Revived Boko Haram makes mockery of Nigerian army

Leaders ‘cover up’ attacks by insurgents on military bases as troops suffer from corruption and shortages

FOR the battle-weary troops of Nigeria’s 157 Task Force battalion, it was yet another tough posting in bandit country. Sent to a base in Metele, a remote town in the heart of Boko Haram turf, they knew it was only a matter of time before the enemy came calling.

When they finally did, it was far worse than anyone had feared. Armed with a dozen truck-mounted anti-aircraft weapons, a band of several hundred insurgents raked the base with gunfire for two hours, leaving up to 100 troops dead.

“The bodies of our troops were littered everywhere, but we watched the news and heard army headquarters saying troops repelled the attack,” one angry soldier later told The Cable, a Nigerian online news site. “Soldiers are being killed on a daily basis, but the army chiefs lie – nobody is telling the president the truth.”

According to his critics, Muhammadu Buhari, the president, has failed to tell the truth himself. Elected in 2015 on a pledge to defeat Boko Haram, the former general claimed last December to have crushed them in their “last haven” in Nigeria’s vast Sambisa forest.

Yet three months before Nigeria’s presidential elections, the group seems anything but defeated, as the attack at Metele in mid-november showed.

The Nigerian army said the correct figure was 23 dead and 31 injured. But even if one takes its word for it, it was still one of the worst losses in the decade-long conflict, and capped a year in which Boko Haram has again regained the initiative.

“Boko Haram is winning this insurgency if it is getting away with these kind of attacks,” said Matthew Page, a former US intelligence official who is now an associate fellow at London’s Chatham House think tank. “It also reflects how vulnerable Nigerian troops are in terms of their equipment, how poor their battlefield intelligence is, and how passive they have become.”

Mr Buhari points out that Boko Haram is no longer the “parallel state” it was five years ago, when it controlled a Belgium-sized chunk of north-east Nigeria’s Borno State. Much of those gains, though, were made in the months before he came to power, when his predecessor, Goodluck Jonathan, hired South African mercenaries to train an elite strike unit.

Under Mr Buhari, the mercenaries were sent home. And while Boko Haram has failed to regain control of the towns and cities it once ruled as its “caliphate”, it remains a formidable guerrilla force. “Today they are just marauding, but when they do attack, it can be in large numbers,” Abubakar Kyari, senator for Borno North, told The Daily Telegraph. “Local people tell us of anything up to 400 armed insurgents massing at a time.”

Recent months have also seen an apparent reconciliation between the group’s Isil-allied faction and that led by Abubakar Shekau, the commander notorious for the Chibok mass schoolgirl kidnapping in 2014. There is a new, more disciplined focus on military targets such as Metele, which was the 18th army base to be attacked this year.

While the insurgency shows signs of improving its leadership, the same cannot be said for the army. Despite expectations that a general-turned-president would make an ideal commander-inchief, Mr Buhari has been less than hands-on, partly due to health problems that have seen him spend months in a private hospital in London.

The army is also dogged by shortages, often caused by senior staff skimming cash from the budgets. At Metele, soldiers complained that they ran out of ammunition within 40 minutes.

Atiku Abubakar, an opposition politician and Mr Buhari’s main rival for the presidency, has made the Metele massacre an election issue. Yet according to Mr Page, the problem is not that the war chest is too small, but that it is too big.

With billions of oil dollars earmarked every year for defence spending the opportunities for corruption are so great that many of Nigeria’s top brass have no real interest in seeing the war end.