THE BOKO HARAM DIALOGUE.

Bomb blast claimed by Boko Haram in Abuja, Nigeria - 14 Apr 2014: Rescuers transfer the body of a victim at the blast site (Rex Features)

In recent weeks, the Islamic militant group ‘Boko Haram’ has stepped up its activity in north-eastern Nigeria. In 2014 alone, more than 1,500 people have been killed in Boko Haram related violence. It’s been the bloodiest year yet. But how much do we really know about Boko Haram – whose name means ‘western education is sinful’? VoR's Tim Walklate hosts a discussion.

Joining Tim in our London studio:

Dr Titilola Banjoko from the Nigerian Leadership Initiative and Senior Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre

Matt Carr, author of ‘The Infernal Machine: A History of Terrorism’

Murray Last, professor Emeritus of Anthropology at UCL

Andrew Walker, writer and journalist who’s worked on Nigeria since 2006

And on Skype from Nigeria:

Saratu Abiola, Nigerian writer and editor at NigeriansTalk.org

Soundbites

AW: It’s very difficult to say with any degree of accuracy how many people are involved in this one group because the group itself is segmented into different cells and different parts of the organisation. There’ve been reports recently of how they’ve hired people to come and raid towns… So, it’s not one figure, the group has gone through many different incarnations, many different moments of its existence where at one stage they were almost an open group of Salafi reformers working in Maiduguri – this is before the 2009 uprising. They had their own mosque, they had their own farm, they had their own reputation as being somewhere where people could come and receive social benefits and work. After the government came down on them very-very hard, they scattered into different groups.”

“Despite having this kind of diffused structure, there is a central group of people who direct what they [Boko Haram] do, because if you look at the history of the attacks, you can see that they change and adapt very quickly, and move to a number of priorities, which I personally believe is directed by a central core – a number of people probably in the dozens. You can see that in their transmissions through their leader Abubakar Shekau, and through the targets which they go after. Their priorities shift.”

“I don’t really know what a simple terrorist group is… You can see elements within their actions of, I think, a mixture between a guerrilla insurgence and a very-very potent personality cult. They’re the followers of Mohammed Yusuf and his influence reaches down into the second generation of leaders. That time when they were driven out by the state really still looms large in their own folk ideology and we can’t really penetrate that. We don’t know what their internal mythmaking process is. We can’t really say how these people keep together as a group…”

TB: “My personal view and the view of a number of Nigerians and indeed non-Nigerians is that the environment in which it [Boko Haram] exists is enabling it to exist. There are a lot of fundamental issues that haven’t been addressed, and obviously Boko Haram expresses that in a way I don’t support. But the systemic and endemic corruption in Nigeria! You mentioned the issue of being provided with social services – all these things have gone and it has created a vacuum. That to me means that some people will resort to illegal means and people are taken advantage of…”

“The news about Nigeria, simply as the largest economy in Africa – well, I think that’s a joke! It’s the largest economy, but you have to ask what does that mean to the 70 percent of the population? Grinding poverty, and when I say poverty, I mean people will take up any amount of money, no matter how small it is, in terms of their survival. And that mirrors what happens actually in many sectors across the country in Nigeria, in that money tends to answer a lot of things, even in politics…”

“I think this enables ideologies you don’t support to strive. So, Boko Haram, whether it’s a movement, whether it’s a terrorist group, there is an ideology that they’ve exploited and some people are sympathetic to what they are fighting for, even though the means are wrong.”

“First of all, they believe that a number of political leaders from the north are corrupt, that they’ve held the north back. The fact that the structures that were in place, whether they believed in them or not, pre-2009, which kept them out of harm’s way, were dismantled. That left them all exposed – that means that there is a grievance against the State. I personally have my concerns about what the country is doing to a lot of people, but I will not express my concerns in a way that Boko Haram would… But somebody said, you die once, and if you die once, what are you going to do in the process of dying? That, to me, is an issue. You have to remember that Nigeria is a religious country where politics, religion, business, everything is interwoven. That makes it easier for people to be exploited under the banner of religion.”

“I’m from the south… but actually, my brother’s a Muslim, my dad was a Muslim… So, the divide is not really a religious divide, it’s a poverty divide. I know that people tend to say that there are predominantly Muslims in the north and Christians in the south. We mix in the south! A lot of Muslims live there. I have friends, who are Muslim; but poverty is the dividing line, and the poverty in the North is not acceptable at all!”

SA: “Throughout the country you will find whether it’s the east or the south-west, the north, the south, really desperate poverty. When you look at the numbers, and then we actually go to some of these places, the assertion is supported, and the Almajiri system is a good example of this, that poverty is almost institutionalised in the North in a way that it’s not down South.”

ML: “In all these histories of resistance dissent within a year or two, the military component in a reform movement usually takes charge. It did, even in the famous jihad of Shehu Uthman Dan Fodio, and it seems to be that you might be barking up the wrong tree when you focus on the ideology rather than the dynamics of who is running day to day operations. It’s not ideological to kidnap girls, blow up schools or any of those things…”

“The second point, I think, related, is that it’s clear that people have said that they’ve received contracts from Boko Haram to join the fight for a set time and at the end of their contract they go away, and the sums are quite large. Corpses of Boko Haram fighters, which are quite rare to find, are actually being found with a hundred thousand naira on them. Basically, for an awful lot of people in Boko Haram it’s a perfectly good job with a degree of immunity because the army has a habit of withdrawing before an attack takes places – which is very wise. But it does mean that you can get the whole picture wrong.”

“The third point, which is important, having been in the countryside in Nigeria twice this last six months there is a level of insecurity not related to Boko Haram at all in Southern Katsina, in Zamfara, in Taraba, in Benue, Nassarawa – this is a totally different scene, and in a sense, the real problem is how on earth would a government ever disarm people, remove the guns from it? Until they can do that, the insecurity will be there.”

“Just recently it [money] has become available. They have shown people that they’ve got enough cash to last them 50 years, god knows where it comes from, but it’s in US dollars… It was seen in US dollars. One assumes they can change the cash into naira… I mean, the whole world of the economics of Boko Haram that isn’t terrorism or anything like that – it’s a straight financial opportunity.”

MC: “When you look at the various forms of jihad that is going on internationally, not only the local manifestations, but also in the way al-Qaeda type franchises operate internationally, there’s always an overlap between religion, ideology, gangsterism, criminality – getting money in order to do things. A lot of people involved in that will rationalise various forms of gangsterism saying that anything is justified if you’re going to produce a kind of positive religious result. Reading the International Crisis Group report I was struck by the kind of similarities between the Boko Haram processes, at least in its early status, and other Islamist jihadist movements in other countries. For example, the idea that you mentioned before that Boko Haram might be stronger now could actually be wrong because quite often when these movements are in decline they’re at their most ferocious. If you look at the 1990s in Egypt, for example, the Jamaat al-Islamiyya jihad carried out some fearsome attacks at the precise point when they were actually losing politically. Also an interesting thing about Boko Haram is the way in which so many of these movements kind of fall into the empty spaces that the state has vacated. They are doing things that the state once should have done or perhaps, in another context, the left might have done. They’re the ones who are going into slum areas, organised communities… Providing some kind of explanation as to why people are in the plight that they’re in. It might be a perfectly legitimate protest against the state, against the oppression or repression by the security forces, and then it assumes this kind of moral religious explanation – the reason you’re in this plight is because you’ve departed from certain first principles in religion. You have that overlapping with what is basically seen as pure gangsterism in another context, except that this gangsterism is always devoted towards this kind of political, religious, ideological end.”

“There are some suggestions that it [Boko Haram] has [internationalised]. I think they should all be taken with a pinch of salt really. It’s in the interest of certain governments to portray any local movement as being some offshoot or consequences of al-Qaeda. It’s also in the interest of some of these movements to present themselves as being linked to al-Qaeda in some way – gives them a certain amount of prestige, it sometimes gives them a certain amount of money as well… So, there have been reports that this is the case that there are curios connections, for example, between Boko Haram and Al-Shabab in Somalia in terms of trading and money. It may well be going on, but I think we should be wary of a tendency to create in our imaginations arcs of insecurity in Africa in the way that has been done in the Middle East.”

AW: “It’s really difficult for someone who has lived their entire life within the intellectual boundaries of what we know as the nation state, the kind of comforting politics and the strength, to put oneself into the mind of someone, who lives in a village in this part of the world, which has absolutely no concept of the state… the way that we approach it, is by coming up with questions like – is this to do with al-Qaeda? When really it has nothing to do with what’s actually going on, on the ground, in terms of day by day movements of this group [Boko Haram], from one village to the next. They turn up, they take over control, they suck up whatever resources they can – money, food, women and the next thing that happens is that the army turn up, and they take out all the people who sheltered Boko Haram members – shoot them. Then they move on to the next village… It’s impossible to kind of link this meta-debate with what is al-Qaeda, what is terrorism. It’s completely fruitless…”

SA: “I’m definitely a lot more concerned about the spread [of Boko Haram] within Nigeria. I don’t know if anybody saw that video that came out after the Nyanya bus park blast, where Shekau, for 30minutes or so, was atoning and beating his chest. Once again, Shekau was talking about hitting an oil refinery. The nearest oil refinery in the North is Kaduna, and that’s not a place that, really, in the past year has seen Boko Haram activity. That’s something that jumped out at me. Also, Boko Haram torched a school in Bauchi in the past week and I think they also claimed responsibility for an attack in Taraba. The kind of stuff that we’ve been seeing in Bauchi and Taraba has been more the Fulani herdsmen, the skirmishes, their concerns about grazing land, nothing really in the past year that has anything to do with Boko Haram violence, at least nothing noticeable. That spread that we’re beginning to see is obvious…as well as the intent to spread. When you look at the scale of it, you can’t compare, for example, an attack on an army base or an attack on a police station or on a government building to torching a school… Yes, they’re both deadly, so you see the intention to want to hit more places.”

“I don’t know if this shows Boko Haram gaining strength necessarily because of the kind of targets they’re hitting, beyond their immediate areas of strength near Borno.”

TB: “I don’t think they’re gaining strength. I think it’s more the need for the Nigerian government to step up what they’re doing in a very credible manner, not discriminate in terms of security. We’re all talking about the International Crisis Report… I read it and I laughed when I saw a sentence there that Nigerians lack security, but the political leaders don’t. If the same level of security that our leaders enjoy would be put in very strategic places, which you know are very susceptible to attacks, there is a potential to reduce them. Not putting in a level of security that you know will run away when an attack is going to happen. That, to me, isn’t security. What we all do in Nigeria is buy our own security. That is not state security…”

“As well as having a military response, the Nigerian government has come up with what we call the ‘soft approach’ to terrorism… It’s about delivery, we can come up with plots, we can come up with statements but there needs to be immediate delivery on the ground that is visible and brings about credibility and confidence in people living in those places. If you ask some people whether they are confident the Nigerian government can handle this, the answer will be no.”

“There needs to be a consistent approach to people who are breaking the law across the country, at all levels. Otherwise, it’s two-faced in that you’re doing it for security, but there are political issues that are not being addressed, the economic issues that are not being addressed, and where people are wanted for crimes or corruption, nobody is prosecuted. The elites get away with what they want.”

“Most of these Boko Haram people have money. Where did the money come from? Surely somebody’s funding it or if they’re not funding it within the country, there is a noose through which that money’s getting to the country.”

ML: “A matter of great interest in Northern Nigeria is why big cities like Kano and Katsina are not nearly as caught up in Boko Haram. There may be a small group – Ansaru, but at a popular level. So there remains the question of why is it confined by and large to the North East, and with different cells. One of the explanations is, of course, that the North East has access to rather remote bits of the Niger, which has always been at the far end from Niger administration. Second, it’s on the borders of Chad, which has always had the most efficient army and terrorist rebel group – the Tubu. And, you have Cameroon, and a lot of the trouble is in Northern Adamawa. So, there is a strategic reason to why the north-east is actually a very good place for starting an insurgency and maintaining it. As for protection, remember that the president has an Israeli security force, and I can’t see too many Israelis being distributed happily around northern Nigeria.”

“There is a real problem within the army and that is not really analysed. But if you are around in Northern Nigeria, you can pick it up quite easily. I think in a sense, why Boko Haram is still thriving as it certainly is, is because there are real problems and the army is, of course, seen as an army of occupation. On the whole, people don’t support armies of occupation in the way they need to. The army has organised what is called a Civilian Joint Task Force, which are local youth militias who are just as happy to shoot people they don’t like. So you’re beginning to split communities in a way that will make it extremely hard for people like Dr Banjoko to restore the community sense in ten years time.”

“Boko Haram is really fascinated with death. They circulated a video showing how a Boko Haram man was trying to cut off the head of a police man and he had to twist and twist it, and it was the sort of video that makes you feel quite sick… One’s dealing with a much deeper problem than just poverty.”

AW: “The thing that is really putting Nigeria at risk, let’s be honest, a group like Boko Haram can continue to kill people in wholesale large numbers in the North East of Nigeria, and nothing would ever happen. But it’s everything which has accrued around it – these narratives of North versus South, Muslim versus Christian, one particular part of the political elite versus another… That is the real existential worry for Nigeria as a state, and that has added worry to the very real problems that Professor Last was talking about.”

voiceofrussia.