducting in-depth interviews with purposively selected participants. The qualitative data were analysed using manual content analysis involving narrative analysis and verbatim quotations.

Discussion of findings: perceived susceptibility

There was a feeling that ‘nobody is safe’ (meaning they all felt susceptible) among participants due to the state of insecurity in Kano State. This made them feel unhappy because they felt they were susceptible to becoming victims. As non-indigenes, their businesses in the metropolis were threatened; and their movements were restricted while they feared for their lives. The fear of the unknown seemed to govern their daily routine. This was because aggression was perceived to have been focused on non-indigenes/Christians and non-Hausa people, and as a participant put it ‘We do not know their next plan’. This perception of the Boko Haram war being targeted at Christians and the non-Hausa populace and institutions was subsequent to the call made by the leader of the Boko Haram group in which he called on non-Muslims to return to their home states, calling them infidels.

Participants feared for their children going to school without being assured of state security after witnessing successful Boko Haram attacks on several schools with child casualties in the north. The safety of the neighbourhood was significant when examining physical activities the children were allowed, particularly from the parent’s perspectives. Carver et al. (2008) have also found that perceptions of neighbourhood safety make parents constrain the movement of their children. And so a participant expressed the fear that ‘We are scared in terms of school so that they will not go to our children’s school to go and look for them there.’ The careful usage of ‘they’ by the participants shows the direction of aggression against Christians and non-indigenes. This creates mutual distrust. Further, a female non-indigene said:

It has not been easy because it has put a lot of tension in people; nobody feels safe again to go about their normal business. In fact, you don’t know what will happen at the next minute, so, as it stands now, we all live in fear. So, the situation is very bad, very very bad. As if it’s calming down but before you know it, the next minute you’ll hear it’s happening there, you’ll hear it’s happening here. So, you don’t actually know what is really happening and how the whole thing will end.

They also felt that their lives were not safe in their location which they described as a threat to their right to life. A clergy in Sabon Gari had the opinion that:

One is that I believe in human rights. Human rights include right to live, right to own a property, and this insecurity is affecting our right to live because many have died. It’s affecting our rights to own a property and as a result of that, nobody can make any investment in this town and nobody is sure of tomorrow as far as life is concerned.

Beyond living in the strangers’ quarters, non-indigenes became afraid of social spaces which could increase their vulnerability and tried to avoid such spaces. A married business woman said:

I am not finding it all that funny. For non-indigenes, we are scared because we don’t know their next plan. Some non-indigenes were complaining that the Boko Haram men are saying that market place and anywhere there is social/gathering is their next target.

There was also a gender dimension to the likelihood of threat of Boko Haram victimization. Previous research has shown that women show higher levels of perceptions of risk than men (Fisher et al., 1995). For instance, women who sold produce at markets mapped out ‘safe’ time and social spaces as well as gathering information about the probability of being hit by a terrorist bomb. Another married business woman said:

So we women, we don’t know their next plan. So in terms of market, whenever we go to the market, we buy whatever we want to buy ‘sharp sharp’ (quickly) and return to our home.

Human beings are afraid of something real or imagined and based on the responses above, participants were afraid of something real; which was the fear of death or the fear of losing loved ones, since they were unsure when and where the terrorists would strike next. This finding is in line with existing studies on the gendered dimension to threat of victimization. These studies show that women’s elevated fear levels may increase their perceptions of risk and may cause them to be more likely to engage in constrained behaviours, including dependence on male protectors (Rader, 2008; Rountree, 1998; Stanko, 1990, 2001). For women, as May et al. (2010: 18) noted: ‘the threat of victimization appears to be affected by rational choices to both avoid places that they are likely to be victimized and engage in defensive behaviors to protect themselves from victimization. Furthermore, the impact of perceived risk has little association with defensive and avoidance behaviors for either gender.’

Such a feeling of perceived threat may have contributed to the development of feelings of distrust. This became apparent with some participants declaring that the person next to them was a potential threat. A participant said to us that ‘your next door neighbour, the person by your side is number one suspect. You must be alert. As you’re going, you must be careful, be focused, know the person by your side, know the next move the person is about to make.’

It was observed that none of the participants felt happy. This may not be unconnected to the challenges they faced and their adopted constrained behaviours. For fear of being victimized, they regulated their lifestyle to reduce exposure to risk.

Perceived severity

Almost all the participants described the Boko Haram terrorism as being severe. The severity discourse focused on the number of human casualties suffered due to the series of bombings that had occurred in the community, and its effects on the business interests of individuals and Kano State. They said that insecurity in the state had gone ‘out of control’ while some stated that insecurity was not unique to the state alone but spread across the country. A few participants averred that the government had failed or had become too weak to tackle the problem. For example, a married medical professional who owned a house in Sabon Gari where he collects rent was asked if he had been affected directly or indirectly by the Boko Haram phenomenon:

Directly or indirectly? Both! Directly, my friends have been killed. Indirectly, the Igbos are being haunted here and there. Indirectly again, the business is not what it used to be and there is serious economic downturn and many people are owing house rent. They don’t pay because of Boko Haram.

Perceived costs

Due to the perceived severity of the problem of insecurity and the perceived consequences, participants considered the benefits of behaving ‘safely’ against the cost of engaging in risk exposing behaviours. In doing so, participants restricted their movements, re-ordered their routines, and reduced attendance at church services as well as social events. Business interests also suffered as they considered it a wise decision to stay alive to be able to make sales.

Perceived costs of adopting safe and secure behaviour remained unique to the socio-demographics of our participants. They listed the cost of embracing security and behaving safely on their business, religious and social interests. These changes in daily routine activities of the non-indigenes, above all, have crippled the economy of the state. For instance, when asked if any of his daily activities had changed due to insecurity, a never-married male businessman stated:

I just have a routine movement now; leave my house, go to work, from work, come back home. I can’t go anywhere. In fact, the other day I went for a birthday party, I was asking them to close the gate because it was along Naibawa side. So you can imagine that we were celebrating and at the same time, I was still so scared.

Participants tended to retire home early as a safe behaviour. In ‘No mans’ land’ (an area in Sabon Gari called so because it is owned by no individual or tribe and is dominated by strangers, i.e. non-indigenes) for example, it is difficult to see people walking around the streets between the hours of 7pm and 7.30pm and by 8pm, the whole area looks deserted. This relates to what Fisher and Nasar (1995) have shown, that fear is greater at night than during the day. It is also because most of the bomb blast incidents in Sabon Gari happened at night. For instance a married worker said:

Normally, I’m the kind of person that keeps late night but because of this insecurity, 7 o’clock-7.30, I’m already inside because if you check this north, most of the attacks normally come in the night especially in this Kano. Most of them, apart from the park bomb blast; others were just at night so because of things like this, I just go home and just stay indoors most times.

While a married female trader said:

I like to be in the house early because coming in the night; you don’t know who is who. That one they did in the night, you see now, if you are in the beer parlour, you see where how many of them scatter. But what I always do, I like to come early so that…you know in the day time, you know who is who but if it is in the night, you will not know what they are doing, and you will not see anything. So that’s why I like that day time I will be in the house even if it is around to 7pm, I’m already at home.

Churches in this area had embraced safe and secure behaviour. This was executed through downward adjustment of the time of church services, especially their evening services and early morning mass. This allowed their members to return home early. Apart from this, members had also reduced the times they went to church which has seriously hampered the economy of churches and stagnated church construction projects due to a paucity of funds occasioned by reduction in membership and church attendance. A pastor stated that:

Very well…our time of worship, before I’ll start our evening service 6 o’clock while we close around 8. But now, we start service 5pm and make sure we close before 6pm.

These strategies of avoiding perceived dangerous spots concur with May et al.’s (2010) assertion that avoidance behaviours typically include avoidance of certain places at night, avoidance of events, or a restriction in activities.

Apart from churches changing their time of worship, other respondents were quick to add that the issue of insecurity had threatened their religious interests, while others claimed that their religious interests were not threatened. When asked if they could attend crusades or night vigils, most of them said emphatically ‘NO’. Others would attend a night vigil if it was organized by their own church and after studying the security situation of things in the state. This shows the importance of vigilance as a defence strategy. A female participant stressed being careful:

I don’t go for vigil elsewhere except those organized in my church, by His grace I might be there but one has to be careful.

A Muslim cleric spoke on the perceived cost of terrorism on their activities which led to the relocation of their major yearly programmes to another state with considerable financial implications. However, the benefit of the relocation was the safety of members which was more assured in Katsina than in Kano. An official of a Muslim religious society said:

we used to have Lailatul quadri…that is, the night of emergency where Muslims are expected to keep vigils in the last ten days of Ramadan fasting. In the two previous years we could not be able to have it because of security threats. That of last year, I think 2 days to the event was when there was a bomb blast in the next street and the other street there. So the two adjourning streets had an attack. So the tension was heightened and we had to call off that event. Last year also, a similar thing happened about a week or so to the event…and we had to shift the event from Kano to Funtua in Katsina.

This narrative shows the pattern of bombing recurrence in the said location. People would also not risk their lives no matter what their stance was on the assumption that the insurgents were targeting Christians. While a yet-to-be-married male businessman maintained that his religious interest could never be threatened by terrorism ‘no matter what it takes, I will die a Christian’, when the same participant was asked if he would go to a crusade or night vigil, he quickly responded ‘I won’t. Completely, I won’t’. This shows that despite his religious inclination, he was conscious of the need to behave securely and adopt avoidance behaviour in order to be able to practise his religion alive.

Another cost to the expense of the church evangelism committee was a stop on street evangelism. They used phones to reach their members and also stopped welfare visits to hospitals. All these were adopted as a safe behaviour but with the cost of not increasing their membership. Adopting a safe and secure behaviour by implication obstructs ‘soul searching’, ‘soul winning’ and ‘empathic visitation’ by churches through which new members may be recruited. A female member of the evangelism committee of one of the churches stated:

We normally go out for evangelism before but we cannot go because of fear of bomb, fear of gun, gunmen here, gunmen there, you will be walking on the way, just motorcycle will pass you and the person in your front will be gunned down…visitation has stopped…you just use phone…that’s what we use to communicate. But to visit, go to hospital to pray for people that are sick, those ones have been grounded.

Also, no one seemed to engage in social activities as they did when the state was considered safer. Social life in the state was deteriorating fast because social centres were seen to be ‘hot spots’ of bombing, especially beer parlours, hotels and churches. Some of the bomb blasts that occurred in Sabon Gari happened in places that had hotels and beer parlours. Social activities which enhanced social integration in society seemed not to be possible in the state anymore because non-indigenes now avoided social gatherings, and would rather stay in their homes instead of hanging out with friends. The rate at which people went to view, for example, the European Champions League football matches live at public viewing centres had reduced, especially after the bomb blast that rocked a viewing centre in Jos, Plateau State:

Socially, it’s only a crazy person that will engage in social activities now because just like the blast that happened last week Sunday, it was a social event, a social gathering…I believe that all social gathering, parents, individuals, youths, from now on should be a thing of within you, your family, your friends, your immediate friends. It could be small in your home…you can have it in your house, no need of going out. Like if you want to watch football match…you watch it in your house, buy cool drinks, take, enjoy yourself, instead of going out. Just like we heard, free drinks were being offered last week and free drinks cost some people their lives. (Male teacher).

The economy is defined as the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services. Based on this definition, it could be said that the economy is vital for the survival of any society. Prior to the emergence of terrorism in Kano State, the state had been known to be a commercial centre with several industries and markets that served different purposes, including a textile market, food market, etc. Because of the economic and commercial activities going on in the state, it had attracted foreigners and people from different states within the country to come and invest or just transact business.

This was no longer the case since the birth of terrorism in the state. The issue of insecurity in Kano State has greatly affected the business interests of individuals and thus has had negative consequences on the economy of the state. Business transactions had dropped sharply with profound implications for the government and people of Kano and indeed the North as a whole. This is because Kano is a strategic city and functions as the commercial nerve centre for the North. These effects are seen in the downturn in people’s businesses, companies folding, people closing their shops in the market and relocating to other states, and investors pulling out of the state. Even foreigners who had owned commercial premises in the state had begun shutting down their businesses, and leaving the state. People who had chosen to move out to other states adopted this preventive behaviour in order not to fall victim:

Investors, people who have invested much in Kano are pulling out. They are transferring their assets down to other areas. So, definitely, it’s going to affect the economy of Kano…we all also know that once a state is not doing very well in terms of insecurity, investment becomes very impossible to do and it will really affect the economy of the state.

Another single female trader said:

you hardly see a non-indigene that will want to invest in Kano. Those that already have investment in Kano are now shifting it to the east, west, and south…and you know the Igbo people are part of those that make Kano so they are now shifting all the resources of Kano now down to their side.

While some male household heads relocated their wives and children while still staying themselves, they were suffering loneliness and lacked good care. A pastor also lamented thus when asked about the challenges he was facing as a result of insecurity in the state:

Right now my family is separated. It is a big challenge and as a result of that, what I’m supposed to enjoy or eat, I don’t. You know when family is together, the difference is very clear. It’s not an easy thing. In fact, I don’t even encourage anybody to take such step (send wife and children to their home town/state) if not for the situation in town. You come back home, everywhere is boring, you stay alone in the room and because of the fear of the town, you are not the type that walks about, go and sit in public place. So it’s a challenge, it’s boring, it’s not encouraging.

The findings above indicate adoption of ‘constrained behaviours’ described as the modification of routine habits and activities (Ferraro, 1995). Defensive or avoidance behaviour may be the option when one considers the degree of perceived risk (Ferraro, 1995). Rader et al. (2007) found that fear of crime was a significant predictor and contributor to perceived risk, avoidance behaviour, and defensive behaviour. Skogan and Maxfield (1980) suggested that routine crime prevention behaviour can be broken down into two major categories: avoidance; and risk management strategies. They argue that one can reduce the risk of victimization by avoiding dangerous situations and settings, thereby reducing the risk of running into a potentially threatening situation. And as Pain (2000) observed, the impact of fear of crime is not just upon individual freedoms and activities, but is also sharply focused on particular social groups in particular places such as the non-indigenes in Sabon Gari. Of course, the social relations operating in Sabon Gari and its environs became integral to fear of crime than the physical character of particular environments (Painter, 1989; Warr, 1990). Keane (1995) observes that fears can be concrete when specific to a crime like terrorism and formless when they are generic to all forms of crime.

Cues to action

Participants took cues to ensure that they remained safe and secure. These cues may be short term and long term. Some of these included restricting their movement, avoiding crowded places, and relocating to ‘safe and more secure’ states outside the northern part of Nigeria. They also prayed to God to keep them safe since no one can really protect him/herself through relocating family members and management of public spaces and their own relocation comes with the challenge of starting life afresh. Most of them agreed they would leave the state, but that it required planning. They also had various coping techniques which included personal security measures that they adopted to cope with the situation in the state.

Apart from the presence of security agents in the state, these measures are just ways in which the non-indigenes could reduce their risk of being a victim or avoid being victimized. Indeed some did not take any cues but instead became spiritual. A food vendor said:

Well, I cannot guide myself if God did not guide me. I leave everything for God so I don’t have anything, it’s only God that can secure somebody. I cannot secure myself…

Another married female teacher said:

Well, the measures I’ve taken personally as a person to secure myself and my family. Divine security comes from God but as human beings, as long as we are still in the vicinity, we still have to put on measures. First, we don’t go out late in the evenings again, and wherever we are, we try to come back early and apart from that, we don’t go to any gathering again, maybe like wedding reception, birthday parties, viewing centres, in such, any place that attracts crowd, we don’t go to such places again because we now see that such places are their targets, so we try to restrict our movements from those places.

A comedian stated that because of his career, he needs a crowd to make ends meet but he looked out for cues such as beer parlours and churches:

there’s this saying that says ‘heaven help those who help themselves’, so I won’t wait for the government to take measures. I need to take some personal measures, personal challenges like avoiding crowd though it would affect me a lot because I can’t avoid the crowd because I need the crowd, so I avoid unnecessary crowd. Like here in Sabon Gari now, there are streets that are very trivial, I hardly pass such areas, those streets that have beer parlours or there are churches around there, I don’t go there.

As a long-term measure, some participants decided to relocate their wives and children while the husbands stayed because of their investments or peculiarities of their profession; this is certainly safe (avoidance) behaviour, to reduce collateral damage while the husband follows other ‘advertised’ cues to ensure their security in the state. A married businessman stated that:

First and foremost, the first thing I did was to make sure that my family are moved down to the east so that I know that even if anything is happening, wherever I am, I will be able to from there look for a way of escape, that’s one. Then secondly…one thing I do is that I am conscious of time, wherever I am going I am time conscious, I am minded of that place, I make sure I go to that place and come back. Like in the evening, instead of going to sit in a public place, what I do is that as soon as I close from the market, if I have any program in church, I go straight to the church and after that I make sure I come back home, to actually curtail excessive moving about.

When asked about the issue of relocating, he said:

you know, you have to be very careful not running away from one problem and running to another. So the issue of relocating has always been an issue to an individual and to a group of people, like a family. It’s always a very delicate issue to discuss. Especially when you’ve been in a particular place for many years…all my life I’ve stayed in Kano so the issue of relocating is very difficult in the sense that you have to plan, you have to know where you are going to, why you’re going there, you have to plan a lot of things financially. I mean you are leaving, it’s like you are starting all over again. Someone like me now is actually not supposed to leave like that; I’m just taking my time, watching and also planning to know what to do next.

A female food vendor submitted that there was no safe place:

Well since I have seen that no place is safe, since I don’t have anywhere to go and I notice that no place is safe, I’m still in Kano State.

These safety-related actions have also been documented in the literature. For instance, studies have found that people tend to stay at home because of a perceived high risk of crime victimization, which leads to a lack of trust and cohesion in their neighbourhood (Covington and Taylor, 1991; Park, 2005). The perception of crime problems in the neighbourhood can make people feel unsafe and fearful of crime, and may cause them to move away from the neighbourhood.

Perceived control

Perceived control involves the extent to which people and institutions believe they have the capacity to take and implement actions that can guarantee their security. Religious institutions in the research setting led in the area of acquiring information that could enhance the security of their people and structures. The bulk of the preventive measures taken to ward off possible attacks on churches were procuring security gadgets such as scanners which were used to screen people in and out of churches. This had made people feel safe while attending church programmes. It had also become a norm to see security men screening people into worship centres and patrolling church premises while the church service was on. This was not the case before the outset of terrorism in the state. A participant claimed that he liked the screening and felt safe in the church due to the ‘presence of security men with guns’.

As a result of their ‘shared vulnerability’, the social networks among non-indigenes had remained strong as perceived targets of aggression in Kano State. The social network within associations was observed to be strong in terms of how associations tracked the absence of their members and how clerics tracked the absence of their members too. For instance, a church denomination secretary said:

How we do that is, we track them through their pastors. Especially whenever we have things like that, we make efforts to get to that place, we discover what has happened and of course through the pastors, find out if it has affected anybody, and the one I told you of, when it happened, we were there because it affected two members and one church was broken, I had to go there.

Finally, a pastor said:

There’s no member that I don’t know his house and by name. So if it affects them, I will know. No matter how plenty they are, I know them by name and I have register where their phone numbers are that I call them regularly to know what is happening.

Due to the reduction in the frequency of church programmes and the need to ensure the security of members, churches in Sabon Gari tracked their members through the membership register opened at the church. The register contained the phone numbers and addresses of all church members. Security information was therefore passed to members through short message services. Such information was typically passed from security agencies to church hierarchies on security alert. In case of any bombing or other terrorist attacks, missing persons were also tracked through available lists and phone numbers. Part of the perceived control method was re-orientation of members of the religious group on how to behave in terror prone areas. Our participants stated that ‘God guides only those who guide themselves’ indicating that the first effective control was self-control. This included avoiding making careless speeches which could make them susceptible to attacks. If people avoided ‘vain talks’, they reduced their chances of being direct victims. A Muslim cleric cited this example:

Another thing is don’t involve yourself in vain talks…I’ve heard instances where people are being attacked after they make one comment or the other. Probably they made the comment in the midst of the people that are sympathetic to the terrorist group or that are full-fledged members of the terrorist group so the next thing they went and vent their anger on such person. There was an Imam in the mosque that even when the federal government was making announcement that they wanted to negotiate with them, one Imam on xxx road was announcing on the microphone that whoever knows the Boko Haram, the government is interested in making peace, they should go and negotiate with the government, the following day they came and killed that Imam and some members of his household…so that’s another thing we can put in place, as much as you can, don’t involve yourself in vain talk and don’t discuss security issues with people that are alien to you. So these are some of the steps that we put in place, and if there’s any information…we have security operatives among our members, so whenever there is alert, they pass message to our own security officer, who inform the chairman and the house will also be informed.

The Muslim cleric maintained that:

No human being can play the role of security to another human being and as a religious organization, that’s the primary hope of every Muslim, it’s only Allah that can secure us but at the same time, we put some measures in place because there is this popular saying that says ‘God guides only those who guide themselves’. So, mostly we encourage our members and non-members alike that wherever there is crowd, unnecessary crowding, to avoid it as much as possible, that is one. Two, to reduce, you know before now, Kano used to be a very lovely and free place, you can move on the street from 12 midnight till 5 o’clock the following morning and nothing will happen to you on the street. So for those that we have been engrossed in that belief, we now have to re-orientate ourselves to the new changes that are obtainable presently.

To get up-to-date security information, churches had security committees which met regularly with the security authorities to increase surveillance, and get security training and tips, as well as obtaining other security intelligence for non-indigenes. The secretary of a church denomination said that:

as far as (we are) concerned, we’ve been able to make efforts to meet with the security chiefs in the land, we’ve been able to meet with the army commander here, we’ve also been able to meet with the commissioner of police and making it clear to them the importance of securing everybody, particularly the non-indigenes, and they’ve also been working very close with us…they give us information…they tell us what is going on, the moment we get that, we gather people and tell them. There was a time they instructed us not to have programs into the night, there was also a time they gave us training on these improvised explosive devices, they gave us training on how to know them when we see them and avoid getting involved in things like that…we now make efforts to impart same idea into our people and also we organize security training where we give them ideas about what is going on…we also have the security unit, security arm…which will work with the government…in terms of dissemination of information, they are doing very well.

Effectively implementing these security behaviours had reduced their becoming direct victims. For instance, the market is a place that cannot be totally avoided by anyone since people will have to get essential things that they need for survival. People have been able to navigate this through adopting particular security behaviour. A married female food vendor said:

I used to be afraid but what I used to do is that I will buy my things in time and come back home in time.

Another married female teacher said:

I do go for weekend shopping, I do go on Saturdays but as it stands now, I go on Fridays because I feel that Fridays are safer now because the market is not as crowded as it used to be on Saturdays and because they are targeting a crowded place, so I feel that Saturday is no longer safe. So I do go for my shopping on Friday.

Conclusion

The perceptions of risk and susceptibility set out in the study appear to have spurred people living in high-risk, terror-prone social spaces such as Sabon Gari to adopt safety behaviour. The perception of risk and fear of attack was captured in the expression ‘nobody is sure of tomorrow’. Using the HBM to explain the likelihood of behaving securely in a terror zone follows the intuition developed in Davinson and Sillence (2014). In particular, they noted that behaviour change models could equally prove useful in security settings. This was confirmed by the perceptions of risk and susceptibility among our participants and their consequent adopted defensive and avoidance behaviour culminating in feeling being safe and secure. More important was the fact that they were non-indigenes, and the majority were Christians who were being targeted and christened ‘infidels’ by Boko Haram terrorists. Hence, adopting safe and secure behaviours based on risk perceptions may prove useful in preventing future victimization.

The concurrent adoption of safety behaviours by participants appeared to have enhanced healthy living as the majority believed that implementing security behaviour would reduce their risk of direct victimization. Indeed the HBM used as an interpretive tool concerning the adoption of safe and secure behaviour in Sabon Gari suggested that the safety-inclined behaviour of non-indigenes was related to their perception that behaving insecurely might make them direct victims. As such, they manifested safe behaviours such as staying away from crowded places and returning home early as well as relocating family members (constrained behaviours). What is striking from the study is the feeling of collective victimization by participants. The feeling that they were the targets of aggression helped develop bonding which enabled those living within the strangers’ quarters to think of themselves as ‘we’ against ‘them’. While this may infuse future enmity and erosion of empathy, it does indicate that a collective is more likely to adopt safe and secure behavioural change whenever there are feelings of insecurity. At the policy level, there is the need to use elements of HBM to promote the adoption of safe and secure behaviour against risky actions in order to reduce victimization in terror zones in particular and to reduce the threat of insecurity in Nigeria.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the editorial assistance of Dr Oluwatosin Adeniyi and the research participants at Sabon Gari, Kano State. We are grateful to the IRV anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

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