Boko Haram Insurgency: The End of the Beginning
Jibrin Ibrahim, Deepening Democracy Column, Daily Trust, 28th December 2015
On Christmas Eve, President Buhari announced that the Boko Haram insurgency has been largely defeated. In an interview with the BBC, he explained that his instruction to the military was to recapture the territory that the insurgents seized from the Nigerian State and to degrade their capacity to carry out large scale conventional attacks on military locations and the civilian population. One indication that he drew the intention of people to was that the insurgents have now resorted to suicide bombing and attacks on remote communities precisely because their capacity for spectacular conventional action has been destroyed. If indeed that was the objective of his instruction to the military, then I would agree that it has been largely achieved. The real implication of his statement however is that we can now move on to the real struggle against the insurgency.
The fact of the matter was that the Boko Haram insurgency should have never been able to chase our armed forces away, capture and keep territory. What we know from the nature of such insurgencies is that they normally limit their action to guerrilla hit and run tactics precisely because normally, they should not be able to withstand a modern standing army of a State. The success of Boko Haram is in my view, not a sign of their strength but an expression of the weakness of State and society in contemporary Nigeria. The insurgency is a statement about the breakdown of religious hierarchies and order. It's a revelation about the decomposition of social and moral education within the family. It's an expression of galloping urbanisation in which poverty and ghettoes provide an atmosphere in which the disconnected individuals wallowing in misery can see the engagement in mass atrocities as acceptable and indeed desirable behaviour.
By the time the Goodluck Jonathan Administration came into office, the Nigerian State had decayed sufficiently for the government to consciously abdicate its responsibility of providing security for Nigerians. The protection of the very oil pipelines that transported the resources that are allocated was given to militants that were engaged in insurgency and were massively stealing the oil meant for export. When the Boko Haram insurgency developed, State actors read it as political mischief against a southern Christian president and allowed it to fester and grow. My reading of what President Buhari is saying now is that the military has now started the fight to crush the Boko Haram, which has been reduced to a normal insurgency, so let the struggle against the insurgency begin. Moving forward, the struggle is not just by the armed forces but also by the entire Nigerian society.
Boko Haram agents have been successful because they have been able to move around freely in reconnaissance missions and stay and live with communities, which they study before carrying out their actions. Nigeria remains at war and measures for enhanced security need to be taken at the community level. Nigerian traditional rulers have almost completely lost their capacity to monitor and track inhabitants of their communities. In the medium term, this capacity has to be re-developed. One of the reasons that Boko Haram was able to develop rapidly is that traditional rulers who are highly respected in their communities did not come out openly to condemn the evil nature of the group. In a sense, the group was effective in playing its role as terrorists by killing a number of traditional rulers who criticised them. The others therefore kept quiet, most likely out of fear. The fact of the matter however is that the group is out to kill all non-members so traditional rulers have to take the responsibility of coming out to condemn them even at personal risk.
Traditional rulers in the Muslim North are also religious leaders and they need to work in tandem with the ulema (Clergy) to counter the ideology that justifies violent extremism. They need to take the lead in counter radicalisation and contesting the religious explanation justifying violent extremism. The process of proselytization needs to be controlled and all those found to be promoting religious ideologies supportive of violent extremism dealt with. Nigeria has developed a soft approach to countering violent extremism but we now know that the Office of the National Security Adviser to the President which developed he programme was too busy distributing cash and did not devote attention to implementing the programme. The programme which was designed to utilize existing structures within and outside government to carry out a series of activities that encourage families, communities, faith based organizations and civil society to counter the ideology of religious radicalism and build resilience to violent extremism must now be prioritised. Traditional rulers and religious leaders need to use their networks and knowledge to mobilise at the levels of family, culture and religion to counter violent extremism. The strategy of counter radicalization can only succeed if community engagement and resilience through building trust and creating awareness is led by people who are known and respected at the local level.
In the medium term, it is the quality of religious education that would solve the problem of radicalization. Islamic scholars in particular have the responsibility of inculcating in the youth that practices that lead to atrocities cannot be the true religious belief. The practice of strapping innocent young girls with bombs and using them as vehicles to bomb, kill and maim people is so despicable that it should not be too difficult to show that it is contrary to true religious values.
Christian religious leaders also have a role in promoting the message that the insurgency is not a war by Muslims against Christians. It is a war by terrorists against Muslims, Christians and the Nigerian State. It is apparent that part of the strategy of the terrorists is to promote religious war between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. In the build up to the 2015 elections, there was massive Christian versus Muslim mobilization and campaigning. The outcome of the elections was evidence that Nigerians were not ready to go along that path of self-destruction. Nigerians showed a sense of responsibility and refused the politics of brinkmanship. We must now build upon that success and promote a sense of belonging to all.
Many civil society organisations have competence in promoting community awareness on security. Such organisations should intensify their capacity building efforts and messaging that security is everybody's business. High quality intelligence is one key ingredient that has been missing in the war against the insurgency. Communities have not been socialised into a war mood in which they are on their toes watching out for the enemy and liaising with security agencies. One of the reasons that have led to the insurgency festering and growing has been the hostile attitude of security agencies to communities where insurgents have been active. Often, the security agencies engage their operations on the assumption that community members in general and the youth in particular are all supportive of the terrorists. This attitude has been very harmful to the success of the war. Promoting a blame game in this regard is counter-productive. Civil society and community organisations need to take up the challenge of working towards enhancing their own security consciousness and seeking ways of creating synergy with security agencies to enhance the war against the insurgency.
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