States of Emergency

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)

Jonathan, Boko Haram and the Amnesty Question

Two weeks ago, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III proposed that the federal government issue an amnesty to Boko Haram insurgents as a means of restoring peace to the troubled North. President Goodluck Jonathan dismissed the proposal, insisting that Boko Haram militants remain anonymous “ghosts” and so cannot be negotiated with. Predictably, a polemical crossfire has ensued between those for and against the amnesty proposal.

Perhaps the most telling thing about the president’s parley with Borno community leaders during his visit to Maiduguri was the latter’s reluctance to unequivocally condemn Boko Haram’s murderous campaign. The Borno leaders’ argument essentially was that the president could unilaterally end the violence by making peace overtures to the terror group. Since Boko Haram has consistently rejected such peace overtures and continues its terror campaign, offering an olive branch including a general amnesty would amount to surrendering to the group.

The clamour for any quick fix solution to the insurgency also corresponds with the unwillingness or incapacity of several commentators to properly situate Boko Haram, preferring instead to see it as an aberrant monstrousity that just suddenly emerged out of the ether. In fact, the group is the latest evolutionary stage of the spate of sectarian convulsions that began with the Maitatsine uprisings in 1980. The long history of sectarian violence in the North is rooted in an explosive mix of political misrule, poverty, an opportunity deficit for the young and Islamo-populism purveyed by duplicitous politicians and hate-spewing clerics.

Successive regimes paid little attention to the implications of a burgeoning underclass that had no means of social mobility and was feeding on increasingly extremist (neo-Wahhabi) variants of Islam. Indeed, as long as this underclass draped their rage in religious metaphors and aimed it at Christians, southerners and other minorities, Northern political leaders seemed content to hold their peace.

In Boko Haram, we have the first fruits of a generation raised in a culture of hate; one in which religious violence was normative and the destruction of infidels was tolerated by political authorities. The group’s omnivorous violence which claims both Christians and Muslims does not make it an outlier but a Frankenstein mutation of long existing tendencies. Indeed, because Boko Haram, as conceived by its founder Mohammed Yusuf, is fundamentally a revolt against the Northern ruling class which it deems an apostate caste corrupted by godless westernism, northern elites were forced to sit up and take notice. Some have tried to co-opt the group; others have towed the line of political correctness in order to survive the group’s wrath. Burdened by guilt and the need to stay alive, many northern elites have opted for appeasement.

By winking at, and in many instances rhetorically fuelling, religious violence, northern elites fostered the tragic impression of the North as a feral wasteland patrolled by murderous zealots – an impression which Boko Haram is now stamping indelibly in the international consciousness. This is, of course, a caricature. But in our mediocre times, caricatures and stereotypes often shape public opinion and policy. The equivocation of northern elites in condemning violence also serves to fortify this caricature.

The Sultan’s amnesty proposal also stems from the war-weariness that has set in after two full years of battling Boko Haram, as well as the death and destruction that the conflict has inflicted on affected communities. Maiduguri is a bleeding, broken shell of itself reeling from both terrorist outrages and the heavy-handedness of the military’s Joint Task Force (JTF). Parts of Northern Nigeria are directly suffering the disruption of economic and social life by the insurgency. The whole country is suffering by extension as it now makes the international news headlines as an outpost of anomie. There is almost a hint of Stockholm syndrome in the way some Borno elites have cast the JTF as the enemy and demanded its withdrawal rather than the insurgents holding their communities hostage. This is understandable. Borno and other afflicted areas desperately require respite and have been failed by a federal administration that has shown insufficient empathy.

Not Everything is Jonathan’s Fault

But fairness demands that we apportion blame in the right quarters and in the right measure. The much maligned JTF troops are prosecuting a difficult assignment in a treacherous operational environment at great risk to themselves and far from the comfort of their families. Many of them have paid the supreme price in the line of duty. While any unprofessional conduct must be condemned and dealt with, they deserve praise for their courage and sacrifice, which the president noted. Without their presence in Borno and Yobe, those states would have been overrun by insurgents.  

Borno and the North have been failed, above all, by their own leaders. These leaders were distinctly missing or silent when the culture of violence was being nurtured in their communities; when social capital depleted so totally that a generation fell into the hands of extremists; when leading local politicians initiated unemployed youths into a life of brigandage; when hoards of almajiri multiplied filling slums and ghettoes; and when lives, property, and worship places were periodically destroyed in waves of religiously-inspired rioting. Even now, these leaders have presented no plan to rescue the region from anarchy. They have offered no plans to invest massively in education and social infrastructure and offer hope to millions of hopeless youth that constitute a near infinite pool of potential recruits for extremists.

Last year, Zamfara spent 2.7 billion naira on Ramadan gifts, an investment of doubtful consequence, given the educational, infrastructural and social deficits of the state. This typical recourse to Islamo-populism at the expense of tackling real problems makes it difficult to take northern elites seriously when they talk of northern poverty. Yet, only the people of Zamfara can affect the state’s fiscal choices. Even if the state government decided to spend its entire budget on pilgrimages and festive gifts, it would still be down to Zamfara people to raise their concerns, if any, about the value of such expenditures. This illustrates the parlous state of civil society in many Northern states and the politico-religious manipulation of people who are vulnerable because of their impoverishment.

In our federal system, states are responsible for their own fiscal priorities. Those who blame the federal government must recognize the incongruence of simultaneously seeking more federalism (which means more powers for states) and more federal activism. It is all too easy to blame the federal government for every crisis while states are left off the hook.

The Trouble with Jonathan’s Counter-Terrorism Plan

However, the federal government is scarcely faultless. Jonathan’s response to the Sultan was rife with dissembling. He cavalierly described Boko Haram as unknown “ghosts” even though his administration has admitted after a tortuous tangle of denial and obfuscation that it was engaged in back-channel negotiations with the group. In December 2011, Jonathan claimed that Boko Haram had infiltrated his administration. (On hindsight this statement was calculated to polarize and distract the public ahead of his removal of fuel subsidy.) These statements suggest some knowledge of who the “ghosts” are. In January, while talking to CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, Jonathan flippantly dismissed the idea that poverty is a factor in the Boko Haram insurgency, betraying a lack of analytical rigour in his own grasp of a crucial national security situation.

More pertinently, the administration apparently has no broader strategy for dealing with the insurgency beyond militarization. Troops can only contain violence long enough for political leaders to initiate remedial economic, social and political measures. The administration has burdened the military with the patently impossible task of wiping out an insurgency without taking steps to address the circumstances that created the insurgency in the first place. The counter-insurgency campaign evidently has no psychological operations unit aimed at countering extremist teachings and winning hearts and minds. A relief and reconstruction fund for Borno and Yobe would not have been out of place and Jonathan could have announced this during his Maiduguri visit to bring some succor to the suffering.   

There is no indication of what the administration intends to do with the scores of Boko Haram suspects already in custody, how they are to be processed in order to punish the guilty and avoid miscarriages of justice, and whether there is any mechanism for separating hard core ideologues from mules, or whether there is any planned deradicalization programme for the mules who are not yet beyond salvage. The administration should have fast tracked trials of terror suspects and their high profile confederates in order to avoid a situation where they become bargaining chips. The administration has also not seen fit to address reported acts of misconduct and human rights violations by security forces in Maiduguri. Early in this administration, there was a sense that senior officials saw Boko Haram as a mascot of northern opposition to Jonathan or were indifferent to northerners blowing themselves up. Only when the group struck in Abuja did the administration seriously begin updating its counter-terrorism capacities.

What about an Amnesty?

Jonathan was virtually shamed into visiting Maiduguri a fortnight ago after the opposition All Progressive Congress (APC) had met there without fear. Yet both visits seemed more about political theatrics. Opposition partisans who delight in casting Boko Haram as a problem of the ruling People’s Democratic Party should remember that Borno and Yobe have been run by the opposition All Nigeria Peoples Party since 1999. The ANPP’s flagrant use of Islamo-populist rhetoric and Sharia politics in the early 2000s helped create the conditions that fostered Boko Haram. For all its bluster, the APC itself has offered platitudes but no plan or programme for ending the insurgency. Cheap politicking has obscured serious debate.

Beyond histrionics, we need to have a less emotive and more reasoned discourse. An amnesty proposal cannot be written off as absurd because a precedent has already been set with the amnesty for Niger Delta militants. But the efficacy of an amnesty in ending violence is yet to be conclusively established. In the Niger Delta, onshore militancy has decreased but oil theft and piracy have increased. The military remains stationed there indicating the federal government’s doubt as to the degree to which militant gangs have disarmed. These militants always seemed more like capitalist bandits seeking economic concessions and therefore more likely to lay down their arms if they were “bought.” In this sense, the amnesty programme is an extortionate welfare scheme for angry young men, many with blood on their hands. Whether this “peace” in the Niger Delta will endure once the flow of federal largesse is turned off remains to be seen.  

In Boko Haram’s case, rewarding mass murder with a blanket amnesty makes no moral or political sense and only opens the door for more people to see violence as a means of acquiring economic power and political relevance. Furthermore, Boko Haram, a group now splintering into factions like Ansaru, is not a cohesive union of mass killers that can be negotiated with in the same way that you would in an industrial dispute. Without a central command and control structure, it is more an amorphous movement. There is no indication that the faction that recently called for a ceasefire is the dominant faction. The group’s leader Abubakar Shekau has serially rejected peace overtures, recently denied any ceasefire agreement and is known to sanction executions of the more “dovish” elements in his ranks. A week ago, Ansaru slaughtered seven foreign hostages that it had been holding for several weeks. The murder of those hostages represents an eloquent response to the Sultan’s amnesty proposal.

 Offering an amnesty in these circumstances, especially where federal authorities have yet to neutralize the flow of arms into Nigeria, is a white flag of surrender to psychopathic anarchists. A state simply cannot imply that its citizens can be murdered with impunity and their murderers can then be amnestied as if nothing happened. The slain (including civilians, troops and security agents) and their survivors demand justice. And if such an amnesty were issued, the emergence of groups seeking vengeance on ex-Boko Haram militants cannot be ruled out. Furthermore, an amnesty cannot replace the need for governance and developmental deliverables in ailing communities. Politicians need not wait for insurrections to start before doing their jobs.

Conclusion

After two years of remorseless conflict with a steep cost in blood, tears and treasure, an understandable war-weariness has set in. But insurgencies cannot be killed off with quick fixes especially when they are deep rooted. Maitatsine emerged in 1980, was crushed that same year in Kano, and yet staged sporadic revolts in different states until 1985. Boko Haram is better resourced than Maitatsine, has access to better technology and the Nigerian state is weaker and her military smaller than it was in the early 1980s. This will take time. Even if Boko Haram suddenly expired today, as long as the socio-economic indices remain unchanged, we would be contending with another, better organized insurgency within a decade from now.

Finally, there seems to be a misguided notion that merely announcing an amnesty will switch off terrorism like a battery-operated toy. Those who seek a return to “peace” and “normalcy” need to review their presumptions. If by “peace” they are referring to the pre-2009 era of sporadic sectarian clashes, millions of destitute children placidly swarming northern cities in escalating beggary while the idle rich cavort in palatial mansions, they are sorely mistaken. All students of conflict understand how a pre-existing structural violence can be garbed in “peace” and “normalcy” until it matures into armed insurgency. The class contradictions of the north have reached a critical mass and the spirit of militant discontent is now abroad. Only honest, responsible and reasoned politics can dispel it. 

(All Images sourced online.)        

Terrorism, Myth and Propaganda

Terrorists use narratives and myths to justify their acts of mass murder and to create enabling psychological environments for their campaigns. They do this frequently by couching their criminal acts in revolutionary or revivalist rhetoric. The effect of this is to create a permissive climate of moral ambiguity around them.

During the 1980s, Lawrence Anini’s gang robbed banks and distributed the loot to Benin City market women creating a diversionary debate as to whether Anini was a modern day Robin Hood provoked into a life of violent crime when the police extra-judicially killed his brother or whether he was a narcissistic gangster who wrote letters to the press and reveled in his notoriety. In the same way, gangs in the Niger Delta, less interested in resource control than in cashing in on oil bunkering and piracy, were romanticized as militants in some sections of the media.  

In weaving mythical narratives, criminals undermine official resolve by leveraging psychological capital in the form of public sympathy. A lack of moral clarity clouds our interpretation of obvious crimes. We begin to ask whether we are dealing with terrorists or freedom fighters; mass murderers or rebels with a cause; homicidal nihilists or overzealous activists that just need lessons in anger management. Between each definition is a patina of myth that serves to rationalize the devaluation of human life.

Boko Haram’s narrative in the last two years has been one of grievance. In June 2009, seventeen of its members in a funeral procession were shot by highway policemen allegedly because they were not wearing regulation motorcycle helmets. Its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, and scores of sect members were later extra-judicially executed by the police. This narrative of unprovoked injustice and justifiable vengeance has been used by some to explain Boko Haram’s terror campaign. There is also a grander narrative in which the sect seeks to establish an Islamic state.

These narratives are false. Assuredly, Boko Haram was destined to wage war on the federal government and serve as a proxy for Al Qaeda. The caliber of weaponry that the security services unearthed in the group’s hideouts before and during the 2009 confrontation did not suggest a passive posture awaiting circumstantial provocation. Boko Haram at the time was already radicalized and militarized. As at 2004, a group called the Black Taliban, thought to be an affiliate or prototype of Boko Haram was already staging blitz attacks on police stations and local government secretariats in Yobe state. Boko Haram’s battle readiness suggested a prior intent to levy war on the state and the killing of its members, while heinous, was not the catalyst for its uprising. It simply pre-empted the sect, causing them to launch their war earlier than originally planned.

Boko Haram casts itself as a sort of Islamic revivalist vanguard when, in fact, it is a fringe movement espousing a neo-Wahhabi theology which many Muslims find repulsive. That a Muslim wants to live under Sharia does not mean that he wants to live under the Taliban-esque rule of Boko Haram. But because Nigeria is a religious country, evenly split between Christians and Muslims, with a high degree of ignorance about both faiths, the danger is that Boko Haram’s narrow quest could be interpreted by the uninformed as being synonymous with the Islamic faith thereby escalating the group’s agenda into a broader sectarian conflict. Boko Haram will surely benefit from the larger chaos and strengthen itself even as security forces are stretched thin.

The federal government has been slow thus far to undertake the rhetorical aspects of its combat with Boko Haram. It must distinguish the group from mainstream Islam in the public mind by emphasizing its extremist psycho-pathologies. It must distinguish between Islamism which is a political ideology and the religion of Islam. These distinctions might sound academic or over-intellectual but terrorism is now part of the fabric of our social reality and it is prudent for us to understand the nature of this threat.

The federal government must make much more of the brave Islamic clerics that have been killed by the sect for opposing it. The sect’s indiscriminate murder of Muslims and Christians makes it a peculiar threat to national security. The federal government must also counter the stereotypical reporting in the local and international media that often forces every incident of unrest into the silly “Muslim north versus Christian south” cliché. Muslims are not at war with Nigeria; Boko Haram is.

Boko Haram’s immediate goal seems to be to perpetuate itself in Maiduguri but a larger consequence is the poisoning of public life with fear, paranoia and anti-Muslim hysteria. When all Christians and Muslims view each other through lenses of mutual suspicion, the extremists would have won an even greater victory. The group does not have the numbers to militarily challenge the state but it does not need them; it can spread hate, bigotry and fear and watch the country unravel as its fault lines are inflamed.

This is why the government and civil society must work to create forums for inter-faith dialogue where voices of reason rather than extremists shape the conversation. The media can aid this effort by avoiding sensationalism in its reportage and seriously moderating its online platforms where vile hate speech, Islamophobic slander and rumours are circulating virtually uninhibited. It is also important to avoid conflating different conflict scenarios thereby creating artificial correspondences. For example, the conflicts in Plateau State and Borno State are rooted in distinct factors. It is unhelpful to conflate both and suggest connections where none exist. In this regard, politicians, religious leaders and the rest of us should be more circumspect in our comments.

But it is not enough to simply counter Boko Haram’s propaganda. The Nigerian state must create a superior narrative. A nation is a moral consciousness, an idea and a myth of human community actualized by the state. The purpose of governance is to give material meaning to the intangible property of national identity by providing tangible social goods – healthcare, security, education, employment and all other means of self-actualization. In the absence of a grand national myth to accommodate the breadth of our aspirations, people are taking refuge in the most powerful myth of all – that supplied by religion. This is the basis of religious extremism which evolves when religion increasingly explains and compensates for the failures of the nation-state. It does so by offering a more coherent narrative with which young people especially make sense of their dire existential conditions. Religious extremism offers the meaning that Nigerian citizenship has failed to provide for its teeming youths. This is also why terrorism thrives in failed or weak states.

Accordingly, we must see the fight against terror as an ideological conflict. Hence, the necessity of crafting a national myth that gives renewed meaning to Nigerian citizenship in the 21^st century. In this regard, the government’s vast broadcast infrastructure and agencies like the National Orientation Agency could be put to better use.

A new mythos requires that we exorcise the colonial instinct and the culture of violence that characterizes relations between the citizenry and the state’s security forces. The extra-judicial killing of Yusuf and his cohorts was not only wrong; it was short-sighted and foolish.  It created a martyr and transfigured a fringe sect into a movement convinced that its cause had been validated by the martyrdom of its founder. The culture of thoughtless police brutality played into the terrorists’ psychology by creating for them an inspirational figure immortalized by an early death.

From the northeast to the Niger Delta, insurgencies have sprouted wherever security forces have acted like lawless bandits thereby providing facile justification for the democratization of violence. In this respect, the behaviour of the state is itself often a threat to national security.

This brings us to a philosophical yet fundamental point. Governance is largely represented in the 

Nigerian imagination as the exhibition of raw power dramatized by the sirened convoys and motorcades that frequently intimidate other road users. Public insecurity actually increases whenever a VIP is on the road. These negative atmospherics of official terrorism brutalize the Nigerian psyche. Therefore, the anti-terror campaign must include changing the visuals and the language of officialdom from that of vulgar belligerence to one of reverence for life and public safety. One does not need to be a terrorist sympathizer to understand that violence, even if only symbolic, begets violence.    

A New Dark Age of Terror

After the June 16 suicide bombing at the Nigerian police headquarters, it should be clear that we are facing a new species of violence; one that we must confront with the full weight of our public institutions. The attack was a statement of terrible symbolism. By striking at the first line of the security establishment, Boko Haram issued a message that not even the society’s professional protectors are safe. Coming just days after the police Inspector General had declared that the group’s days were numbered, it was a reply of murderous eloquence. The point of such violence is to sow fear into the public mind. It is to “terrorize” – which is what Boko Haram has been doing with diabolical aplomb in Borno State.

The “16/6” attack was merely a spectacular reprise of the group’s operations over the years in the northeast. In that time, police stations have been bombed and scores of police officers assassinated. The Leadership newspaper of July 28, 2009 reported police sources confirming a suicide bomb attack on a police station in Potiskum, Yobe State. Sect members wired with explosives had biked into the station and blown themselves up. Boko Haram has also targeted politicians, community leaders, clerics and generally anyone that opposes their aim of establishing an Islamic state. As with most emergencies outside Lagos and Abuja, their attacks did not elicit serious national interest. Niger Delta militants gained attention even in the creeks because they had the oil industry at their mercy. In contrast, the terror campaign on the nation’s impoverished northeastern fringes seemed remote even to the authorities despite the brazen slaughter of state operatives.  Seeking more serious official recognition, Boko Haram struck in Abuja.

Our concerns for the future should be threefold. Boko Haram appears to have mapped our systemic strengths and weaknesses and emboldened by their successes so far, will attempt even more daring assaults. Terrorists crave horrific spectacles that promote their causes and attract media attention. Accordingly, Boko Haram will seek maximal yield targets with potentially high casualties; sensational bombings and high profile assassinations. Such targets would likely include airports, malls, passenger planes, trains, bridges and other physical infrastructure as well as sites of symbolic national value such as the National Assembly and other federal buildings.

Secondly, the more successful Boko Haram is, the greater the likelihood that copycat terrorist groups will emerge attempting even more spectacular horrors in order to burnish their reputations in the jihadi pantheon – a sort of street credibility for mass murderers.

Thirdly, this threat is unlikely to disappear quickly. Boko Haram’s extremist ideology and uncompromisingly homicidal methods place it beyond the range of reason and dialogue. People willing to blow themselves up generally do not bargain. Its demands are absolute, its terms, non-negotiable and its means, totalitarian. Their grievance has deeper roots than a quest for “resource control” and possesses the fiery certitude of unhinged zealotry. Unlike some Niger Delta militants, they will not be dissuaded by choice plots in Abuja or excursions to the presidential villa. Boko Haram will not be convinced of the error of its ways; it has to be confronted decisively.           

It may be that receiving militants in Aso Rock as the previous two administrations did and generally treating them as “freedom fighters” set a precedent whereby groups can now use terrorism to pursue their goals. Obviously, where the state is perceived to be illegitimate, and conventional channels of representation are obstructed, violence will be cast as a veritable tool of negotiation. A combination of vote-rigging, democracy deficits and unaccountable government has dragged us into dark sophistic terrain where some may argue that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter or that the justice of a terrorist’s cause is in the eyes of the beholder. Perhaps the extrajudicial slaying of Boko Haram’s leader Mohammed Yusuf by police officers triggered the group’s vengeful killing spree. However, the wanton slaughter of men, women and children with random bombs places it in the category of bloodthirsty anarchists.

Confronting Boko Haram could be a long struggle. Over decades, Britain had to manage the Irish Republican Army’s insurgency and Germany had to deal with the Red Army Faction. Similarly, terror alerts and bombings could assume a terrifying new normalcy.

The odds of averting this scenario are currently unfavourable. Our security challenges expose a deeper institutional crisis. We can justifiably question whether strategic agencies whose staffing is often determined by twisted notions of affirmative action (“federal character”) rather than merit have the competence to handle the threats assailing us.

Our national security establishment is dysfunctional and like other branches of the Nigerian state is beset by a severe lack of institutional capacity. Our much maligned police force works under appalling conditions. As at 2008, Nigeria had 377,000 officers policing a population of about 150 million. One-third of the force is effectively a privatized security corps illegally guarding VIPs and corporate establishments. The police are generally underpaid, ill-equipped and ill-trained. The force has been further debased by its serial use by politicians either to suppress dissent or abet electoral heists. Our cops are unfairly expected to deliver results in very difficult circumstances.

Corruption which bleeds the state is also a critical factor. The Police Equipment Fund created to procure anti-crime gear was embezzled by some of its executives.

The security bureaucracy is still bound by military-era paradigms and operational assumptions better suited to catching coup-plotters than addressing the asymmetries of non-state violence. The one-dimensional approach of deploying the army to combat suburban terrorism has not worked as the July 2009 offensive against Boko Haram in Maiduguri showed. Such operations executed often with overwhelming and indiscriminate force yield great collateral damage. Nothing facilitates further radicalization of the general populace more than punishing the innocent with the guilty. Such methods tend to transform cowering neutrals or passive sympathizers into active combatants. We must now develop the counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism competencies required to address extant security threats.

Our intelligence capabilities are decidedly poor. Bukar Shekau, the current head of Boko Haram was pronounced killed in the 2009 offensive. President Goodluck Jonathan appointed an anti-terrorism czar early this year but nothing has been heard from that office. There is little to indicate any significant changes in our security architecture since the October 1, 2010 bombings at Eagle Square. If anything, bombings have actually increased.

Security agencies must disrupt the arteries of finance and weaponry that sustain Boko Haram. The group’s scale of terrorism cannot be conducted pro bono and if the paper trail is found and followed, it is sure to reveal local and foreign benefactors. Our borders are notoriously porous and Boko Haram benefits from its proximity to erstwhile conflict spots in Chad and Niger Republic which can supply a steady flow of manpower and armaments. The group’s political protectors, the sympathizers in high places who obstruct investigations or refuse to act on actionable intelligence delivered by the security services, must be exposed. Its cells and safe houses have to be located, its hierarchies identified and its operatives neutralized. There also has to be a review of security protocols at public places, offices, federal buildings and likely targets. The public has to be vigilant.

Conceivably, the federal government could use counterinsurgency “sticks” against Boko Haram’s hawkish hard core of operatives while offering “carrots” to its more impressionable novice terrorists. This will work best when the group feels endangered enough to consider negotiation.  

However, pursuing an aggressive policy alone will not conclusively end this threat. Think of extremism as a hydra-headed monster and Boko Haram as just one head among others. Cut off one head and two more may well grow in its place. More than anything, it is failed governance that fuels extremism. The cynical use of Sharia law by corrupt politicians to mask their sleaze surely encouraged extremists to pursue the violent establishment of a “more authentic” Sharia regime.     

According to the recently released Nigeria Education Data Survey, 83 percent of children aged 5-16 in the northeast (Boko Haram territory) cannot read at all. “A typical child in the northeast sub region is about four times more likely to be illiterate than his or her mate in the southwest.” The region also accounts for the country’s highest level of innumeracy at 73 percent. This geography of illiteracy and innumeracy does not merely coincide with the geography of extremism; it fortifies it. It is a vast demographic ocean of potential recruits for terrorist groups.

Altering these statistics should be a key governmental priority. Boko Haram is not just a gathering of bucolic malcontents; it also has a fair number of educated youths disenchanted with their lack of prospects and with the corruption that has arrested their development. They have now chosen to redeem themselves by deforming their own souls in these acts of transcendent evil. Until the sordid material conditions that gestate violence are seriously addressed, there will be yet more homicidal zealots dominating the news headlines.   

Jonathan's Rocky Road Ahead

Recognizing the reputational debilities of his party, the People’s Democratic Party, President Goodluck Jonathan built his campaign around his personal brand, which despite his underwhelming incumbency, remained sufficiently popular to earn him a win. He presented his bid as “a breath of fresh air” not an enterprise in continuity, knowing that the PDP had offered little worthy of continuation. He engaged broadly on social media and with constituencies ranging from commercial motorcyclists to Nollywood. It was smart politics. By repudiating the PDP’s zoning arrangement, Jonathan had angered influential northern power-brokers and needed to counteract their angst by broadening his popular support. Arguably, he accurately keyed into public opinion since an NOI/Gallup poll in early 2010 found that 63 percent of Nigerians opposed zoning.  

While campaigning, the president often sounded more like a populist insurgent than the ruling party candidate. Having won by virtue of strategic populism, he must now manage stratospheric public expectations and the tension between his two public personas – man of the people and ruling party standard bearer. These tensions will define his presidency. Nigerians voted for Jonathan and not the PDP. Yet, the coming days will reveal just how much ownership of his presidency ordinary Nigerians can justifiably claim.

The Jonathan administration will move to abolish subsidies on domestic fuel prices which will cause not only a hike in the price of petrol but also diesel and kerosene, the lifeblood of household economics for millions of Nigerians. It will likely raise fuel prices to between N115 to N120 per liter, effectively an increased tax with knock on effects on food and transportation prices. Last September, the finance minister, Segun Aganga disclosed that the subsidies would be removed by the end of 2011 but after investment in a mass transit program to ease its impact on the poor. Since then, officials have been more forthright in arguing for subsidy abolition than in announcing when this mass transit program is to commence.

At the same time, Jonathan has to curb the riotous government spending particularly, the reckless and unsustainable financial rewards that the PDP dominated National Assembly has appropriated for itself. This will surely bring him into confrontation with his party. If he abolishes subsidies without imposing fiscal discipline, he will swiftly become the object of public odium. If he takes on the reigning kleptocracy, he could trigger a civil war within the PDP pitting reformers against conservatives. But Jonathan could rally civil society groups and popular support to his aid in an epic confrontation with the culture of impunity. Either way, confrontation is certain if the orgy of theft in Abuja continues and the economy does not improve.

Subsidy removal will not achieve the administration’s stated goal of reducing the current 13.2 percent inflation rate to single digit figures. Nor would it aid reduction of the present 21.2 percent unemployment rate. Indeed, it will erase the gains of the new national minimum wage of N18, 000 which many states cannot pay. To do so, some states may have to lay off workers and risk the wrath of organized labour. Industrial unrest could paralyze several states as a result. The increasingly powerful Governors Forum will insist on a revision of the Revenue Allocation Formula to increase the funds available to states and ignite a potential confrontation with the federal government which presently gobbles up 52.68 percent of centrally collected revenue.  

Jonathan must also contend with a treacherous national security threat environment. Nigeria’s ruling class is a rent-seeking elite reliant on government for survival but its northern fraction is the most hopelessly dependent on government, the most vulnerable without it and, therefore, the most obsessed with state power. Unlike its southern cohorts, it has no technical or entrepreneurial capacity to fall back on. The coterie of northern politicians that sees power as an entitlement and now feels marginalized by Jonathan’s victory may stir up the feral passions of the northern street. They may deploy the armies of the slums to wreak havoc as a means of negotiating their continued access to the national cake. While they share no affinity with the Talakawa, identity politics often creates a false sense of solidarity between the dispossessed and the privileged. This explains why mobs may riot in support of the very elites responsible for their impoverishment. This has happened often enough in the past and is a likely scenario in the coming days.  

Kaduna which has its first elected Christian governor could witness a rise in sectarian tensions. For nearly two years, in Borno State, the ultraviolent anarchist Islamist cult, Boko Haram has been assassinating police officers, district heads and opposing clerics. It will attempt to expand its theatre of terror beyond the northeast and target even Abuja with high profile bombings and assassinations in order to firmly establish itself in the national consciousness. Other extremist groups could arise elsewhere in the north due to the ongoing and widespread radicalization of young northern males. In Jos, Plateau State, which is now largely segregated across ethnic and religious line, a tense calm is punctuated frequently by covert reciprocal killings. The likelihood of more open violence remains.

In the next four years, an outbreak of violence in the north may compel President Jonathan to declare a state of emergency in the affected state. At the very least, the army will be deployed as has been customary since 1999 to contain unrest. Yet Jonathan must adroitly manage the politics of militarizing trouble-prone Northern areas and also the practical consideration that prolonged militarization of an area tends to radicalize restive communities as was the case in the Niger Delta in the 1990s.

The administration must develop a comprehensive national security doctrine that metes out tough, swift and decisive responses to sectarian terrorists, their sponsors and the architects of serial unrest including clerics and politicians that traffic in hate speech and incitement. Such a doctrine must also tackle the structural poverty and injustice that feed extremism. Jonathan must pressure and work with northern state governments to deliver good governance.

On another front, the new administration must tackle the constant clashes between nomadic pastoralists and agrarian communities. This is actually Nigeria’s most consistent low-intensity conflict and is partly a result of our flawed energy policy. 45 percent of Nigerian households use firewood for cooking and this figure will rise as the abolition of subsidies prices kerosene beyond the reach of more people. The quest for a cheaper alternative in firewood leads to deforestation, contributing to severe erosion and loss of farmland in the southeast. According to the Federal Ministry of Environment, Nigeria’s forests are plundered of more than 30 million tons of firewood annually.

In the north, deforestation and desertification is forcing the southward migration of pastoralists in search of grazing ground and into contact and conflict with agrarian communities in the Middle Belt. It is really a straight forward resource conflict but because these agrarian communities are mostly Christian, these clashes are reported as Christian-Muslim clashes when, in fact, nomadic Fulani are not Muslim. Such reportage fits the stereotypical “Muslim vs. Christian” binary beloved of much of the local and international media. Unfortunately, it also creates artificial convergences between distinct formats of violence, intensifying conflicts and perpetuating a mutual sense of threat and paranoia among ethnic and religious groups.

Much of Nigeria’s protein requirement is supplied by the pastoralists now hemmed in by the surging Sahara and by unwelcoming farmers. Without land to sustain their livestock, the pastoralists will suffer but Nigeria’s loss will be more severe. It will undermine our food security and sharply increase protein deficiency which is a key factor in the high rates of malnutrition and child mortality. The federal government should resume plans to establish a grazing reserve which if successfully implemented would drastically reduce clashes between herdsmen and farmers.

On the whole, the Jonathan era is likely to be marked by turbulence. The Nigerian state is bereft of institutional capacity, severely weakened by pathological graft and no longer has a monopoly of force. New non-state actors have emerged, created by the long-term militarization of public life, mobilized by social injustice and empowered by the privatization of violence.

The president may feel inclined to secure his government by distributing government positions to placate special interests. This would be a mistake. The commoditization of public office is the hallmark of a failed brand of politics. Instead, Jonathan must assemble a coalition of competent and honest Nigerians to drive national restoration. This will be the first sign of any serious intention to distinguish his presidency.

Politicians typically campaign in generalities and govern in specifics. However, in the course of his campaign, Jonathan was exceedingly vague and offered no definitive positions on key national questions such as why an oil-rich country imports fuel when it could build refineries or the meaning of Nigerian citizenship in the light of conflicts between so-called “indigenes” and “settlers.” These and other urgent questions await cogent answers.