BOKO HARAM: WHEN A DOG SNIFFS A SHOE

          A number of comments are being made from people who have an influence on public opinion which seek to lay the entire blame for the emergence and increasing threat of Boko Haram on northern leaders. Some of these comments are so ridiculous that they can safely be dismissed as rantings of unstable and idle people with an eye for a media which has replaced professionalism with reckless sensationalism. But quite a few of the comments come from persons who wield influence and have some relationship with the highest levels of the nation’s leadership. These comments pose additional dangers for Nigerians and Nigeria; but it will worsen the danger they pose if they are allowed to achieve their objectives. Either they are part of an official thinking which is being put forward to prepare an actual and sustainable position and strategy of the administration towards the Boko Haram insurgency, or they represent efforts to push the administration towards that direction.

        The range of comments, suggestions and the conjectures which link the Boko Haram with northern political interests, or which hint at the failure of northern leaders to nip it in the bud is extensive. Most people will dismiss the rantings of Mrs. Sarah Jibril as a comical attempt to earn her huge pay as Special Adviser to the President on Ethics, when she says northern leaders are responsible for the emergence and growth of Boko Haram. Comments from people like Sarah Jubril should bother no one; and if she is speaking for the administration, then she represents its worst mouthpiece. But comments from the President of the Christian Association of Nigeria, Pastor Oritsejafor to the effect that northern leaders are not doing enough to control and eliminate the Boko Haram insurgency should be taken seriously. Granted, the CAN President has lost much of his following and influence over rank and file Nigerian Christians over his serial gaffes, but he is still an influential figure in the current political disposition. The CAN President claims that leaders from the South South zone played an active role in bringing the dangerous militancy in the region to an end by engaging the militants directly and appealing to them to lay down their arms. He says northern leaders should do the same with Boko Haram insurgents. Presumably if they are unable to do this, the only conclusion will be that they support it. There have been other comments which suggest that northern leaders resent their inability to install Sharia in the north; or their loss of political power, and have created Boko Haram to provide a violent alternative to achieve these goals. Since the arrest and arraignment of a senator on suspicion of collaborating with members of the sect, and the widely-reported comments of a suspect which links prominent politicians from the north east with Boko Haram, there have been many insinuations and explicit comments, including some from official quarters, that Boko Haram is a political creation of the north, and can be controlled only by the north. The emphatic repudiation of the linkages by spokesmen of the movement does not appear to have changed minds among those who are bent on visiting the entire Boko Haram phenomenon on the scheming or failures of northern leaders.

        The dangers in the attempts to identify the Boko Haram insurgency as a northern issue, and to hold its leaders responsible for it, are many. One danger is that the view will inform the adoption of the wrong strategy to deal with the problem. Resources and energy will be directed at chasing politicians and the clergy, while the problem grows. Another danger is that the fight against a national threat will become politicized and pitch sections of the country against each other. While this may be the actual goals of some of the commentators, they fail to realize that no part of the country is safe from the emergence and spread of violence around political issues; or beyond the reach of sectional militants. The NADECO and OPC uprising following the abortion of the 1992 elections in the southwest complete with tribal warlords and mass murder of northerners is firmly etched in Nigerian history. Similarly, the militancy and the thinly-veiled criminality in the south south which has ebbed at a huge cost to the nation affected every Nigerian. Thirdly, a strategy which seeks to blame northern leaders for responsibility or failure with regards to Boko Haram will merely feed the insurgency. It will burn the bridges which the administration may need to build towards a resolution. It will make most northern leaders multiple victims, because they are neither safe from Boko Haram nor the government. It will create new enemies for an administration which needs all the support it can get from politicians, traditional rulers and the clergy, and the public in its fight against the insurgency. Above all, it may give the administration a false sense of accomplishment when it thinks it has identified the enemy; when it is far from doing that.  

        The north should vigorously fight this attempt to isolate it and blame it for a problem which has made it a worse victim than all other parts of the country. Many Nigerians conveniently choose to forget that it was the directive of a northerner, the late President Umaru Musa ‘YarAdua against the Boko Haram group that set in motion the most decisive chain of events leading to its current disposition. The vast majority of the hundreds of lives lost in clashes, attacks, bombings and shootings are northern. The economy and society of Borno State and environs have been devastated. Funds which should go into building schools and hospitals, or roads and water plants are now used to pay security personnel in a conflict which shows no sign of abetting. The political and security decisions and responses to the Boko Haram insurgency were made by Abuja, not by northern politicians. Some of those decisions and responses appear to have fuelled the growth and sophistication of the insurgency, and the north today pays a much higher price for them than anyone.

        Northern leaders must be acutely embarrassed by their impotence to influence this escalating threat. Traditional rulers have little or no influence over religious matters anymore. In fact, in most cases, they are specifically targeted as foes by increasingly militant sects. The clergy is fractured and substantially compromised by its intimate relationship with partisan politics. It has lost its pre-eminent position to set standards of conduct or call followers to order. Northern politicians have shrunk in political size and influence, and those among them with real power, the Governors, are afraid to offer any opinion towards a resolution, outside their cosy circle of psycophants. There are no northern leaders above these shackled groups, and the vacuum is being taken up by an insurgency which sees everyone as a virtual enemy.

        Those who hold northern leaders responsible for failure to control and eliminate the Boko Haram insurgency may have sinister motives of isolating the north further; as well as creating an excuse for the administration’s inability so far to get a grip on the Boko Haram insurgency. Perhaps they recognize the weakness of the north better than even northerners do; and they know that dangerous insinuations and outright provocation will not even be responded to. Or they may be laying the foundations of a potentially self-defeating strategy which leaves the problem of Boko Haram pretty much to the north, its perceived creator. If President Jonathan does not share this perspective, he should assure the nation that the Boko Haram insurgency is a national issue which will be tackled by the nation as one. Otherwise, the north may begin to think it is even more dangerously exposed than it is.  Because, as a Hausa proverb goes, when a dog sniffs at a shoe, it is very likely to take it away.