Column
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| By Dan Agbese |
IT would have been naïve, foolish even, to expect that with the mere change of government on May 29, the Boko Haram insurgents would turn tail, the bombs would stop exploding where and when they choose and the mindless killings would end. Had that happened, it would have been an Aha! moment for former President Jonathan. It would have converted the lie told, sold and believed by him, his wife, Patience, and their supporters to the bent truth they nursed for more than five years. Nothing shook them from their belief that the insurgency was a phantom conceived, executed and sustained by the ugly northerners out to make Nigeria ungovernable for him and stop him from contesting the 2015 presidential election.
The bombs are still exploding; the killings are still going on in various parts of the northern states and the Chibok girls are yet to regain their freedom. The insurgents still beat our intelligence personnel. They still choose when to strike, where to strike – and they strike and vanish into thin air. I am sure they know that Jonathan had since left office as president.
I wonder if it is possible now for Jonathan and his wife to accept, even if grudgingly, that this was never about him and his political ambition. This was never about an unholy and hidden northern political agenda. It has always been about misguided quasi-religious zealots taking on the Nigerian state for their misguided end. It has always been about a national challenge to which, sadly, Jonathan responded so very poorly.
Well, the ball is now in President Muhammed Buhari’s court. I am sure many of us expected the president to do what Jonathan could not do: make a short shrift of the murderous insurgency and relieve the nation of its nightmare. It might be unfair but not unreasonable. Buhari is a general. To borrow a military expression, he had seen action. To expect him to bring his professional experience to bear on the insurgency and win is not to suggest anyone wants him to perform magic. Wars are not decided by magicians.
Perhaps, aware of this public expectation, the president gave in to what I call the human response and gave a December deadline for an end to the insurgency. It was a mistake. It raised hopes sure to be shattered on the rocks of realities. Jonathan made the same mistake. He said sometime in 2010, not long after he assumed office, that the insurgency would end in June 2011. It did not. He had no basis for his lofty pronouncement. It was an empty political statement intended to reassure us that as the new sheriff in town, he had what it takes to deal with this national nightmare.
Buhari has reversed himself on the deadline. Something must have told him it is not always wise to give a deadline for ending an insurgency. Ask the Americans. Insurgency by its nature is a protracted battle. You always know when it begins, not when it ends. It stymied Jonathan. His most intelligent response was to impose a state of emergency on areas deemed to be the theatre of the war. Three times he imposed the state of emergency and three times the insurgents showed they had the upper hand in motivated personnel and more sophisticated weapons. And the daring bombings and killings went on.
The architecture of the war with the insurgents has, however, changed since the change of government. There is evidence of an honest approach to the prosecution of the war by the officers and the men of the Nigerian armed forces. Attitude does make a difference in this as in other situations. Jonathan’s men developed a self-defeating attitude. They undermined and sabotaged their own fitful efforts at winning the war. Instead of containing the insurgency, it spread with the insurgents daring further afield.
It is encouraging that we no longer hear of desertions by our fighting men. We no longer hear of officers cheating their troops out of their allowances. We no longer hear of soldiers sent into battle with empty guns. Attitude matters; so does a sense of responsibility.
The Boko Haram insurgency, like most insurgencies, will end one day. It may not be tomorrow or next month but the law of attrition will sooner than later set in and the misguided fighters will find themselves holding the short end of the stick. As I see it, the end of the Boko Haram insurgency poses as grave challenges as the war itself. We should begin to prepare for the post Boko Haram challenges. They would be daunting. I am happy to see that the federal government is thinking ahead on this. It indicated this week a Buhari Plan, not a Marshall Plan, as the plan has been dubbed by the press, for the northeastern parts of the country, the main theatres of the war devastated by the insurgency. Two new ‘Rs’ would tax the nation and its planners. The reconstruction of the areas destroyed by the war would be no easy task. With Buhari at the helm of affairs, we can reasonably hope that money would not be thrown at this massive problem; or worse, be diverted into private pockets.
The second ‘R’ would be the rehabilitation of the unfortunate victims of the insurgency. How to give the lives of peasant farmers and herdsmen back to them would be a rather tricky task. This is even more critical than the physical reconstruction of the affected areas. I do not envy the president and his administration.
This is the time too for us to begin to look at the many dimensions of the Boko Haram challenge and ask ourselves some critical questions. For instance, why was it easy for a band of murderous elements, waving the stained flag of religious irredentism, to take on the Nigerian state for more than six years? How were they able to mine one of our critical fault lines, religion? Although their primary objective in waging the war against the Nigerian state has never been properly defined it is not difficult to see that they have had a measure of success in challenging the corporate existence of our dear country. They still control two local government areas in Borno State.
Boko Haram was not the first to put the corporate existence of our country to the test. I suppose the late Isaac Adaka Boro was the first man in our history to appropriate part of the country as his fiefdom in a short lived challenge to the corporate existence of Nigeria. The late Lt-Col Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu was next. He pulled the former Eastern Region out of Nigeria and renamed it the Republic of Biafra. It took a 30-month civil war to wipe Biafra off the map of the West African sub-region. Biafra revivalists are still at work in parts of the former Eastern Region. They too are challenging the wisdom of Lord Lugard.
It seems to me that there is something about our country that makes it so easy for individuals and groups of persons to put it to the test. Perhaps, Boko Haram provides as good an opportunity as any for us to critically examine what our country means to its citizens and what its citizens think of the country. An honest response to the underlying problems might prevent the sudden emergence of another bloody-minded group from mining our national fault lines and taking on the Nigerian state.
— Nov 2, 2015 @ 19:00 GMT
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May God the Almighty grant The Federal Government of Nigeria & our Armed Forces the ability to put down the insurgency in the North east within the shortest possible time & further maintain the corporate existence of Nigeria as an indivisible Country, Ameen.