‘Why Nigeria may not defeat Boko Haram soon: Re-visiting the counter-operations’
During the last presidential electioneering, General Muhammad Buhari (Rtrd, now President) must have scored a significant political point through his promise to terminate the Boko Haram insurgency within one year of his take-over. Probably desperate to actualize this highly ambitious electoral promise, the Presidency declared in December, 2015 that the Boko Haram insurgents had been defeated. As if to quickly declare the Presidency a Liar Entity, movement struck rather brazenly in the same month killing 20 in a mosque bombing in Adamawa on 21st December, 2015 and terminating the lives of 16 in an inferno in Kimba, Borno on Christmas day. Early in the new year, and specifically on January 8, 2016, a Boko Haram suicide bomber detonated an explosive device at a mosque in Kolofata, Far North Cameroon, killing two and injuring one. They repeated same in another mosque after five days (13th January, 2016) in Kouyape, also Far North Cameroon, killing 12 and injuring one, and recording yet another one at another mosque after another five days (18th January, 2016), killing four. From 13th February, 2016 till date there have been multiple Boko Haram attacks in Borno and its environs, including the one in which worshippers were forced into a mosque and shot. There were also the killings of Nigerian Army’s most gallant commander, Muhammed Abu Ali, a Lieutenant Colonel, Major D.S Erasmus, Lt. Col. K. Yusuf and several senior officers by the insurgents between September 25 and December, 2016.
Although the Nigerian troops gave the insurgents a hard fight and killed a good number of them, the perturbing question is. Why have Nigerian soldiers continued to fall at the feet of the trigger-active insurgents who have been blissfully declared defeated and whose defeat had even been publicly celebrated by the Presidency one year ago? To what extent can the Presidency’s selfproclaimed victory against Boko Haram be true?
The purpose of this discourse is not to argue for or against the presidential claim whose invalidity is as clear as the sunlight in broad day time. Hakeem Onapajo, a South Africa-based political scientist and post-doctoral fellow at the University of Zululand, has recently fulfilled that in a scholarly appraisal. The purpose of this discourse is rather to offer a situational analysis and expose the missing link that has rendered unattainable the laudable presidential promise of defeating Boko Haram within one year.
The present analysis conjectures that Nigeria does not know the enemy she is fighting. It also conjectures that Nigeria has not been sensitive enough to the Boko Haram ideology and recruitment strategies. Again, it conjectures that Nigeria’s counter-terrorist strategy is essentially military, a kind of fire-forfire approach, and neither sufficiently ideological nor adequately orientational. There again is a grossly unstrategic approach to intelligence, on the part of the Nigerian troops. I shall engage critically with these four conjectures through some theoretical explanations with a view to demonstrating that firearms, (which have been Nigeria’s only ammunition) alone cannot defeat Boko Haram who, at times, prove more militarily sophisticated and battle-strategic than the Nigerian troops.
Before approaching such an engagement, it should be noted that Boko Haramism is not a strange phenomenon. It is rather a sub-set of a global trend as there across the world now is a growing concern over the emerging dimensions of what is now characterized as a “new globalized Islam”, as a result of the Muslim clamour and “search for a New Ummah”. Consequently, the concern became obvious as the attention of the contemporary world began to shift gradually to the Muslim world since the unprecedented attacks of September 11, 2001 to which the media has connected several events and incidents of bombings in various parts of the world. Such a shift of pendulum in the attention of the world has culminated in the intensification of research and reporting on Islam especially with regard to its propagation and expansion. Consequently, scholars and researchers on the subject zoomed unto the Middle-East and South Asian countries, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan, both of which have been portrayed as operation bases for professional terrorists and potential bombers. The eventual killing of Al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden by the United States Special Forces during an early morning raid on a military settlement in Abottabad, Pakistan, on May 1, 2011, later aggravated the negative image that had been created for Pakistan.
In the aftermath of all that, there has been a sustained interest among scholars from various disciplines on the nature of expansionist and revivalist activities of the Muslims with a view to exposing extremist elements or extremist potentialities that are capable of propelling the likelihood of such unprecedented attacks on the super power. The perspectives offered by various notable scholars of Muslim Politics, though appreciably critical of the general concept of Political Islam, do not really mark a total departure Its repeated unveiled claims that its members have been sent on training in various parts of the Muslim world, such as Algeria, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, have been described as an indication that the movement modeled itself after notable militant Islamic groups like the Taliban which the group has always acknowledged as though it is their source of inspiration. Such claims provide some clues for the Federal security operatives in Nigeria from the central concept. In fact, it could be inferred from their views that it is in a bid to pursue the Political Islam agenda that Muslim activists, at times, find themselves caught in the web of what is often tagged as “Extremist Islam” or Islamic Extremism, as will also be demonstrated later in this discourse.
Consequently, there is an emerging concern over the continued radicalization and militarization of Islam in some parts of the Muslim world. Although there have been different interpretations of this scenario by various scholars, there is little evidence of complacency on the part of the Muslim, in the face of external aggression, the like of which spurs them into reacting radically. Such an experience which is fast becoming a new trend has contributed in no small measure in promoting the arguably erroneous perception that “Islamic extremism” and Extremist Islam are inseparable allies and products of Islamic revivalist efforts. The growing concern has culminated in the emergence of a sophisticated body of scholarship in various fields where research interests are inclusive of the ideological concepts of revivalism, extremism, militancy, terrorism, and other related concepts. Boko Haram may be accurately located in such an ideological context as will be demonstrated in the following lines.
The relevance of the word ideology to any discourse on Boko Haram lies in the conception of the idea of ideology as related to commitment to designing a programme for the purpose of improving the human condition, through a struggle that requires the recruitment of followers and partisans committed to the realization of the target. In what later turned out to be a template for subsequent ideological programmes, there was not to be an appeal to the general public but the key actors were to be chosen with care. It is obvious that the Boko Haram Movement of Nigeria, like such other notable Islamic groups as the Jama’at Islamiyya of Egypt, the Jama Islamiyya of Indonesia, has kept faithfully to this principle.
A careful look at the style and mode of operations of the Movement may also provide some insight into its ideology. Its repeated unveiled claims that its members have been sent on training in various parts of the Muslim world, such as Algeria, Mauritania, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, have been described as an indication that the movement modeled itself after notable militant Islamic groups like the Taliban which the group has always acknowledged as though it is their source of inspiration. Such claims provide some clues for the Federal security operatives in Nigeria.
The central theme of Boko Haram message was that Islam is averse to Western secular education. In a similar token, the group maintain that evangelism, which is being deceitfully given the colouring of Western education, is Islamically unacceptable. It may be reiterated here that this particular anti-Western education stance can not be regarded as an initiative of the Boko Haram leader, Muhammad Yusuf, given the fact that literature is replete with information concerning the apprehension of Northern Nigerian Islamic scholars who had been unrepentantly critical of Western education, which they saw as a potential instrument for possible conversion of their unsuspecting children and wards to Christianity. It may, however, be acknowledged for the record, albeit arguably, that this age-long practice was what Boko Haram exploited and deceitfully presented as the nucleus of its ideology.
As time progressed, illiterates and jobless youths flocked around Muhammad Yusuf to embrace his doctrines. Some of the educated ones among his followers were said to have torn off their certificates in demonstration of their total commitment to the path of Yusuf. Yusuf ’s claim was that their mission was to fight the satanic system and enthrone the Shari’ah in the country. However, the group was able to attract to itself few members of some of the most influential families in Maiduguri, such as Maikanti Indimi and Bana Mulima. According to Muhammad Murtada, who wrote in 2010, it was Yusuf’s persistent attack on anything western that made him a hero and role model as he was believed to have been using his Islamic knowledge to justify his mission to his followers. Evidence abound in research that people are attracted to a movement owing to their subscription to such social forces with potential to stimulate a break-out in rebellion against the system as being experienced in the Boko Haram case.
As recently pointed out by Henry Borom, the unrepentant nature of Boko Haram Movement suggests the somewhat rewarding nature of the outcome of their recruitment strategy where established members are charged with the responsibility of recruiting others by seeking to identify those who are most likely to agree to act, if asked, and to further the cause. This way, the leadership of the movement charges its rational prospectors with the use of intelligence to find likely targets after which recruiters provide further information and deploy inducements to persuade recruits to say “yes”. This strategy which relies on social bonds and relationships, has been a source of strength to the movement, especially with regard to its ever-expanding recruitment networks. It would be an appreciable counter-terrorist strategy for the Presidency to investigate the specific attractions that have prompted recruits to continue to join the Boko Haram insurgents.