President Goodluck Jonathan’s proclamation of a
state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States may signal a turning point
in the Nigerian government’s conflict with Islamist insurgents in Northern
Nigeria. The military’s deployment of more troops as well as helicopter
gunships and jets has been greeted by a euphoric note of optimism in the media.
The sense is that the armed forces, now unshackled from political inhibitions,
are about to showcase the hitherto underestimated might of the Nigerian state
and finally crush Boko Haram. Such militaristic boosterism should be tempered
by more sober appraisals of events.
In imposing emergency rule, President Jonathan
acted decisively if belatedly, for this was a measure that arguably should have
been taken a year or two earlier instead of engaging in fruitless attempts to
appease the terrorists. It had become necessary to prevent the Northeast from a
descent into ungovernable chaos. The expectation now is that the escalation of
force will swiftly end the insurgency but it is more realistic to think in
terms of months and years rather than weeks.
Counterinsurgency campaigns take time because of
the hydra-headed and often protean nature of insurgencies. The
proper comparison is not, as some commentators opine, between the Nigerian
situation and the recent Anglo-American military expeditions in Iraq and
Afghanistan. The Nigerian army is not a foreign invading force. The more
accurate comparison is with the conflicts between Sri Lanka and the Tamil
Tigers, Britain and the Irish Republican Army, Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance
Army and India and the Naxalite Maoist rebellion. All these insurgencies have lasted
decades.
The
current offensive may well degrade and even destroy the organization known as
Boko Haram but this is unlikely to end the plague of terrorism for a number of
reasons. Firstly, even though the group is probably in its death throes, it
would be prudent to expect it to mount last gasp bombings, shootings and
kidnappings and to attempt high profile attacks on major cities including Abuja
almost as a sort of murderous final flourish. The Islamist anarchist cult
Maitatsine was first “crushed” by the military in 1980 in Kano but its sporadic
uprisings continued across the north, particularly the northeast, until 1985. This
resilience is typical of a manifestation of terror that has evolved beyond an organizational
format to become a socio-cultural phenomenon. When we think of terrorism now,
we should think less of organizations and more of a subculture of violent
rebellion against the state.
Beyond
this, the technology of violence is now diffuse. Terrorism executed with easily
accessible low tech implements will likely become a normative feature of
Nigerian life for the time being. Furthermore, Boko Haram is not the only
terrorist threat facing Nigeria. The first terrorist attack of the Jonathan era
was carried out by the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, a
seasoned purveyor of bombings in the Delta.
The
country’s vast pool of unschooled, unskilled, and unemployed young males of
working age is a veritable incubator of anti-state aggression. This is coupled
with politicians’ penchant for domesticating and co-opting violent groups for
their own purposes instead of properly addressing them as criminal elements.
Indeed, it is impossible to separate terrorism and insurgency from the culture
of political violence that suffuses partisan politics. A presidential adviser, Kingsley
Kuku and Asari Dokubo, a Niger Delta militant gang leader recently threatened
violence if Jonathan is not reelected in 2015 demonstrating the complicity of
politicians at the highest levels in the plague of terrorism. The politically-connected
oil-stealing gangsters who call themselves “Niger Delta militants” symbolize
the nexus between terrorism and politics.
As
was the case in the Niger Delta, the prolonged militarization in the North east
and the complexity of combating a stealthy group hiding in the midst of a
civilian population and using it as a human shield, carry the risk of human
rights violations by the military. Such abuses will radicalize an embittered
populace and further fuel the flames of the insurgency. The geography of the
north east, which is the epicentre of this insurgency, has enabled Boko Haram
to develop transnational affiliations and close links with criminal and terror
networks extending from the Sahel to the Maghreb. It will take concerted and
persistent action to root out these groups. In the Northeast, the veins of
alienation which extremist groups tap into run deep. If Islamist terrorism was
going to germinate in Nigeria, it seems logical that it would be in her much
neglected northeastern frontier.
Whatever
its eventual success, this military action should be understood as an ad hoc measure. A medium to long term
national security strategy requires the urgent development of institutional
capacities to address the new range of threats posed by low intensity conflicts
such as that between the pastoralists and farmers, an essentially ecological
conflict driven by climate change but with the potential to assume a broader
sectarian scale. These include threats posed by insurgency, ethnic militias and privately-owned
paramilitaries. Piracy in Nigeria’s coastal waters is a growing threat with
international implications and could become the next major national and international
security crisis.
A
revised national security strategy must surely involve an enhanced border
security administration including the short-term militarization of Nigeria’s
exceedingly porous borders with her Sahelian neighbours. It will also call for
police reform initiatives that restore civilian policing to the front lines of
security and law enforcement administration. One of the more pungent symptoms
of Nigeria’s dysfunctional security architecture has been the militarization of
law enforcement with an overburdened military tasked to combat everything from
highway banditry to kidnapping. This, in addition to the neglect of the police,
has contributed to a climate of militarism that feeds violence and in which a
regard for due process of law can scarcely flower.
A
pre-emptive security doctrine would blend modern, well-tooled policing with
conflict resolution mechanisms and early warning systems in communities. This
means leveraging civil society resources in creating mechanisms that prevent
small scale altercations from flaring into all out conflict. Security and
intelligence services must become more adept at tracking the evolution of
ethnic and religious associations, and identifying those whose philosophies
dispose them towards future radicalization and militarization.
Institutional
reforms in the security establishment are much more difficult than proclaiming
emergency rule. They require administrative rigour and the political will to
challenge obsolete orthodoxies. They call for a shift from the establishment’s
obsolete military era obsession with state capture through coup d’etat – a steadily
diminishing threat since 1999 – to a broader cognizance of the perils posed by
non-state actors and the intersection of politics, organized crime and
terrorism. No security sector reform, for instance, is complete without
reviewing the use of perverse affirmative action schemes in staffing strategic
agencies. If there is any area of governance that urgently needs to be run as a
meritocracy, it is the intelligence, security and law and enforcement
administration.
The Terrifying New Normal
Before
the 1980s, there were no religious disturbances in Northern Nigeria. From 1980,
they became normative fixtures of the northern urban life. A variety of factors
were responsible. The oil boom of the late 1970s had driven many youngsters
from rural agrarian life to the cities in search of jobs. Deindustrialization subsequently
eliminated a significant segment of the blue collar work force and provided the
Maitatsine cult with fodder for its various uprisings from 1980 onwards. Other factors
were the proliferation of radical Islamist groups supported by Wahhabi
extremists in Saudi Arabia and Shia revolutionaries in Iran which fed on rampant
socio-economic dislocation, the politicization of religion after the 1978
Constituent Assembly debates on Sharia and later, military regimes’ manipulation
of religion to generate support in Northern Nigeria and mask their misrule. All
of these factors coupled with the failure of the state and the deepening
poverty of the region provided fertile ground for the chronic spate of urban
terrorism that are frequently described as religious riots.
In
much the same way that religious riots became normative after the 1980s, it is
reasonable to project that Boko Haram-style terrorism will continue albeit in
isolated and sporadic proportions for the time being. It will become part of
the fabric of our national life. Safety measures will be out in place to adapt
us to this terrifying new normal. Bomb detectors are already almost ubiquitous
in public spaces. More of such devices will become customary. But the problem
with a scenario in which terrorism ceases to have any impact is that terrorists
will seek to carry out even more spectacular outrages to register their agenda
on a desensitized public consciousness. Nigerians are already accustomed to great
insecurity so terrorists might feel compelled to use more vicious tactics to
breach the threshold of public outrage. Should the socio-economic conditions
that incubated Boko Haram be left unaddressed, we can also expect a better
armed and more organized insurgency to emerge from the ashes within a decade.
Ultimately,
however efficient the military and the security forces may be, their work is
only a stopgap measure. Elected politicians must actually govern and provide
the developmental deliverables that will turn a teeming young population away
from nihilism and anarchy. There are no foolproof guarantees against terrorism
but intelligent governance can shrink the population of malcontents to the
barest minimum of misanthropes that are beyond salvage. The more young
Nigerians are empowered to live creative lives and achieve upward mobility, the
less likely they are to be seduced by psychotic visions of paradise or careers
in political thuggery. It is this failure to create social security and to
provide paths to a meaningful life that is the greatest generator of terrorism
and conflict in Nigeria.
(All Images sourced online)
