Nigeria: Boko Haram's Threat

　
　

　
Obi Nwakanma
19 June 2011
　
On Thursday, the militant Islamist group, Boko Haram took their challenge to the Nigerian state one notch up. They bombed the Louis Edet House, the headquarters of the Nigeria Police Force in Abuja.
As a statement of defiance, nothing could be bolder. It is a simple statement of challenge: catch me if you can. Boko Haram is the most recent of the bones in Nigeria's throat as a nation. It is one other manifestation of anti-Nigerianism, based this time on a toxic mix of religious extremism and anger over social inequity. Let us here, try a bit to understand Boko Haram.

There are many pundits in Nigeria who say that Boko Haram is a group that reflects the upper North's disenchantment with what it sees as the increasing loss of power by the North of Nigeria. It seeks to reflect what might be a central principle held by a faction of the political leadership from the North of Nigeria, that Nigeria as a modern nation must be governed by Islamic principles and under the umbrella of a worldwide Muslim Amir. It is, of course, an illusion but it is a serious illusion.
Boko Haram has announced its Jihad in Nigeria and its intent on causing further mayhem until its goals of setting up a nation under Sharia is met. For many Nigerians, this is a serious threat, and must be taken very seriously by this President. Boko Haram has basically declared war on the Federal Government of Nigeria, and it is important to evaluate the situation carefully in the coming days on whether to initiate A-grade operations in the North to root out this threat now or allow it to fester and create a growing, inoperable cancer. It is better now to excise the tumor before it spreads.
But I speak on the plain and absolute belief that Dr. Jonathan has the will to engage this threat without vacillation. I'd like to put my fears in perspective: over the years, Religion was made to become a central part of Nigeria, to the extent that government policy pussy-foots around religion. For many years, the Nigerian government funded religious pilgrimages to Mecca and to Jerusalem.
They created conditions in which religion interfered in the national political culture, and any action by governments to contain the religious debate was both ethnicised and politicised. The very idea of a Nigerian, secular state was challenged, and it was seen as part of the North-South divide, in which the north, often described as "mostly Moslem" was pitted against the South, also often described as "mostly Christian." The nation remained a fiction of our imaginations.
As a post-colonial state, Nigeria has fuelled the divisive politics of difference to the extent that even those who marginally identify with certain groups feel a serious threat and a serious need to throw even if symbolic support to groups that "represent" them above Nigeria.
If we must be truthful, Boko Haram must now join the group of movements that have frequently rejected the idea of a coherent Nigerian nation run as an organic and modern state. The defiance against Nigeria began from before independence. In the modern history of Nigeria, the first of these radical attempts to change the face of Nigeria by violent means began with the massacre of southerners in Jos in 1945 and the 1953 riots in Kano which targeted Southerners.
These were early precursors to what has since become the "northern tradition" of riots and purges that target Nigerian citizens particularly those originally from the South and newly-settled in the north. To date, including with the recent post-election killings, the Nigerian government, both under the colonial Brits and afterwards, has done very little about this. No one has ever been brought in, prosecuted and punished for leading mini-jihads against Nigerians, itself, by all definition a challenge to the Nigerian state under whose protection all her citizens dwell.
The second recorded attempt at a defiant movement aimed at Nigeria was in that plot by the partisans of the Action Group led by Chief Awolowo to violently overthrow the government of Nigeria in the first republic. Perhaps the most serious and most poignant of these movements aimed in defiance of the Nigerian state remains the Biafran secession, which unilaterally excised the Eastern part from the Nigerian federation. Fought for three years and with the loss of much life, property and stature, the civil war ended but created what remains today a reluctant citizenship; that sense of the half-and-half Nigerian.
In between Biafra and the restoration - yes, the second republic is the restoration of the civil order in Nigeria - were the military coups. These coups were defiant in character and aim, and they also helped to undermine the rationale for Nigeria as a coherent entity. Of these coups, the most destructive was the Babangida-Abacha era which introduced both religion and financial corruption at a scale never before seen in Nigeria up till then.
The thing about the Babangida-Abacha era is that it constantly provoked that strange feeling in Nigerian of a regime that set out deliberately to undermine the very meaning of nation as a Machiavellian strategy of manipulating and holding on to power. That power was cast in the image of the north. Its lingering after effects have affected everything, thereafter. It created the terrorist state.
Among the movements that emerged in defiance of the Nigerian state include OPC, the storm troopers of the Oodua movement, the rabidly Yoruba nationalist movement; the new Biafran separatist movement MASSOB, the Niger Delta Militant groups, and now, Boko Haram, the north's apparent answer to the anti-Nigerian defiance that seems to suggest that, as a principle, the idea of Nigeria is an orphan ideology, hated by many who wish to buckle it to the ground.
Nigerian nationalists have always been pitted against these anti-Nigerian movements.But the trouble today is that there is no "Nigerian nationalist" - that is those who genuinely believe that any good could come out of the idea of a genuinely just, modern, egalitarian, multi-ethnic and prosperous nation built on the enlightenment ethic as the visionary Nnamdi Azikiwe imagined it.
What we have today are "stake holders" - that is convenient Nigerians whose political and material interests are tied to the continuous exploitation of an "Abiku" nation. Perhaps this Boko Haram threat ought to bring us to our toes, for unlike any threat to Nigeria, Boko Haram wants to take over the power to govern Nigeria as a religious movement.
By attacking the central symbol of Nigeria's law, it has declared war on the government of Nigeria. Of note is its link to an international terrorist network whose aim is the religious as well as political colonization of countries like Nigeria. Far more than any threat before in Nigeria, Boko Haram must be taken very seriously. It is important for the President to establish, not a task force, but a broad security initiative to check this threat. The time to act is now.
The Federal Government must stop forthwith any negotiations with any terrorist or separatist group who uses means, other than the legitimate means of peaceful political petition to seek change. If this President cannot do it, perhaps the National Assembly should declare a national emergency, dissolve itself sine die, and hand emergency power to the Nigerian Armed Forces. I hope we do not come to that as an option.

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