How the
failings of the Nigerian state, over the years, have conspired to create the
conditions for the transformation of Boko Haram from just one of several
fundamentalist sects in Northern Nigeria, into the irredeemably violent
organization it is today; one that now appears to lie well beyond the capacity
of the country to confront and defeat.
A culture of
corruption
The turning
point in the drawn-out evolution of Boko Haram was the 2009 killing, by
Nigerian police, of Boko Haram founder Yusuf Mohammed, hours after soldiers
arrested and handed him over.
His capture followed five days of clashes between
sect members and the military, ordered in by the President when it became clear
that the police could not contain it.
If the
authorities got any warnings – and there are suggestions they did – nothing pre-emptive
was done, until the sect struck.
Five years after the events of July 2009 not
much seems to have changed; regarding the abduction of more than 200
schoolgirls in Chibok Amnesty International says: “Nigerian security forces
knew about Boko Haram’s impending raid, but failed to take the immediate action
needed to stop it.” Pleas continue..
In February
the Governor of Nigeria’s Borno State told journalists that “Boko Haram are
better armed and are better motivated than our own troops.”
The recent mutiny
by soldiers on the frontlines against Boko Haram provides strong evidence of
the levels of frustration within the military. A culture of corruption deprives
fighting personnel of weapons, equipment and welfare, resulting in a
demoralized force. Rumours abound of Nigerian soldiers stealing and selling
arms to criminals.
There have
also been suggestions that Nigeria’s military bosses are interested in
preserving the stalemate with Boko Haram to justify the continued allocation of
billions of dollars to security in the Federal budget.
Police and
military excesses
The first
violent uprising associated with the sect that has come to be known as Boko
Haram, took place in December 2003. About 200 armed youth who styled themselves
Al Sunna Wal Jamma (“Followers of the Prophet”) attacked police stations in two
border towns in Yobe State, near Nigeria’s border with Yobe.
The attack on the
police stations is now believed to have been in retaliation for what the group
perceived as mistreatment of its members by the police.
For six years
there were no other attacks on the scale of the 2003 uprisings. And then the
events of July 2009 took place, in which the sect launched a series of brazen,
coordinated attacks on police stations and government buildings in four states,
in retaliation for an encounter weeks earlier with a team of ‘Operation Flush’,
a special security unit under the control of then Governor Ali Modu Sherriff.
That earlier
incident, in which sect members were reportedly challenged by ‘Operation Flush’
operatives for defying a state law and riding motorcycles without helmets, took
place in June 2009, and resulted in gunshot injuries to several sect members.
After that incident, Yusuf reportedly wrote and circulated an “open letter” to
President Yar’Adua, threatening violence (a vow that was fulfilled weeks
later).
The deaths
of Yusuf, his father-in-law (who provided the land on which his mosque in
Maiduguri was built), and alleged financier, Buji Foi, all in controversial
circumstances at the hands of the police, and after the violence had already
subsided, marked the beginning of a new phase of the campaign waged by Boko
Haram. (Also at that time local media reported that Muslim men in Maiduguri
were shaving their beards to avoid being rounded up for summary execution by the
military).
In an audio
message released to the media in April 2013, following reports that the
government was planning to extend amnesty to repentant militants, sect leader,
Abu Shekau, is reported as saying: “We are the one to grant them pardon. Have
you forgotten their atrocities against us?”
Human rights
groups have continued to document accounts of abuses perpetrated by the
Nigerian military, which end up alienating local communities and further
radicalizing Boko Haram sympathizers.
Playing
politics
Yusuf’s
charismatic preaching and his philanthropy quickly ensured that he was in
control of a large and deeply devoted youth population, drawn to his attacks on
secular Western education and on a decadent political system whose legacy was
corruption and poverty.
Multitudes left their families or quit education to
follow him. And these were not always poor youth, it has been reported that
many of his followers were from wealthy families.
With this
youth army, it is easy to see the attraction it held for politicians on a desperate
quest to gain or retain political office. It is a pattern across Nigeria that
politicians cultivate, for the purposes of winning elections, armies of youth
whose job it is to intimidate opponents, and create the kind of chaos that
makes rigging easy on election days.
These political links may explain the
initial reluctance to decisively deal with the issue of Boko Haram in its early
days.
Today,
Nigeria’s main political parties continue to exploit Boko Haram for their own
ends, by using it as basis for trading accusations aimed at undermining
opponents.
The ruling Peoples Democratic Party and the President’s advisers
have long struggled to portray the opposition All Progressives Congress as a
‘Muslim Brotherhood’ or ‘Janjaweed’ look-alike bent on “Islamising” Nigeria,
while the APC suspects that the reluctance of the Federal Government to clamp
down decisively on the insurgency is connected to its plan to keep the region –
an APC stronghold – unstable and undermine chances of elections holding there
in 2015.
Amid the
frenzy of baseless accusations and counter-accusations, the protection of
hapless citizens, like the students in Chibok, is not a priority.
Foreign
connections
One
noticeable trend in Nigeria from the early 2000s was the proliferation of arms
in the country, smuggled in across Nigeria’s porous four-thousand-mile-stretch
of borders with Benin, Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
In response,
Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo in 2005 set up a Presidential Action
Committee on Control of Violent Crimes and Illegal Weapons, which reportedly
raised fears that extremist sects were gaining ground in the country. There is
no evidence any actions were taken at that time, to address what were very
credible threats.
It is now
also known that funds have flowed into Northern Nigeria from abroad, to support
an array of disruptive Muslim sects, since the turn of the century. Writing in
2011, Mai Yamani, author of Cradle of Islam noted that “despite the decade of
the West’s war on terror, and Saudi Arabia’s longer-term alliance with the US,
the Kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment has continued to bankroll Islamic
extremist ideologies around the world.”
In 2002, a
Nigerian associate of Osama Bin Laden reportedly received 300m naira (US$3m at
that time) from him to donate to several Islamist sects across Northern
Nigeria, including Boko Haram. Osama had himself broadcast a message around
that time in which he cited Nigeria as one of six countries “ready for
liberation.”
This is a
condensed version of a piece that will appear in full shortly
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