Amid growing concern over the worsening spate of insecurity across Nigeria, the Presidency last Tuesday, once again, declared with some glee that the “real Boko Haram” insurgents had been defeated.
President Muhammadu Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, had said that what remained in existence of the obdurate Boko Haram insurgent group was just a remnant, including some fugitive criminals and the members of the Islamic State in the Maghreb.
According to him, the Nigerian government is of the strong opinion that the Boko Haram terrorist group has been degraded and defeated.
For the Presidency, the real Boko Haram known to it had been defeated and the President Buhari-led administration had made the country safer than it met it.
While it is true that in 2015, when President Buhari “took power, Boko Haram terrorism was active in nearly half the number of states in the country. They controlled a territory the size of Belgium, with a flag and systems of administration and taxation of their own. Emirs and Chiefs had fled their domains along with hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens. Such is no more; they have been taken from them,” the potency of the decapitated snake that the sect has become cannot be denied.
The sect, as acknowledged by the Presidency, is still actively causing havoc and killing Nigerians in the remote and rural agrarian communities in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states.
Curiously, four days before the Presidency’s declaration of victory over Boko Haram, the insurgents had struck at a funeral in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, killing 65 persons, who had come to mourn and bury a dead person. Skirmishes between Boko Haram fighters and troops of the Nigerian Army have lately become almost a daily occurrence.
It’s been ten years since the Boko Haram insurgency began with the transformation of a relatively peaceful Maiduguri-based Islamic sect into one of the world’s most brutal transnational terrorist organisation. And almost four years ago, following his 2015 campaign promises to destroy the violent sect, President Buhari himself had told the world that the Boko Haram insurgents had been “technically defeated.” A couple of such declarations of victory over the terrorist group had been made in the past by the government, with the latest being last Tuesday’s.
Inspite of these multiple declarations of victory by the Federal Government, the evil group, though truly significantly degraded, has continued to kill innocent Nigerians and ambush troops in the north east of the country as well as in neighbouring Chad, Niger and Cameroon, where its fighters have often wreak havoc on the civilian population and military targets.
It is incontrovertible that the decade-old violence has left over 27,000 people dead and displaced no fewer than N2million. According to the Chief of Army Staff, Lt. General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, the insurgency has also cost Nigeria about $9billion.
It is pertinent to note that the sect, which split into two factions last year, is not relenting in its attacks and building of its arsenal. The security situation in north-east Nigeria is really not improving, and this should necessitate a comprehensive review of the military’s strategy. In the recent past, there had been complaints from under-equipped troops, inspite of the billions of dollars spent on defence procurements.
Last year’s raid by the insurgents on a military base in Metele near the border with Niger and Chad, left no fewer than a hundred soldiers dead and more than 150 others missing, though the army insisted that the death toll was only 23. Since then, there have been series of attacks by the insurgents on military bases and barracks in the conflict zone with the attendant loss of lives and military hardware recorded.
The Army itself said last year that it “noticed daring moves by the terrorists, increased use of drones against our defensive positions and infusion of foreign fighters in their ranks. These potent threats require us to continually review our operations.”
Sadly, these sustained attacks on military bases and barracks as well as the ambushes on Army personnel and convoys by the Boko Haram raise a lot of worries and questions about the adequacy and effectiveness of the strategy still being employed by the military.
A situation where Boko Haram fighters would travel undetected through tens of kilometres to attack a military base demands a change of the leadership of the armed forces, and not just the commanders at the lower rung of the military hierarchy.
There is no doubt that the 200,000-strong Nigerian military is currently facing daunting and seemingly overwhelming security crises across Nigeria, ranging from banditry in the north-west to brutal farmer-herder clashes in the middle belt to kidnappings for ransom and killings perpetrated by suspected Fulani herdsmen in the South West. Its overstretched troops are deployed in at least 30 out of the 36 states of the Federation. The current spate of insecurity has made Nigeria look more or less like a failed state, defence analysts have continued to argue.
Foreign and local media reports have indicated that no fewer than 19 attempts had been made since July last year by the Boko Haram to overrun military bases in the North east. The insurgents have also continued to attack villages and internally displaced persons camps around Maiduguri, the Borno State capital in the past months.
International defence analysts and security experts are of the opinion that the inability of the Nigerian military to completely defeat Boko Haram is due to not just a failed strategy, but also an unreformed security sector that has an entrenched pecuniary and political interest to ensure the low-level insurgency subsists.
But critics of the government are quick to point out that it has formed the habit of exaggerating the extent of its success against the Boko Haram insurgents. They further argue that each time the army claims to have wiped out Boko Haram, the insurgents have quietly rebuilt and re-emerged deadlier, against the government’s wrong assumption that it had incapacitated the sect to an extent that it could no longer mount “conventional attacks” against security forces or population centres.
Talking about defeating the “real Boko Haram,” those Nigerians trapped in the region where the sect has continued to wreak havoc and inflict violence are wont to take this claim of victory by the FG with nothing more than a pinch of salt.
It is a common knowledge that in 2016, Boko Haram split into two factions, with one loyal to its leader Abubakar Shekau, who had succeeded the late founder Mohammed Yusuf, and the other to Yusuf’s son, Abu Musab al-Barnawi. The Shekau faction, generally referred to as Boko Haram or Jama’at Ahl al-Sunnah li-l-Dawah wa-l-Jihad , is notorious for its sheer brutality — carrying out indiscriminate killing of civilians and soldiers and largely employing young female suicide bombers to wreak havoc among civilian population. The other faction, the al-Barnawi Islamic State West Africa Province, is backed by ISIS and aims at winning over Muslim civilians, but targeting the military.
According to defence analysts, the two factions of the Boko Haram, as at today, have an estimated 6,000 fighters.
Although it can be argued that both ISWAP and JAS now control less territory than in 2014, when Shekau declared an “Islamic state” in Nigeria, and that the factions also now have less capacity to launch attacks across a wide area than in 2012, when the violent sect regularly targeted cities in central and northern Nigeria, including the capital, Abuja, the situation can be deceptive, military strategists warn.
ISWAP’s control of territories around Lake Chad has become more consolidated and its attacks fiercer than ever before, just as JAS in Borno’s Sambisa Forest has continued to entrench itself.
Moreover, the Federal Government has yet to investigate the recent claims by the Wall Street Journal of the secret burial last November of some 1000 soldiers allegedly killed by the insurgents in Borno State. Since the military usually conducts its affairs in secret, there may be some elements of truth in this claim by the international news medium.
Defence analysts are, however, of the view that the insurgency’s ten-year evolution and geographical movements speak volumes about Boko Haram’s antecedents and the surprise it can spring the next minute. It is contended that some of its fighters have transformed to bandits and relocated to the North West to continue to ravage rural populations in the forests in Zamfara, Katsina and Kaduna, where they now engage in violent cattle rustling and dangerous kidnapping of citizens for ransom. It is clear that the factions of the sect still have the capacity to operate elsewhere under new and different nomenclatures.
There is, therefore, no doubt that the Boko Haram insurgents have, in one way or the other, continued to contribute their own quota to the worsening spate of insecurity across the country.
So, the question remains which of the factions of the evil and violent sect has actually been defeated by the Nigerian military, especially in the face of rising insecurity in different parts of the country?
The fact is that the two factions of the Boko Haram sect remain dangerous like the other half of a snake cut into two. Until the two factions are completely annihilated in all parts of the country, where they are currently holding sway, the government cannot declare victory yet.
Declaring victory now is premature and it amounts to merely living in denial of the real security situation in the country.
