Kaduna Trade Fair Gradually Regaining Lost Glory
Colonel Aminu Isa Kontagora (rtd) is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Sight and Sound Communication, a security outfit in Abuja. The former military administrator of Kano and Benue states during the regimes of the late General Sani Abacha and General
Why does it seem difficult to contain the insurgents?
I will first of all start with the comment made by the governor of Borno State. I understand his feelings and we have to look at it critically that as administrator of the state, he wants peace and he wants it now not tomorrow. Unfortunately, insurgency wars are not time-bound; they take a very long time. We also have to appreciate that the insurgency to a great extent has been contained to one segment of the country. This shows that the military has been making progress. People are refusing to appreciate that Nigeria is at war and it’s because the government has not placed it on the people that the country is at war.
What should the military do to contain the insurgents and reduce the level of casualty being recorded in recent times?
There are many legal issues that will follow when a country declares itself at war. All the same, we have to appreciate that insurgency is a very expensive war in terms of human lives, equipment and the resources that are available. You are fighting an enemy that has no battlefront; you are fighting an enemy that looks like every other person. He doesn’t wear a uniform, he won’t announce to you that he is coming and he doesn’t have military truck painted in any colour when he is coming for an attack. This shows that to fight them as an enemy, you need a large force and one can appreciate that our armed forces have deployed so much of the resources that are available. There is nowhere you go in the country that there are no check points on the highways.
Soldiers are on the highways and some of them have been on a spot for over a year. You cannot give soldiers rifle to fight Boko Haram. To even replace a single soldier you need nothing less than nine months at best to train another one. I think our expectation is that the armed forces and police should just go and wipe out Boko Haram and come back to tell us to go and sleep. No, it’s not that simple. If you look at the history of all insurgencies across the world, it’s not simple curbing them. In Ireland, they used to have what was called the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which is over 40 years now. They signed a truce and did all that to stop them, but even last week they sent parcel bombs with explosives to army recruitment centres around the United Kingdom and even owned up to sending it. This is to tell the authority that they are still in existence.
There are other instances. Take the Somali issue. This is the one you can hardly understand because it’s a very unique country in the sense that it’s almost a-one-tribe country, but they have been fighting on clan line. You can see that even speaking in one tongue does not prevent them from taking up arms over ideological differences.
India is a functional democracy and a fast growing economy, but it has up to four different insurgent groups. In January 2005, talks between the Andhra Pradesh state government and the CPI-Maoists broke down, but this has not stopped it from functioning as a country and it’s still fighting the insurgents.
What are the lessons here? Despite the fact that we are confronted with the Boko Haram issue we must have semblance of a full life. While fighting the war, we must deploy adequate resources to the operation and we should request concerned Nigerians to do thorough investigation. The Borno government, the affected local governments and other governments around the area should also be ready to work with them to stop the insurgents. Insurgency is never won on the battleground alone. It’s through carrot and stick approach, because it’s a large area of propaganda.
One may be wondering why they launched the recent attacks and how they operate. They want popularity. Any crime they commit is to announce their achievement. They want people to believe what they are not. They want them to believe they can strike anywhere at will. For those communities they attacked, there are so many scenarios. It could be they want to instill fear in the people so that they can allow their children to join them, or maybe the efforts of both government and local authorities are achieving results in such a way that people are even resisting them and their ideas and they find it difficult to recruit people into their fold. Again, some of their attacks are revenge attacks. Maybe they were given away by the people of the communities and some of their members were either killed or captured by soldiers, so they now come back for revenge attacks.
Now, to the general public, what does this portends? The armed forces and the police are not doing enough. But if you have to look at the size of Borno State or even the local governments where these attacks took place, they are two times the size of some states in Nigeria. It’s not an area where you place a soldier and after one metre you place another one. That is not possible. Yes, they need intelligence from the people. It’s not everybody they see that they can suspect as members of Boko Haram. That will be counterproductive. You must first identify who are members of Boko Haram, where they are based. Somebody must know about this, somebody must have seen them there and report back.
The insurgents have had cause to take the fight to the soldiers and police in their barracks and cantonments, killing and even abducting some members of their families. How is this possible?
It’s the manpower issue. How many soldiers were even in the barracks at the time of the attack? Maybe only a fraction of them were left to protect the barracks. The bulk of them were at the battlefield. Like I told you, the insurgents want to do something that people will praise and say, they are even bold enough to go to the barracks. This is to give the impression that they are so strong to have dared the soldiers. We should also know that when a fight like this takes too long, they are likely to recruit some soldiers into their fold. They will pay for information. As the authority is paying for information, they are also paying for it. So they will know when the barracks are less protected and use that advantage to attack them. And because of that you say, ‘they are strong enough to dare the
soldiers.’
Some soldiers were alleged to have compromised and that was why the recent attacks by the insurgents were possible. What is your view?
No, I don’t agree with that. After the airport episode and the barracks attacks, I had expected that the military would take operational audit and involve experts, even retired military personnel to help them with the audit of their operation. This would have helped the armed forces to forge ahead. I don’t know if this was done, but this is what should be done. If they do this it will help to know their requirements.
The governor was saying Boko Haram members are more motivated. Now, what is motivation? For a Boko Haram member, if he dies he believes he is going to heaven. If he kills you, he thinks he is going to heaven. This is his spiritual motivation. For the soldier, you sent him there to fight the insurgents. If he dies, what do you do to his family? He is not going to heaven, he does not believe in that. The logistic chain is very important to the soldiers fighting the insurgents.
How many square meals can you take to them in a day because they are at the battlefront, they can’t come around for their meals and, remember this is a mobile war. They can’t be static, they are moving. How fast can you evacuate the wounded ones among them, within 30 minutes or one hour? What is the casualty rate? Is it high or low? What is the training level of the soldiers?
I read in one of the newspapers that in all the villages raided by the insurgents no soldier was killed. I know the paper was trying to say, ‘where were they during the attacks?’ Were they there and if they were there, why didn’t they fight back?
But the issue is that can they fight if they are not fully deployed? They have to tactically withdraw so that they can fight another day, because the training they had did not say they should die, but remain safe to fight tomorrow. If they are killed, who will fight the war tomorrow? If it’s in a battalion, when you are fighting other people will be supporting you, but you know the insurgents are enemies that don’t wear uniforms and have no battle line.
The governor also said the insurgents carried more sophisticated weapons. Could this be the reason why they did not fully engage the insurgents?
No, no. I’m not down-playing sentiment, but the governor will not have the technical knowledge to say the weapons they are carrying are more sophisticated than those of the soldiers. What I know of insurgents is that they don’t choose their targets. They may be firing anti-tank weapons on people or on houses, which is excess power and maybe this is what the governor thought was sophistication. In terms of sophistication, our military are far more sophisticated, but they cannot behave the way the insurgents behave.
Even if they see a Boko Haram camp, they cannot wipe out everybody there. They can’t kill the women and children. The first responsibility is to make those women and children safe. But you see in their own case, they just go to a village and kill women and children. They even destroy mosques, and churches, so you could see the difference. They want maximum impact and that would mean maximum publicity and an exaggerated capacity.
Given this, how can the military fully engage the insurgents?
They can do this by simply adapting to the hit and run method of the insurgents, which shows the level of desperation on the part of the insurgents because they are losing and they don’t want to be written off. What I will suggest is that the military should add more pressure on the insurgents. They are feeling the pressure already, that is why they are resorting to hit and run. They should maintain their pressure and improve the logistic chain. They should intensify their raid on their camps.
Even if the camps are outside the country, I don’t see why we cannot take permission from any of the countries to raid them. It’s allowed in international law. Even if the permission did not come in time, we can inform the countries’ authority about the raid and carry it out, it’s allowed. The defence of Nigeria is number one priority and it doesn’t matter where the enemy is, we can engage him. But we should not hit the assets of that country. If it’s their camp, we can destroy it; if its weapons depot, we can destroy it and; if it’s a smuggling route, we can destroy it.
We don’t fight international war within our territory, we fight outside our border. When Boko Haram started and they were building camps they were detected and destroyed. How many of such camps have America destroyed in Somalia, Afghanistan and other places where the terrorists are building their bases? They are not fighting on American soil, but America considered its interest first.
If anybody takes up arms against his fatherland, he is an enemy no matter where he is. We cannot fight Nigerians, I don’t think our law permits Mr. President to fight Nigerians, but it allows him to fight anybody that endangers Nigerians or anyone who takes up arms against Nigeria. If you take up arms against Nigeria, you are already an enemy. I think the president needs to upgrade the status of this war.
Most Nigerians feel he is not showing concern because it’s happening in Borno, Yobe or Adamawa. Some are even complaining that the roadblocks are too long and that the security agents are collecting N20 from the people. Nobody has commended them for stopping bomb blasts two years ago in Abuja and its environs. This was achieved based on information gathering, intelligence report, surveillance and everything put in place by the security agencies to protect the place. As a nation, we should support those fighting the insurgents.