Jonathan, Boko Haram And The War Within
by Dramaking
— March 8, 2014
Regardless of what President Goodluck Jonathan’s government would have us believe, we are losing the war against Boko Haram. We’re losing it to the original Boko Haram and to its various franchises, including those in Jonathan’s government.
Days after the chief of defence staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, took over in January, he vowed to end the Boko Haram onslaught by April. He had barely finished speaking when gunmen struck, killing 74 people in separate attacks in Borno and Adamawa states. Badeh ate the humble pie and promptly disavowed setting any deadline to end the killings.
In the last two weeks, gunmen presumed to be Boko Haram have killed over 200 people, including children and teenagers, with over 30 killed on Tuesday.
It’s no use asking what President Jonathan is doing about it. He is doing well at doing nothing. OK, he has fired a national security adviser, created a special military unit to tackle the insurgency and renewed the state of emergency in three north-east states, which was first declared in May 2012. He also purged the military high command early this year after intra-service infighting over strategy opened another warfront.
Boko Haram predates Jonathan, but in his four years of being in charge the insurgency has, on the whole, escalated. It’s true that after the April 2012 attack on ThisDay, Abuja has been relatively peaceful. But it’s troubling that the government has failed to replicate that success outside the capital, creating the impression that as long as its backyard is secure the rest of the country may burn.
Jonathan has blamed everyone for the escalating violence in the north-east and his aides have even accused influential northern politicians of stoking the fires because they don’t like the president.
It’s nonsense to suggest that these politicians, whoever they are, have to kill their brothers, sisters and families and virtually uproot themselves from their homesteads, to prove that they hate Jonathan. However you slice it, the truth is that the Boko Haram outside and the ones inside Jonathan’s government have exploited the president’s unwillingness and/or his failure of leadership, to turn what started as a skirmish into a raging warfare.
Let’s start from the Boko Haram outside. Everything suggests that the group has transformed significantly from the small angry mob of machete wielding youths assembled by Mohammed Yusuf in 2002. Yusuf’s extra-judicial killing in 2009 radicalised the group under Abubakar Shekau. The most dramatic turning point, however, was the ousting of Moummar Gaddafi. His downfall left the entire Sahel region awash with deadly arms, and vermin from his shattered regime looking for new hosts.
They seem to have found a new haven in Mali, Chad and Cameroon, creating what is clearly the most dangerous Boko Haram franchise around Nigeria’s border towns in the north-east. How could the president see the danger coming when it took him years after the conflict started to pay even a flying visit to Borno State?
Why is the government behaving as if securing our borders is rocket science? One of the toughest border battles that the US has had to fight is on its border with Mexico, which stretches 3,168,798km. When the US found that fencing off over one-third of this border area was not enough to contain the massive drug and immigration problems, it deployed patrols to the remotest parts with 16,875 vehicles, 269 aircraft, 300 watercraft and 300 camera towers. Intelligence or soft power is at the heart of modern conflict management.
Of course this does not come cheap, but widespread corruption makes it even more expensive.
Nigeria’s total length of land borders is 4,047km. This covers its four neighbours of Cameroon (1,690km) in the east, Niger (1,497km) in the north, Benin (773km) in the west, and Chad (87km) in the north-east.
If the estimated cost for doing the whole US-Mexico border of about 3,169Km is $22.4billion, then what Nigeria really needs to fence the total length of her land borders of 4,047 is about $28.61billion. Surely that cannot be too much for a country where $20billion is lost in a minister’s headgear. Or for a government that allegedly spends N2billion daily on security.
Ironically, the Boko Haram within – I mean those inside Jonathan’s government – may be doing just as much damage as those without. Apart from the Directorate of State Services, I honestly don’t know what the Directorate of Military Intelligence and the National Intelligence Agency are doing.
How can the government claim to be spending billions and billions of naira on security while children and women are being murdered everyday? How can the government slash police salary budget by N13billion at a time of grave national crisis? There’s not a single police post standing in Borno and each major Boko Haram strike in recent times has happened after the removal of a military security post. Who is responsible?
I’m tired of hearing that the existing intelligence framework did not take account of the current scale of insurgency, when there’s nothing on ground that can stop a boy’s scout attack. If the president keeps behaving as if the north-east is another country, it won’t be long before even Abuja loses its temporary peace.
At the height of the war on Al-Queda, Barack Obama took direct charge and personally supervised the operation that led to the killing of Bin Laden. That is leadership. We cannot have a president that has to be forced to visit conflict zones inside his own country only for him to get mad when he is told the insurgents have superior firepower.
As long as he is the president of the 36 states of this country, Jonathan must do what needs to be done to recover and secure every inch of this country. I’m waiting to see that happen.
And Bolaji Abdullahi Is Fired…
I’m sure he saw it coming. After Bolaji Abdullahi’s former boss, Bukola Saraki, fell out with President Goodluck Jonathan and the Peoples Democratic Party, most people knew it was only a matter of time before the axe falls on the former sports minister. Not a big deal, really. After a rickety start at the 2012 London Olympics, Nigeria won the Nations Cup, the FIFA U17 championship and qualified for the World Cup – all on Abdullahi’s watch. That should make him truly proud.
