The events of Tuesday June 16, 2011, when the Boko Haram sect of insurgents out of Borno State carried their war of attrition against the Nigerian state right inside the headquarters of the nation’s police force, have erased any doubt on the intractable nature of the security problem the band of Boko Haram guerrilla fighters poses.
Unless the matter gets the clinical attention it demands from the authorities, the disease may prove debilitating, rendering the state unable to attend to other even more pressing matters. In the end, it may eat so much into the fabric of state to unravel it.
Boko Haram is a security quandary for leadership at all levels; it highlights its abject failure. Whatever “concrete measures” have so far been taken “to nip it in the bud”, these must now be seen to have failed woefully; this calls for their thorough review.
The security challenges occasioned by the endless attacks by the group are bound to make the provenance state from where the disease broke out ungovernable; the whole Northeast region (particularly Borno, Bauchi, Kano and Gombe states) appears to be tottering on the brink of lawlessness.
Maiduguri is fast becoming another Somalia, where outlaw groups have taken over and where no government exists. So far, the impact and presence of government can only be felt on the streets of the capital city where armed soldiers who have failed to contain the killings and terror have allegedly made a hobby out of terrorising innocent residents in the name of perfunctory searches for members of the sect.
Sometimes, there are cases of alleged extortion perpetrated on the residents, where the economy has all but collapsed from the persistent onslaught by Boko Haram and resultant curfew imposition by government in response.
In the beginning, it was possible to keep count of the number of people killed; now, the heightened frequency of the killings has so shot up that accurate tally is being kept anymore.
The Boko Haram sect, who engaged security forces in a fire-fight in 2009 following sundry earlier skirmishes on the streets of Maiduguri, would probably have been successfully routed by now were it not for the extra-judicial killing of its leader, Mohammed Yusuf, along with dozens of his followers. Perhaps part of the cure, if it is not too late to be effective, is the ongoing arraignment for their murder of two assistant commissioners of police along with 15 other police officers.
In line with this, the family of the 70-year-old Baba Fugu, the father in-law of the late Boko Haram leader, Muhammed Yusuf, ought to be treated with fairness in the matter of their suit in court challenging the old man’s murder by the police.
Whatever happened to the judgement of the court in their favour? Baba Fugu had reportedly presented himself to the state Police commissioner on being told that he was a wanted man. Instead of taking down his statement, the police took his life even though he was not known to have any relationship with the Boko Haram other than being Mr Yusuf’s father-in-law.
The history of Boko Haram is a testament to government’s inability to put in place effective measures for ensuring justice and egalitarianism. In the beginning, Muhammed Yusuf was reportedly encouraged and bankrolled by former Borno State governor Ali Modu Sheriff, who wanted to use the group’s numerical leverage for political gains. To this end, we are calling for Mr Sheriff to be compelled to appear for interrogation by the newly constituted commission of inquiry set up by the Federal Government.
It has been alleged that Boko Haram financier, the late Buji Foi (also summarily executed by the police), as Mr Sheriff’s commissioner of religious affairs, was possibly his stooge within the sect. Indeed, the extra-judicial killings have led to allegations that, given the haste with which they were carried out, certain persons along the corridors of power had something to hide.
The commission of inquiry set up by the federal government to investigate the uprising was said to have returned a verdict of guilty on former Governor Ali Sheriff and the then Commissioner of police. Why has government not made its content public? Can the Freedom of Information Act be invoked to make this happen?
Therefore, there is an urgent and compelling need to prosecute Mr Sheriff if indeed he is found guilty. In fact, his appearance and possible subsequent prosecution will go a long way in assuaging the truly hurt feelings of the Boko Haram sect. The question must be asked: Could there have been a pact between Mr Sheri ff and the group, which the former reneged on, which has left the sect enraged?
The security approach adopted by security agencies, notably the police, is not only faulty but dastardly. As a retired policeman in Maiduguri once told reporters, ‘’The moment a shooting takes place in any neighbourhood, Operation Flush operatives rush to the scene and round up young men and claim that they have arrested the culprits. How can any gunman who committed an act hang around the scene of the crime to be arrested just like that?”
As a result, many young men made scapegoats for the failure of the security agents to apprehend the real perpetrators of the killings end up radicalised. And so the Boko Haram cancer cells continue to ravage the body polity.
