If anyone has a good chance of breaking the Boko Haram insurgency, it is President Muhammadu Buhari. He has the experience – having chased killer Maitatsine Muslim fundamentalists all the way into Chad in the 80s.
He has the knowledge of the terrain, having worked in several senior capacities in the North East. Although he would not be functioning as an officer on the battlefield, his background as a one-time army general should help him relate better with those charged with doing the fighting today.
His job has been made easier by the fruits of former President Goodluck Jonathan’s last throw of the dice. It wasn’t too long ago when at least 14 local government areas in three states in the North East were under Boko Haram control.
Today, on account of the multinational military operations of February and March, the insurgents have been driven out of the major towns they held. They have been reduced to attacking soft targets in villages in no-man’s land along our borders with Chad, Niger and Cameroun.
More importantly, Buhari is not bogged down by politics that made clearheaded analysis of the problem impossible at the highest levels of government in recent times. In the last two years of his tenure Jonathan and security agencies like the Department of State Security (DSS) spent valuable time trying to sell the fiction that Boko Haram was being sponsored by leading lights of the then opposition All Progressives Congress (APC).
It’s over five weeks since the opposition became the governing party. You would have expected the ‘sponsors’ to call off their goons and claim credit for peace returning to the ravaged areas. On the contrary, we’ve witnessed a spike in attacks that have claimed hundreds of lives in this short period.
Of that huge toll, the massacre of the last few days in Kukawa and surrounding villages in Borno State account for as many as 150 or more of those casualties.
Judging by the unrelenting bloodbath not much has changed since the handover. If anything the insurgents seem to be sending out a message that the election-induced military offensive of February had not destroyed them as a fighting force. Their defiance can be better understood against the backdrop of widespread expectation that Buhari’s tough guy reputation would work the magic where Jonathan’s vacillation didn’t.
I think the president understands that the extremists are not just going to disarm because of his history. He also appreciates that they are a different proposition from the bow and arrow and dane gun-wielding maniacs he crushed in the Second Republic.
Boko Haram is a more sophisticated fighting outfit whose funding sources remain a mystery. They have been implicated in bank robberies in the past, but that cannot be enough to sustain an operation that has spread into four countries and withstood everything their collective armies have thrown at it. It is certainly getting substantial funding from somewhere. It is also recruiting enough people to refresh its ranks in spite of the heavy losses it suffers regularly in combat.
This should trouble us. Aside from conscription, it is evident that many people are joining up with the sect of their own free will. How is it that a group which takes as much delight in killing Muslims as it does in slaughtering Christians, still manages to attract followers in territories where Islam is the predominant religion?
It is the same puzzle that surrounds the appeal of the Islamic State (IS) such that it is attracting young people who grew up in America and the United Kingdom to suddenly abandon their families and comfortable lifestyles to join up with Jihadi fighters in the Middle East.
The pat explanations about economic marginalisation are no longer enough to explain the phenomenon. It is possible that some were initially lured to join the sect in the hope that they would be better off. But we’ve also heard enough stories from defectors and escapees who speak of crushing poverty within the ranks of the insurgents.
Something more powerful than bread and butter is at work here. Wars cease when sides in a conflict decide they are fed up with death. This isn’t the case in a conflict where one side is only too glad to die in the hope of arriving speedily in Paradise into the warm embrace of 72 virgins! When death becomes the fast track to a better reality conflict can no longer be conventional.
That should also affect our expectations as to how this war would be resolved. When militants took up arms in the Niger Delta their grouse was economic and environmental. They had demands that could be negotiated and the compromise was the Amnesty Programme that silenced the booming guns. The arrangement may not be pretty but at least it brought closure – after a fashion.
But how do you deal with enemies who are not willing to negotiate? Their only condition for peace is that you bow to their way of thinking and worship. In a multi-religious and multi-ethnic setting like Nigeria that is a non-starter: leaving only an option – a fight to the finish until only one side is left standing.
Such face-offs are usually wars of attrition that are long-drawn. A striking parallel on the African continent is the conflict between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan government. The rebels formed their organisation in 1987, took up arms in the 90s and have been killing and maiming for over two decades.
Just like Boko Haram the LRA’s activities spilled out of Uganda and over the years affected South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While claiming to be committed to the establishment of multi-party democracy, this ‘Christian’ cult aims to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments. Its religious roots mirror that of the North East insurgents who are pushing a brand of Islam that views Western education as sinful.
A Wikipedia entry about the LRA says it “is not motivated by any identifiable political agenda, and its military strategy and tactics reflect this and it appears to largely function as a personality cult of its leader Joseph Kony.”
The same entry quoting a report funded by United States Embassy in Kampala in 1997 said: “the LRA has no political program or ideology, at least none that the local population has heard or can understand.” (Who in Nigeria has been able to explain what Boko Haram is fighting for, or why it enters a town and mows down 150 unarmed men, women and children?)
This ragtag army at the height of its infamy had thousands enlisted in its ranks. But over the years offensives by the Ugandan army as well as joint operations with neighbouring countries depleted its cadres to the extent that by some estimates it now has only a few hundred fighting men it can call upon to commit havoc.
Even with the intervention of the United States which in 2011 provided 100 military advisers and $4.5 million per month to defeat the rebels, they stubbornly carry on.
In March 2012 a four-nation African Union military force was created with Uganda providing leadership. The brigade of 5,000 drew soldiers from the DR Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan with the mandate to track down Kony and the remnants of the LRA. (That force is much like the one Nigeria heads – involving three of our neighbours.) But as of today the rebel leader remains at large and his diehard followers keep moving between four countries.
Without doubt Buhari and his team are determined to approach the problem differently. It is certainly too early to begin to see the effects of that new strategy when even the process of relocating command and control to Maiduguri is yet to be completed. Still, I don’t see him reinventing the wheel. Judging by the moves he has made in the last few weeks, were seeing a replay of what has been tried in East Africa against the LRA with a limited measure of success.
That isn’t to say that it might not work better here because unlike the Boko Haram situation, the Ugandan rebellion despite its religious colouration had deep ethnic roots. This afforded the rebels a measure of acceptance by the dominant tribes in the northern part of the country. Our Islamists have never aspired to be part of the mainstream political arrangements and don’t care about winning the affection of local people in territories they conquer.
Irrespective of the tack the government wants to adopt it now has to manage a crisis of expectations. Jonathan did so poorly in his handling of the insurgency that people naively expect Buhari like some ‘Rambo’ character to waltz into Sambisa and gun down every one of them. And they expect it to happen fast! In reality this Boko Haram business will not have a Hollywood ending.
We must begin to prepare for the long haul. This sect, just like the LRA, isn’t going to totally disappear because we don’t have enough soldiers to police huge expanses of territory in the country side far from regular military outposts.
They may become a pale shadow of the fearsome terror machine whose maniacal leader, Abubakar Shekau, taunted us with boastful videos from time to time at the height of their notoriety. But they would not totally disappear. Such is the bloodlust that they have become accustomed to that there would be nothing else left for them to do other than kill and be killed.
The governmentmust complement the goal of military victory with winning the war for the minds of those who have been enslaved by the evil Boko Haram ideology. That is the only way of killing the insurgency because what is driving it is the power of an idea.
Unless that approach is taken Buhari would be reduced to celebrating military success one day and issuing unending commiserations the next – just like his predecessor. After a while many would not remember that he was the feared general who once put rampaging extremists to flight in the 80s. They would only remember his record with Boko Haram.
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