 Brilliant. Hello, everybody. I'm Mike Enos, I'm Director of the Conflict Records Unit. This is part of our speaker series. I have with me Vincent Herbaron, who is an academic, a reader in African history at King's College London, and Marc-Antoine Perouse de Mauclot, is a political scientist. If I got that, that's accurate, a political scientist or an historian. Okay, political scientist, senior researcher at the Institute de Recherche pour le développement. And they are going to be talking about recording violent events in Nigeria, specifically the case of the Nigeria Watch Database 2006 to the present. I'll just make a offer a quick note, and then I'll hand it over to our speaker and discussant, and they will take it away. We'll have opportunity for some Q&A towards the end. We'll be running for about 45, 50 minutes. If you are attending and you have any questions, please drop them into the chat box, into the chat room, and I'll moderate that, and we'll take the questions from there of about five or 10 minutes at the end for Q&A. So I met Vincent about a year ago when I was setting up the Conflict Records Unit, and I was familiar with efforts to track violent events in Nigeria in the Lake Chad Basin area more broadly, but I had not heard of this particular database. I got quite excited in a new database, especially given the timeframe associated with that database. This isn't a fad that popped up in the last couple of years. It's been something that's going on for quite a while. So I'm really looking forward to hearing and discussing with Vincent and Malkantuan what this project is and how they developed it, why they developed it, and what use it's put to. So with that, Vincent Malkantuan, the floor is yours. Thank you. Good afternoon, Michael. Thank you for letting me just correct the sound issue. Thank you for hosting us today. I'm actually a... Hi guys. I'm going to step in and just tell you that we got some pretty bad audio feedback going on. I'm a historian, and I think that's why I was talking about the database. There's something you send in before my account, which is very interesting, that this database actually started in 2006, which is not something which was put to the end of the year. It's something which clearly has massive potential for historians, for scientists, anyone interested in violence in Nigeria. And I think that's something which is really the point for me as a historian, which is the worth of this database. One thing I like to stress as well here, not only do we talk about violence, but also we talk about the information and the sources used to talk about violence. Nigeria Watch uses primary sources. I'm sure Malkantuan will tell us more about it in a second, but for those who have access to the database, you can have access to the PDF, scan the press, newspapers used to get the numbers, circumvent numbers on this violence. That's something which I find extremely interesting to discuss violence over the last 15 years in Nigeria. As a historical source, as a as a database, as a project in what we call today, to humanities, I think that the project is extremely valuable. It's one of the oldest projects running at IFRA. That's why I'm very happy for Malkantuan to be with us today as well, for that he can introduce the database to us in a much better way than I would as a PI, as someone who's worked with different people in Nigeria, trying to debunk myths on violence in Nigeria as well. That's why this database is very well. I will ask questions later on as discussed since Malkantuan showed that we can use the database as a research tool, not just as something which accumulated numbers, which can be a real research tool for us, and I hope you enjoy it. So I think Malkantuan, the floor is yours. Thank you. I hope there is no echo because I'm sitting side by side with Vincent. So is it all right? Yes. No echo? It's fine. All right. Thank you enough. Thank you. And thank you to all for inviting me to this session. Maybe before talking about methodology and some of the findings, I should say a word about the world concept. You see, my first time in Nigeria was in 1988. And in the late 80s, people were already talking about rising violence. And next year, you will have another BFRA war, another civil war. And of course, you have to distinguish between perceptions and what is objectable. What are the hard facts when it comes to the measurement of violence, not only in Nigeria. This is a big issue in many countries. And even in France, for instance, you have surveys that show that people think that the country is now more violent. We had the attack on Charlie Hebdo, the Bataclan, so forth. And yet the homicide rate in France has been divided by four since 1970. And people still think that the country is more violent. We are now in Nigeria in 2021. And I hear exactly what I heard in the 1980s, that is, violence is on the rise. We're on the verge of a civil war and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So from when I was writing my PhD in the late 1980s, I was trying to find figures. The usual thing, normally, you go to the police and see the statistics, but it was a military dictatorship. They no longer published any annual police report. And I went to a place called the Louis-Edet House, which is in Lagos. And that was at this time the headquarters of the National Police, the police force in Nigeria. And it was a kind of cavern of Ali Baba, you know, bunch of papers everywhere, reporting from this local government or another one, not compiled. And you would see that the addition were wrong in these papers. There was nothing to do with it. So basically, we didn't know where the country was going. There was no data based on evidence to see if really in Nigeria was becoming more violent in what region, was there any pattern, you know. And that's how it started in the mid-2000s. First in France. And then we had an opportunity, thanks to DFID that supported us to shift the database to IFRA here in Ibadan. And that makes sense, because it's now run by four Nigerian, three Nigerian scholars were every day working on retrieving data from open sources in the local press. And we used one indicator, which is indeed the body count of violent incidents. That is, we are also part of an international network, which is London based. It's called every casualty worldwide. It's kind of NGO that link various body count practitioners all over the world from Colombia to Pakistan, Somalia, et cetera. And they try, it's really difficult, and we can have a word about it if you want, to set up standouts with the UN on the RCRC, the International Red Cross on how to count the victims of conflicts. And there are many challenges, I must say. And trying to sum up a long story, we decided really to focus only on lethal incidents that have at least one people killed, because we think it doesn't make sense, like some other database do, to compare a non-lethal incident with the massacre of 300 peasants by the army or Boko Haram in the northeast. It really doesn't make sense to give them one unit, one incident. That's usually what private security firms do, or also when it comes to parasy attacks, whatever the number of people killed, they put one unit, one incident, so it's on the rise or not. And also a very important thing is that we use the same corpus since 2006. Otherwise, you might have a distortion, the word is every day is getting more digitalized. So you have more information to aggregate in the database, which might just be related to the fact that you have more captors, more system, more people to report on incidents. So we use the same corpus since 2006, and we know we are not existing at all. I mean, we're talking about a country of 200 million people, approximately. There's a census, which is supposed to be done next year, but we're not sure it's going to happen. The last one was in 2006. And of course, we're also to relate the number of people killed in violence compared to the growth of the population, because this does make sense. People tend to forget it. And again, the issue of the corpus is extremely important. We have gaps, and we actually investigated this gap, geographical gap, to put it a bit, I mean, I'm a bit provocative, maybe I would say that all our figures are wrong. But they are wrong the same way from one year to another on one region to another, because we rely on the Nigerian press, and which is more in the South as compared to the North. So out of 774 local governments, we realized after a few years when we started that with 35, 40 local governments with no fatalities recorded and reported ever. So there were two hypotheses, whether you had Switzerland in Nigeria, or you had some rural local governments that were simply not reported. So thanks to the NSRP, the defeat, we could give grants to Nigerian scholars who did the fieldwork on obviously we found that they were unreported little violence. So we are quite aware of this challenge. This is one of our challenge, but we know that when violence is on the rise with all the gaps we have, then yes, we know that something is going on. Because we try to avoid the distortion of, you know, the more data the more, the more sources you add up, and the more violence you would report, you know, you would record. So we try to avoid this by this, by sticking to the corpus, the same corpus as the one we started in 2006. Another challenge we have is about the coding. And we are not very comfortable with some of the database that claim to deal only with so-called political violence, because it's very difficult to debunk what is political as compared to criminal, ordinary violence. And usually we have several causes for each little incident, you know. It might be reported by some articles as being criminal, motivated by crime. Some of those would say it's political, religious, ethnic, or whatever. So many times we have several causes. And we also use different sources whenever we have access to different sources that usually give different figures of number of victims. So within we make an average to have an idea, because what we are really interested in are the trends. So it really depends on you. Would you like me to say a word about the indicator we choose, or some of the findings? It's really up to you. Tell me. I think all of those things are of interest. I can't hear you. Can you hear me now? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'd say all of those things are interesting. We have a bit of time. Vincent, you're discussing. It's up to you. If there's time for Malcolm to continue. Let's go for indicators first. Yeah, please. All right. So why focusing on the body count only? Because it's also a matter of philosophy in a way. We believe that all human life counts. So when somebody is killed, it can be compared with any other one, any other victim that has been killed. It's much more difficult to compare. Someone who has been injured, difficult to compare them and consider them to be equal. So we stick to the kind of ANC slogan whereby one man, one vote. So we think it makes sense. Most of the body count practitioners also do it this way. Cipri, our colleagues and partners in every casualty worldwide are indeed focusing on the body count as the entry to record violence to make sense to compare. And also because the definition of crime from one country to another, I mean to record criminal acts as the... So now you have a police annual report in Algeria. The military dictatorship is finished. Actually, it's not really the police that produce it because they are not interested in statistics at all. It's a foundation supported by US ed. It's called Clean Foundation in Lagos. They are actually the one producing the police annual report. But they record criminal acts, basically. Sometimes kidnapping, sometimes homicides. But the problem with criminal acts is that the definition is not the same from one region to another, not to talk about one country to another. Let's say that the definition of rape in Saudi Arabia is a bit different from the one in Norway. And there can be some discrepancies also. For instance, Interpol stopped publishing in 2006 a report about international comparison of crime rates from one country to the other precisely because of this problem of definition. And it appeared, for instance, that the most criminal country in Europe was Netherlands because of theft of bicycles. And because people insured their bicycles so they reported to the police whenever their bicycles are stolen, which is not the case. My three bicycles stolen in Paris and I never reported to the police because it's completely useless. And we don't have this culture of insurance of bicycles in France, which might explain why some acts are reported and not others. So because of all this challenge, Interpol stopped publishing statistics, international statistics on crime rates. And even within Algeria, the definition of crime, a bit like in the U.S., can be a bit different from one state to another. We are talking about a federation of 36 states and 12 states in the north are supposed to implement and apply sharia, even if they don't really do so, but anyway. And according to sharia, for instance, adultery would be condemned by the death penalty. Actually, it never really happened because then you have a system where you can resort to so-called secular courts that would actually cancel the sentence by sharia courts. But theoretically, if you are in the north and you are a Muslim, not a Christian, then sharia law would apply. And if you commit adultery, you could face death penalty. And this is not the case in southern Nigeria, which is more dominated by Christians. So if you commit adultery, maybe your pastor or your bishop will come to you and blame you, you're not a good Christian and so on, but it's not considered as a criminal act. So you see, even within a federation like Nigeria, the definition of criminal act is very difficult to implement whenever you try to code and measure violence. So that's some of the reasons why we decided to focus only on the other body count on little incidents. We think it makes more sense. Yeah. So now I have a question about the research findings. For example, you recently done a study on ANSAS. ANSAS was a movement against police body called SAS, which started in 2017, which became the second wave of the movement in 2020, nearly a year ago actually. And the anniversary date is on the 20th of October, 2021. So a year ago, there were shootings in Lagos and there were demonstrations in some parts of the country. So what does the database tell us about such achievements? Yes, thank you. We have many interesting findings and the order we are, of course, the less discrepancy we have in the findings because long trends do confirm what we found. And one of the extraordinary findings, I would say, or maybe it shouldn't be that surprising, but just confirm that the security forces, security and defense forces are musculars in Nigeria. And even in the case of Boko Haram in the northeast, we realized that government forces, that is the army, the police, the air force, the DSS, that is the secret service or the prison or customs service, and the governmental mission are killing more than Boko Haram, for instance, which speaks volume when it comes to the issue of reconciliation to ending the conflict and so forth. So we realized that Boko Haram or not, since we started in 2006, the incidents where the police shoot and kill or the army shoot and kill, the rates of lethal incidents where the police or the army intervene and do kill people is absolutely amazing. It's an average of 50%. I'm just trying to sum up, but in some years, the army could be as much as 80%. That means that in 80% of lethal incidents where the army intervene, they would kill. Actually, there's one unit of the police. It's called Mopo, the mobile police. And in Pijin in Nigeria, they call it Kill and Go. And Kill and Go tells you what it means. I mean, they kill them or they go. So extrajudicial killings are really part of the system. I don't believe it's part of genocide enterprise or the government which would try to wipe out one community. It's just business as usual and there's total impunity in this regard. It's a way of maintaining law and order, kind of. The government is not that in such a good position to actually stop this system, especially now. And what we realized also is that there are differences when it comes to the army or the police. Let's say that the army, of course, is better equipped with war weapons than the army, than the police, sorry. So whenever they shoot on kill, they kill more people at the same time. Whereas the police is less equipped with heavy equipment, but they kill more often. But they kill less people at the same time. But all in all, we really have a structural problem and it appeared clearly last year with the NSAS protest against police brutality. But funny enough, it's not funny actually, it's strangely enough, the protests were focused in southern states, especially big cities like Legos, a bit of worry where it started in Delta State, but not much in the north. And yet with the war on terror against Bokoram, most of the extrajudicial killings, most of the mass human rights violations are in the northeast. And actually, we are presenting a paper very soon in Nabooja with a project called Managing Conflict in Najaya under the EU about this, you know, why there was no NSAS protests in the northeast in 2020 when it was focused in the south, and yet mass human rights violations are many in the northeast. And again, what was surprising, and we could not really explain that, we can explain why it did not happen in the northeast, but that's really another debate. But we can't explain why NSAS protests started in 2020. It could have happened in 2019, in 2018. I mean, police brutality was there already. And then there was a trigger with the social media showing a man being killed while the police stole his car, actually, is SUV in Delta State. But that could have happened any year since we started this database. And we don't really have an explanation on why it took so much time in 2020 to start this protest against police brutality. Historically, in the 1980s, there were already protests, especially in university campus, against police brutality. But to no avail, it never really changed the system. You know, the government decided to disband SAS, which means the Special Anti Robbery Squad. It's called the Crack Squad in the northeast. They disbanded it, but they didn't stop impunity. So it will be interesting to see if the NSAS protests changed anything. My guess would be that no, they didn't really change this system of extrajudicial killings on a daily basis with total impunity. Let me ask you a question about the northeast. You mentioned the northeast recently. For those who don't know, northeast Nigeria, we've got the region of Bono, which became famous for harboring Boko Haram. And Boko Haram became famous, as you're internationally speaking. And what does your database show actually about violence in the northeast and the conflict, the whole conflict? Actually, Boko Haram started with an extrajudicial killing, you know, the extrajudicial killing of Mohammed Yusuf. So this sect, it started as a sect, Islamist sect, very radical and his species. But it was up to 2009, up to the emergency of 2009. It was not banned. It was legal. They had a mosque in Maidaguri. They had time to preach. They had airtime on the Bono regional television. So it was not a terrorist understand group. And what happened is that, that's another finding, by the way, of Nigeria Watch. Your main risk as a Nigerian or an expat to be killed in Nigeria is due to road accidents. And it's under the radar. I mean, nobody really pay attention to that, but it's more than terrorism than anything you want. And actually, some of the Boko Haram members at this time in 2009 died in a car accident on a road in Baoji. And they wanted to bury them in Bono, Bono State, whose capital is Maidaguri. And then they were shot at by the police because they were turbines. It's a complex story, but to make a long story short, that's how it started. Then Mohammed Yusuf wanted to avenge the people who had died out of this shooting. At the beginning, they were treated, but then some of them died from what we understand. And then he launched Jihad. You know, he proclaimed Jihad against the government. And they went on a rampage in Maidaguri that it was in July 2009. And then the police, the army caught Mohammed Yusuf and handed him to the police to be tried. And then the police extra judicially killed him because some of his supporters had actually, how could I say it gently? They dismantled the body of the chief of the mobile police in Nagyanya. They really cut him into pieces. So they wanted to get revenge. So they killed him. Mohammed Yusuf was never tried. And then the group became underground under Shekau. I'm sure you know of him. He was the one who kidnapped the Shibok girls. And then the group became extremely violent and started terrorist operation, terrorist attacks in Abuja and elsewhere against the headquarters of the National Police. And they started also to attack Christians, which was not the case before. So that's how it started. And there was a peak in 2014. If you look at the data, it's online. You don't need a password to get very rough data. If you look at the trends, you would see there was a peak in 2014 in Nagyanya. And that was because of the Boko Haram conflict, because there was a state of emergency. An emergency rule was put in place in 2013. And for the first time, the army would go out of cities and start to bomb villages in rural areas. So the killings were enormous in 2013 and 2014 on both sides. And when Mubad-e-Bawari was a Muslim, the current president was elected in 2015. He decreased a lot. I don't think I have written papers on that. I assume it's not because the army performed better, but because there was more trust by civilians to support the war on terror, because Mubad-e-Bawari was a Muslim. So it declined. And now, actually, the level is quite low when it comes to fatal incidents related to Boko Haram only. But we have another issue, which has to do with rural banditry. But again, it's very difficult to separate what is really related to Boko Haram or to Banditry. And this brings us back to one of the issues I mentioned on other database. Some of them very known. Let me not give names, but anyway, you will see who I'm talking about. I presume you will guess. And they claim to be working only on political violence. But we don't have the capacity to investigate on the field. We are not a police organization. So we just deal with reports as violence was reported. And you know, you can have distortion. And I could give you examples of such a distortion maybe later when we carry on this conversation. But maybe there are some questions. I don't know. Actually, I have a couple of questions. We had conversations about gender violence. This morning, actually, how the database reports, homicides and feminicides in general, and how women are being killed. And in general, press tends to report men thinking about women in a disproportionate way. What can you tell us a bit more about this, please? Actually, we are working on it. So I don't have much to add to this issue, but we presume that indeed, there is a tendency by the Nigerian press to overreport men being killed by their wife, and not to report as much wives being killed by their husband. But let me give you an example of distortion we properly investigated. It was the case of the OPC, which was the case of the OPC, which was an ethnic Yoruba militia operating in Lagos at the beginning of the 2000s, even before we started the database. And I was doing fieldwork there. And I could see very much the press in Lagos. So OPC stands for the Oduwa People's Congress. And Oduwa is supposedly the ancestor of the Yoruba nation, as they claim to be. And there was claims for separatism, form of autonomy. And it was quite ethnic driven. They attacked non-Yoruba residents in Lagos, which is the biggest city in Algeria and the economic capital city. So they would attack the Ijo, the Ibo, the Hausa, and so forth. Everybody was not Yoruba. And what we realized, the journalists in newspapers like Vanguard or Punch, which are very much Yoruba, would consider them as freedom fighters. Whereas the Guardian, there is a Guardian in Lagos, another paper who is owned by somebody from Edo state, not a Yoruba, would treat them as just sheer criminals. And it just speak volume about the way violence can be reported. Some people are inclined for sympathy or some of the armed groups. The same with, for instance, MEND in the Niger Delta, the movement for the emancipation of the Niger Delta. They are called militants, not terrorists. I don't really know why, because they put car bombs in Eagle Square during the 15th anniversary of the independence of Nagia in 2010. And they killed dozens of people with these car bombs. They also organized terrorist attacks in Wari city. So yet they are named militants. But the press really agree on Boko Haram being framed as a terrorist group. There's quite a consensus, but I think it has also to do with these perceptions. So again, the way violence is reported will impact much on the way the database will frame violence. But as I said before, we have several coding. And if we use, for instance, we have one very important newspaper in the North called Daily Trust. It's actually almost the only daily paper in the North. And of course, the way they frame violence, the way they report it, is completely different from the Southern press, especially in Lagos. So again, we have multiple coding. And very often what we have is a fatal incident which is both reported as being political and criminal. There is actually distortion in the whole Nigeria. The way people talk about pastoralism for our listeners today is for the audience who just there's no whole side house. There's supposed to be a competition between pastoralists and farmers. I'm seeing supposed to be because actually the way it's framed in different national presses, different newspapers around in Africa tends to be quite different. But what was it like in your database? How does it appear, basically? Yes, there is an anti-Fulani trend actually currently in the Nigerian press. Now, I had a suspicion. I can't prove it. It's just a suspicion that whenever Muamad Bwari was president of Fulani, president elected from the North, came to power in 2015, the press in the South wanted, you know, Bwari was elected as the former military dictator who can end up the Boko Haram uprising. And Muamad's electoral campaign was very much focused on his predecessor, Gulag Jannatan, who was a Christian from the South, was seen as incompetent, incapable to finish off Boko Haram. So it was a campaign very much focused on the incapacity of the federal government at this time to contain the Boko Haram, the terrorist threat. And I think that from 2015, because what we know from historians is that these stories of rural banditry are very old, they are not new, but I think there was also maybe a kind of distortion that became more visible precisely because it was used as a way to show that Bwari was also as incompetent as his predecessor, but this time to fight Boko Haram or to contain rural banditry. Let me give you, and this brings us also to a very important point, and I'm sure that Vincent, who is a historian, and I really believe in the importance of history, would quite agree with me, but it also shows that all our figures are really useless if you don't combine it with qualitative research. I come from a qualitative world, you know, I'm not a statistician, I'm a political scientist, the French way, not the American way, I'm not into Excel and all these data things. This is really, and I believe that the way you frame your questions when you try to get figures from the database are extremely important, and they can actually determine the results, your findings. So you need fieldwork, this is absolutely fundamental. And what historians have shown in Northern Nigeria and also Northern Cameroon, which prolongs Northern Nigeria towards the region of Lake Jadon, I'm thinking one of my colleagues in Cameroon published some splendid studies in this regard. Maybe several lessons to be learned. Number one, you have a lot of infighting between various Fulani cattle breeders, and this is very often obscured by the narratives focusing on the clash of civilization between Muslim cattle breeders, against Christian peasants, cultivators, farmers. And actually this does happen, yes, especially in the middle belt of Nigeria, in Plato State, for instance, but that's not the end of the story. One, you have a lot of also violent confrontation between farmers. You have to know also that most of the cattle now is breed by farmers, no longer by transhumans, this is disappearing, this is the North tradition in Africa, but most of the cattle is now bred by farmers, agro-pastoral farms, for instance. So we should not forget about these conflicts also. And the other lesson to do with the way, for instance, kidnappings developed in Northern Nigeria. And we can date it back to the introduction, the development of banks in rural areas. And I believe maybe some of you would agree that if there's a blame always, it should be on banks. And when they developed during the oil boom in the 1970s, actually, there was already a lot of rural banditsry, but cattle breeders would go to fairs, they would sell their cattle, and they would bring a lot of cash back home, and they were attacked on the road by bandits. But when these banks developed, they would put the cash in the bank, and then they had very little cash with them when they would travel back home. And so bandits started to kidnap their kids, to get a ransom from them. So kidnapping is not a new phenomenon at all in this region of the world, except that, of course, the Shibok affairs that have involved a lot of money have shown a kind of business model whereby, indeed, young kids in school girls or boys have a value. They can be marketed before bandits would not know it. So now, indeed, the kidnappings in the Northwest, whatever the political condition for reporting these events are apparently, indeed, on the rise. Yes. Well, for those who are interested in what just Marc-Antoine mentioned before is the mix of qualitative and quantitative analysis. You've got a link in the chat you'll be interested in. It's a publication by Marc-Antoine from 2016 called Violence in Nigeria. It's an edited collection. So why am I mentioning this? It's in the chat right now. It's because actually, oh, there it is. Yeah, it's just a chance. You've got a link as well there. It's an open access book. It's a very important one for a lot of reasons. One, which is quite important as well, is that Marc-Antoine works with Nigerian scholars. It's a collaboration. It's not just something which comes out nowhere. And he's working with lots of researchers here in Ibadam but also in the rest of Nigeria. And that's something which is worth mentioning. And two, that he can see how his methodology can be used to really just have proper research conclusions. So it's not just a very kind of positivist approach to numbers, as Marc-Antoine just mentioned before. It's something he wants to ask questions based on these figures. And I think that this book in particular, which I've read in all the chapters now, not all of them, but you'll need all of them. So I think this book in particular shows the potential of the database in particular. If you're looking for something a bit more faster to read, there's also a leaflet called Ten Myths on Violence in Nigeria. And something that Marc-Antoine alluded to, just in his fascinating answers to the question is that somehow there are lots of myths on violence in Nigeria. It's like Nigeria, Colombia, they're supposed to be a country where everything is violent and everything is like fire. And just, yeah, just so there you go as well. Specific answers based on reasons, usage of the figures obtained by the database. And I think that that's where as well, quite like it. And this kind of it's, you've got a PDF in this last link. You can download the PDF. And there you've got access to very clear conclusions. I really like it. I give it to my own students in London, when I'm there for them to read, basically, to know that it's something which goes beyond cliches and stereotypes on violence in certain sub-Saharan countries, or poor countries in general, just like that as well. But something which I think is very, very worthwhile. I wanted to end my own chat by this, but I wanted to show how we can mix these kind of two approaches, how Marc-Antoine mentioned to manage all of this. And I think that's why I like this, you know, I like it as well as the database a lot and I wanted to carry on for a long while. I can see you've got questions already in the chat. The one question by Schimpel-Liff, who's an M.A. student in the Warsaw City Department, Marc-Antoine, the question is, the way you can differentiate drug-created violence and political violence because of the importance of drug cartels in Nigeria and supposedly maybe in some groups. Do you want to answer this question in particular and after we can open the floor to other questions? Is that okay? Yes, thank you for the question. Actually, we don't really differentiate. I mean, it really depends on the way it's reported and very often you would have a little incident that would be coded as being both criminal and political, especially if some political godfathers, as we say in Nigeria, are involved. So that's the way we would sort it out. To be frank, from what I know, from what I remember, we don't have much incident related to drug violence as such. They are not reported for some reasons, I don't know. And as for Bokoram being involved in drug trafficking, I'm extremely skeptical on this dominant narrative. It happened in Mali. We have evidence, you know, there was a plane carrying drugs from Colombia, but there was no such thing in northeast Nigeria. And actually, if I was the head of a drug cartel today, number one, I would earn much more money as with research compared to research. And number two, I wouldn't be stupid enough to transit drug through Bono state. I mean, it's a war area. I mean, you have to dash, as we say in Nigeria, to bribe people to pass checkpoints. I mean, I wouldn't use this food. No way, it doesn't make sense. And that's not where you produce drugs. Of course, we should distinguish between imported drugs, marijuana, which is produced in the south of Nigeria. And I published a very long time ago, some kind of history of drug traffickers in Nigeria. And it really started in the south, not in the north. It involved a lot the military. Because they had facilities to travel. And even when it comes to fake medicine, the laboratories are in the southeast, not in the northeast. And tramable, which is a drug that was used by Shekau and others, probably just to relieve their pain because a good number of their combatants have been injured, was kind of imported from the southeast. That's not in the north. It's not produced in the northeast. So I am quite challenging the idea that Boko Haram is funded by drug trafficking. We don't have any evidence on drug trafficking. You have drunk people who consume drugs in the northeast. But that's not where it's produced. And the dealers are not. I mean, you've got petty dealers who are usually e-book from the southeast and who live in the northeast and they sell drugs. But again, the drug barons are not there. That's not where it happens. And now we've got two questions on metallurgy by Michael. The first one is about distortions. How do you verify information drawn from major press? And the second one is that, I guess, that's where I think Michael is mentioned. We're thinking about internet, I suppose. You know, in fact, we've got more and more sources of the textual media in general, yes. Yeah, we can't verify information drawn from Nigerian press. We are talking about, we are a team of three Nigerian documentalists that are working every day on this issue. We're talking about the country of 200 million people. So obviously we don't have the capacity to make any investigation and verify. So what we do, we can't cross check. But again, we take several contradictory sources. For the same incident, whenever these sources are available, because sometimes we have only one source. So we cannot balance, you know. And this cross-checking with these different sources would probably take us to have different coding in the course of the violence and have different figures on the number of fatalities. And then we take the average, basically, of fatalities. That's how we try to cross-check to balance the sources. But again, we don't have the capacity, I don't think anyone has, not even the Niger police, to investigate all the cases that are reported in the press. That would be absolutely enormous. As for, okay, how do we cope with increased volume types of media output? Again, it's very important for us to stick to our corpus. Because it doesn't eliminate the discrepancies. But we know the discrepancies. You know where it happens. But if you add up more sources while it's ongoing, then automatically violence would be on the rise. And it's a problem that is well known by criminologists. The more cops you have, the more police you have in the streets, patrolling the streets, the more crime you have, because the more crime they can report. So it's quite a challenge. That's why we think it's very important not to rely on social media. Anything could be reported there. We're not saying that journalists are doing a better job when it's printed press. But at least we know where the gaps are. We know where the discrepancies are. So we rely on these mistakes to try to make something out of it. And cross-checking, investigating all these cases is, to me, simply impossible. Can you hear me? I have any questions. Can you hear me? Okay. I've got one or two questions for you. I was holding back from speaking too much because you had some really good flow going. And also sometimes the audio is a bit unreliable. I think that's a really interesting point to sort of more or less close on the value of a reliable and consistent methodology. And that's really interesting. It's kind of a no-brainer. It's a classic sort of antidote to how do you deal with the volume of information and kinds of information that are available to you. And the temptation is always there to grab more of it and try to make sense of more of it. And it's kind of a conundrum that all sorts of entities try to deal with. Because the information is there, they should, of course, try to use it. By excluding some, by making some choices and being transparent and consistent about that, you can have findings that maybe or data that might be useless, but findings that are reliable nonetheless, in a sense. And that might sound a little bit confusing, but I get it entirely. You've made a much better case of it than my summary. I guess my question for you, if you want to drop the link for the database, and again, just to refresh that for attendees, is a basic one. Who uses the database and who can use it? Not enough people, I think. But it's a good problem with delivering passwords. We were hacked, you know. So it's, I mean, we are really a low cost database. And we are a total, I'm a total disaster when it comes to marketing the database. Even the website is not as nice as it could be. I'm very much aware of that. So who use it? Not-Gen Scholars. We used it, some development agencies for some of the... I used to be a Chatham House Fellow. So we used it also for some of their reports. We used it for some of the reports, unpublished reports for the World Bank for the... Oh, yes. There's also one for the French Development Agency on the crisis around Bocoram, on the crisis around the leg chart region. I could put you a link, but I can't do that while I'm talking. And so, yes, you have different users. I would say that today, maybe the majority are now giant. I never really calculated that. Yes, yes. Okay, that's great. I think we're probably getting close to the end of our time. I don't see any other questions. So I think what I'll suggest is we close out. What I will say is that we'll do a little bit of marketing for you, the way we do with all of these events. The video will be available on YouTube shortly once the Department of War Studies has done its magic. And I think your book on qualitative and quantitative methods, of course, it's something we want to call every student's attention to, every researcher's attention to. If you want to hold it up again, just for the audience, then go ahead a little bit of free publicity. And we can certainly include a reference to that when we're drawing attention to this talk as well. Conflict Records Unit, we deal with a lot of different kinds of sources and uses of sources and issues around the uses of those sources. And of course, as academics, we're always interested in the methodological aspect of doing that kind of work. So this is really interesting to me. I will definitely take a look at this as well. Vincent, Malcolm Twins, thank you very much for your time. I think we can probably, if you want to have the last word. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, those are good last words. With that, thank you, and I'll stop the recording. Thank you. Have a good day, guys. Yeah.