How not to end Boko Haram

Barely one month after he appointed his new service chiefs, President Muhammadu Buhari in August set a three-month deadline for the defeat of Boko Haram. In the first flush of excitement after they were picked to lead the military, the service chiefs themselves openly acknowledged that the November deadline was achievable. There was great enthusiasm, new military

equipment, additional motivation, and the violent sect was so degraded as a fighting force that nothing seemed unrealistic about the deadline. A wary but eager public cottoned onto the Buhari timeline notwithstanding the failure of several deadlines issued by former president Goodluck Jonathan, deadlines that failed woefully, repeatedly and embarrassingly. Like many other things with the Buhari government, such as electricity supply and fuel availability, which seem to be responding positively to what has been described as his body language, many Nigerians are joyous with hope that the Boko Haram deadline would yield to the president’s sorcery.

There are chances the high hopes could be realised, and the war and the sect would both be extinguished. The Buhari government has also talked of his plans, together with a part of the world community, for the post-war reconstruction of the northeastern part of Nigeria ravaged by the sect’s nihilistic and murderous war. Having secured a humongous and seemingly disproportionate number of votes from that blighted region, President Buhari, it seems, is not being hypocritical in disclosing his huge plans for the Northeast. Though the plans are yet to be fully spelt out, they appear real and will receive the president’s best backing and energy.

So far, however, the government’s plan to bring the Boko Haram phenomenon to an end is based on two planks: to defeat the sect militarily, and to rebuild the war-ravaged region. As appropriate as these measures are in dealing with the menace in the Northeast, it is doubtful whether they are sufficient to extinguish the sect or prevent other sects and subversive groups from undermining the peace and security of the country. Boko Haram did not start in 2002 as a violent sect, even if it had the potential. It contained seeds of radicalism in its bowels, but it did not start out radicalised. While it was undeniably Islamist in structure and content, notwithstanding what the mainstream Islamic bodies embarrassed by the sect’s activities have said, it nonetheless distorted and perverted Islamic doctrines. Boko Haram’s militancy, radicalisation and ideology grew out of their experiences and encounters with the nation’s unsophisticated security forces and lackadaisical and undiscerning government.

If the sect withers before the firepower of the military, and its foot soldiers are depleted by the rebuilding and reconstruction of the Northeast, it is only a part of the necessary conditions for delivering peace to the region. In all President Buhari’s talk of peace in the region, he has emphasised military action, for which he has set a deadline, and economic regeneration, for which he gives the impression he and the world are prepared. But neither he nor anyone else, including the perceptive Governor Kassim Shettima of Borno State, has talked copiously of or emphasised the injustice that was done to members of the sect, nor even of the extrajudicial murder of the late Boko Haram leader, Mohammed Yusuf. The sect had in the past seized upon the extrajudicial murder of their leader and members to spurn previous offers of dialogue and peace. It is not now clear how the government hopes to ignore those state killings and hope any peace would endure. Peace must be based on justice, and yes, even criminals need justice delivered along civilised lines.

The conventional wisdom in Nigeria concludes that troublemakers are deserving of the punishment they get, no matter how the punishment is procured and administered. But it was pigheaded to carry out extrajudicial murder in the early stages of the disturbances, and it is still unethical to suggest that on account of the heavy economic losses suffered by the country, and the killing and maiming of military personnel, and the painful abridgment of governance in large parts of the Northeast, those who fomented the rebellion deserved the arbitrary punishment meted out to them. What sets a society apart from bloodthirsty anarchists and fanatical sects is the ethical standard by which civilised communities are judged. Boko Haram militants engaged in extraordinary and deplorable bloodletting. The rest of the society could not descend to that abysmal level of indiscriminate killings and hope to be regarded as superior to the sects. It took more than two years for the trial of the policemen who summarily executed the Boko Haram leader in 2009 to begin. The trial has still not been concluded more than six years after the state murder was committed, and about four years since the four or five police suspects were first charged in court.

Because the government itself embraced no fundamental conviction on the issue of extrajudicial murder, and because it reluctantly charged the offending policemen in court and accompanied the sham exercise with no diligent prosecution, it opened the floodgates for scores of other extrajudicial and revenge killings by the military. These unlawful acts in turn prolonged the war, turned it into a vicious and deathly struggle, and led to the partial ostracisation of Nigeria. In March 2013, Dr Jonathan insensitively confused the Boko Haram insurgents with the victimised indigenes of the states affected by militancy, and then warned the indigenes, whom he accused of collaborating with the sect, of the dire consequences of killing even one of his soldiers. After that, the crisis simply took a turn for the worse. It is only in the last one year or so that the military began to recognise it needed different and sensible methods to combat Boko Haram, one that involved winning the confidence of the local populace, making them partners in the war, and recognising belatedly that both troops and victims shared a common destiny and national security objective.

President Buhari talks fulsomely of winning the war in three months, a deadline the military has echoed and adopted with relish. He has promised reconstruction of the Northeast, and the people of the affected states are eagerly looking forward to the economic revival of their lands. These are laudable, achievable goals. But greater efforts must be applied to deliver justice to the hundreds killed extrajudicially, including the late Boko Haram leader, Mallam Yusuf. Nigeria is a nation of laws. Criminals, even if they are caught red handed, must be served justice according to the law. No more, no less.

To underscore the point that neither the Buhari government nor the ones before it had emphasised the issue of justice, the country’s security forces in their everyday dealings with citizens have simply refused to imbibe the culture of lawful law enforcement. Torture, state killings not backed by law, and other rampant abridgement and abuse of the rights of citizens routinely take place at police stations and within the precincts of other Nigerian security establishments. It is abuses such as these that sometimes lead to hardening of criminals and their predilection for wholesale subversion. When President Buhari talks of winning the Boko Haram war in the shortest possible time, and reconstructing the Northeast economically, let him also show understanding of the sect’s dynamics and the general dynamics of criminality and revolt by reflecting on the place of justice in the peace equation. More, let him in fact begin redesigning the architecture of justice such that, according to the provisions of the constitution, he will be sworn to defending the rights of every Nigerian. That is the only way to truly win the Boko Haram war and lay its many scary ghosts to rest.

The Nation