Boko Haram: Why they are on a killing spree

Nigeria seems to be ‘going to hell in a hand basket’, as Americans say, no thanks to the activities of the terrorist Boko Haram group and others. Many people are of the view that the Boko Haram insurgency currently ravaging North East Nigeria, is as a result of poverty and illiteracy but some experts have begged to differ, saying that poverty alone is not enough to cause insurgency.

In this chat with Vanguard Features in Yola, Adamawa State, Professor Kyari Mohammed, Vice-Chancellor of Modibbo Adama University of Technology, MAUTECH, Yola, Professor; Dauda Mohammed Bello, an Islamic scholar and professor of English at Adamawa State University, Mubi and Mr Amed Demirhan, Director of Library Services at the American University of Nigeria, AUN, in Yola speak on the causes and steps to be taken to solve the problem of insurgency.  Excerpts:

By Ebele Orakpo

CAUSES of insurgency:
Speaking on the possible causes of insurgency, Prof. Kyari Mohammed, chair of MAUTECH’s Centre for Peace and Security Studies and one of Nigeria’s leading scholars on the ongoing Boko Haram insurgency and counter-insurgency said: “There are so many causes depending on who you ask. If you ask the insurgents, the first thing they will tell you is that they are seeking for redress because in several of their statements in the course of seeking for peace, they basically said they are taking vengeance for the killing of their leaders in detention, going back to 2009; the killing of Mohammed Yusuf. They also complain about the extra-judicial killing in detention of several of their members and the demolition of their places of worship in Maiduguri. This is their own side of the story.”

Prof. Kyari Mohammed

Agreeing with Prof. Mohammed, Mr Amed Demirhan who has a Master’s in Dispute Resolution said: “Poverty is not an excuse to commit crime.” He cited the example of Spain where the Basque region which was more prosperous and more developed than Castilla region, had insurgents while the poorer, less developed Castilla had none. “In India, there are millions of poor people; they don’t go around killing others. In Nigeria, in most poor places, people don’t kill each other. Many of the people involved in killing are actually educated people. So to me, tying poverty to violence is propaganda, it is a false assumption.”

For Prof. Dauda Bello, it is a combination of poverty and ideology. “In the beginning, it was political, then it became politics mixed with religion. Youths who have finished their studies and are unemployed and those who have not even gone to school and those that went to Islamic schools without anything to do, were recruited by politicians. They were lured in the name of religion to fight for their religion. Meanwhile, the politicians have their selfish aim; so while the innocent youths felt they were fighting for religion, they were actually fighting for the selfish aims of politicians. I can say it is now a combination of so many factors.”

Extremism/extreme ideology

The Vice-Chancellor believes that Boko Haram is an ideological phenomenon.

“We are talking about extremism and extreme ideology. There are ideological factors that conduce people towards taking up arms against their own country; brothers taking up arms against brothers and sisters.

So it is an extreme ideology and it is a worldwide development. What you see in the North-East of Nigeria is the same thing that is happening in some parts of North Africa, in the Sahel; the same thing that Islamic State is doing in Iraq; it is a worldwide phenomenon. So the question should be why are some groups disposed towards violence and extremism in several parts of the country?

Unfair system

Continuing, Prof. Mohammed said: “Let me put it this way: we live in a very unfair system where people see their conditions of oppression and absolute poverty. Everywhere around them, they see affluence and ostentation. So a condition where the majority of your people are poor while a tiny minority very rich, and not only rich, they flaunt these riches, then any little thing is likely to conduce towards violence. It doesn’t have to be an extremist religious violence as we have it here. It could be a social crisis, a class war, an ethnic thing; but the bottom line is that once they erupt, they go towards looking for the haves against the have-nots. So in the case of Boko Haram, at first, it was against security agencies and then the Western educated elite and politicians. But naturally, violence will take on a life of its own.

“Once the insurgents were pushed out of Maiduguri in 2012, the killings became indiscriminate and everybody became a target,” said Prof. Mohammed.

Demirhan: “Most insurgencies I have examined around the world were caused by the elite. Most revolutions are led by the elite, not necessarily for their own selfish gain but because of philosophies and ideologies. There is always a clash of ideas but the issue is how you handle them. Some feel that violence is acceptable culturally and some think it is not acceptable. The most important thing is the means you use to solve the conflict.”

Economic situation

Prof. Mohammed: “The economic situation: unemployment, economic hardship, all of these help to bring about violence but they in themselves will not lead to any form of violence. Look at what is happening in the North East; examples abound. You know the southern part of Niger Republic is poorer than the North East of Nigeria, yet, there are no insurgents, no fighting going on.

So poverty or lack of resource in itself will not conduce to violence. There has to be other precipitating factors that will conduce a people to take up arms. One is that there has to be a grievance; once the grievance exists and in addition to the grievance, these people have also come to a conclusion that they do not deserve the situation they are in. So these two factors must be there for any form of insurgency to take place, especially for people to take up arms against their own fatherland.

“Poverty in the midst of plenty and ostentation is one factor that will conduce to violence. “We have already talked about a violent extremist ideology; so it will take a lot of indoctrination for people to come to that conclusion. When somebody can go to the extent of killing himself in the process of hurting another person, then you know that the level of indoctrination must be very high. So there has to be the violent extreme ideology. That is why in some government cycles, especially the Office of the National Security Adviser, one of the options they are looking at is what they call De-radicalisation and Counter-radicalisation, a counter narrative; that, okay, there is an alternative to the kind of position you are holding.”

Way forward:

Prof. Bello:  “I am a part of the Adamawa Peace Initiative which is powered by the American University of Nigeria, AUN. We have actually been doing a lot at the initial stage to see that we the Adamawa State community are living together in peace, tolerating one another and also working together to see that peace is not only achieved but is sustained within Adamawa and if necessary, outside Adamawa. When the insurgency started, nobody saw it as a serious issue that may turn to this magnitude. Actually, it has done a lot of havoc and now, even those who started it seem to have regretted starting it and those who want to see it end could not end it by themselves.

“So I think the best thing government should do is to be very careful not to relent in the security measures. Security agencies should work even harder now, be more security-conscious within the towns that the insurgents are still controlling.

Political Boko Haram

“You know when people are migrating, the insurgents migrate along with them. Even in Yola, I believe there are many of them. We are talking about displaced people, they are also part of the displaced people within us and we may not know. Government should try to differentiate the true Boko Haram from the robbers and the political Boko Haram.”

Prof. Mohammed: “For me, there are several options: One is the position that the government has already taken; that military force alone is not enough, that in addition to whatever military options you have, you have to also come to some form of diplomatic settlement.

There is no way you can militarily defeat everybody. So they will have to find means, other than just military means, of dealing with the crisis. That, for me, is the way forward. So the process must be driven by some civilian forces (democratic means) and not just the military.”

Demirhan: “Do we have enough opportunities to be flexible and tolerate our differences or we want to suppress the differences? When you do that, it is going to lead to violence. You know in the US in the 1950s when there were civil rights demonstrations; in Detroit, the civil right thing was violent and the US government had to ask the National Guards to patrol the streets of Detroit.

Next day, most of the big companies in Detroit, including General Motors, got together and put down millions of dollars to sponsor some changes in order to deal with the dissent in the system because they recognised the problem and knew they could not solve it by more violence.

In many other places, they would have sent more soldiers which will lead to the killing of more people and if you kill more people, there will be more opposition, more revolution and counter-revolution, a never ending cycle.

“The American civil rights movement was not very peaceful but it was not very violent compared to other countries. In Detroit, they burnt a lot of work places, houses and many people got killed and many were arrested. But they managed to deal with the problem.

This is the key; you don’t just send in too many soldiers when there is a dissent, you are not going to stop dissent by force. If there are some underlying social and political issues, see how you can address them. If you don’t address those issues, it will still come up. If you kill more people, more will oppose you. It is never beneficial.”

Involving the community

Bello: “The security agencies need to work more closely with the community rather than alienating them. People feel that if they go to security agents to report anything, they would not take any action and at the end of the day, those people who feel they were reported would turn on them.”

Adamawa Peace Initiative, API

Prof. Bello: “I would commend the AUN for powering the API to first of all come together. When we started, there were some mistrusts and difficulties between the Moslems and Christians and the API is a combination of all sorts of people.

For instance, I am an imam and I work very closely with bishops and so the API was able to bring together Moslems and Christians, especially their leaders, who would go back to the grassroots and mobilise their followers to the extent that we now have nothing of such mistrust within the state.

We have been working closely with the Nigerian Inter-Religious Council, NIREC, as well as Moslem Council of Adamawa State and various Islamic religious groups and the Christian Association of Nigeria, CAN and their followers in the various Christian denominations. We are now in a kind of cordial relationship, not only tolerating each other and living in peace but struggling or fighting for peace outside our own environment.”

- Vanguard News