After Boko Haram, chaos looms

Before Baga, many towns such as Malumfatori, Abadam, Gamboru-Ngala, Monguno and Dikwa had been liberated by Chadian and Nigerian armies in recent weeks. There is still a long, blood-soaked way to go. Borno State’s second largest city of Bama is yet to be freed, together with Gwoza, the “headquarters” of mercurial Boko Haram leader Abubakar […]

Before Baga, many towns such as Malumfatori, Abadam, Gamboru-Ngala, Monguno and Dikwa had been liberated by Chadian and Nigerian armies in recent weeks.
There is still a long, blood-soaked way to go. Borno State’s second largest city of Bama is yet to be freed, together with Gwoza, the “headquarters” of mercurial Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau’s “Islamic Caliphate.” There are also two Boko Haram infested local governments in Yobe State as well as parts of Madagali Local Government of Adamawa State. If the military campaign continues at its current pace or is stepped up as promised, Boko Haram’s tenure as an effective fighting force could end well within the promised six weeks.
But there is an ugly side to the good news. I am not talking about what many cynics are saying, that the vigorous military effort is part of the strategy for President Jonathan’s hoped-for turn-around before the rescheduled polls. Even if it is, I personally welcome the effort. We have no higher national duty today than to save the lives and well being of millions of citizens. Whoever wishes to claim political credit for that, let him go and claim it. I am thinking instead of the story that broke last week from Kibiya village of Kano State where locals killed Professor Ahmed Mustapha Falaki, director of ABU’s famed Institute of Agricultural Research while armed policemen stood idly by.
The background to it was that suspected Boko Haram gunmen sacked the village’s police station. Unknown to the locals, the gunmen had earlier dispossessed Prof Falaki of his official Jeep. Together with his driver and brother he walked several kilometres back to the village to seek help. The villagers accused them of being the attackers and even though Falaki showed the policemen his ABU ID card he was stabbed to death. To compound matters, the Kano State Police Command announced that the locals had lynched Boko Haram gunmen.  
The episode at Kibiya village will be remembered for a long time as one of the saddest of the Boko Haram era but here is the warning: it could be the harbinger of things to come. The people who live in areas wracked for years by Boko Haram violence are as angry as anyone could be. This anger is often seen on television screens whenever a bomb went off in Azare, Gombe, Potiskum and other places. Youths would snatch the remains of suicide bombers, parade it across streets and burn it to ashes. In Gombe recently, a mob lynched a man accused of being a suicide bomber before the police could intervene.
Now, in the best of times Nigerians are not the best managers of public anger. I recall several episodes in recent decades when some citizens were lynched because someone shouted that they committed blasphemy. There was the episode in Gombe ten years ago when a mob lynched a teacher because her students alleged that she manhandled the Qur’an; it turned out that the teacher snatched papers that a student smuggled into an exam hall. Of course there was the notorious Gideon Akaluka case of 1995 in Kano.
Old timers will also recall that in the 1970s we had an epidemic of “stolen genitals.” Someone will suddenly shout in a crowded market that a man that just brushed his shoulders had stolen his genitals. Before you know it the other man is apprehended by a mob and lynched. Dozens of innocent people died in this way. Not only in the North; in Lagos during the 1970s and 1980s many people were seized by mobs and lynched because someone shouted that they were thieves.
Usually it is an urban phenomenon but the fact that locals in a peaceful rural setting in Kano State will stab a man without giving him the slightest chance to explain himself is awful in the extreme but it is a reflection of the depth of feeling against Boko Haram. What the sect did in the last five years is unspeakable.  Boko Haram sacked village after village and killed thousands of people. Sect members attacked markets and shot everyone in sight. They looted markets and torched whole towns; 90% of the large and prosperous town of Baga was razed to the ground, according to satellite pictures.
Boko Haram also seized people’s wives and raped their daughters. They would invade a house, pay a token to a parent as “dowry” and take away his young daughter. They carted off young boys and old women to their camps. They carried out wholesale slaughter of young boys that they accused of being Civilian JTF members. As attested to by a man in recently liberated Dikwa, Boko Haram also seized people’s cattle herds and kept them at a certain ranch. The Chibok girls were only the best known case. Add to all these the bombing of motor parks, churches, schools, markets, television viewing centres and football fields. Millions of people have fled from towns and villages all over the North East. Some have gone as far as Abuja; at least two million IDPs are in Maiduguri alone. Boko Haram has been a traumatic phenomenon without equal since the civil war.
Right now the army is driving the sect out of occupied towns and villages and the air force is razing down their camps with helicopter gunships.  What is likely to happen is that the sect members will flee to the mountains and forests. They could terrorise the countryside much like the leaderless samurai of 19th century Japan, the ronin. Many of them will however flee to the cities and try to hide among the population. They may either form active cells and try to carry out attacks or they may try to resume normal lives. Still other fleeing sect members may try to return to their family homes. That is where I anticipate the worst problem to occur.
In mid-2013 when state of emergency was declared, soldiers flooded Maiduguri, leading to the rise of Civilian PTF which forced Boko Haram out of the city. Youths went from street to street identifying sect members and lynching them while the army stood aside. In many cases parents and relatives handed in sect members that tried to hide in their family homes. All these could happen again. Soon afterwards, Civilian JTF members started going from Maiduguri to various Borno towns to help apprehend sect members. That explains Boko Haram’s hatred of Civilian JTF and the slaughter of its members in occupied towns but the table is about to turn again.
So, as military progress is made in the North East we should not do like the American army that invaded Iraq in 2003 and had no plans for a post Saddam Iraq. Authorities at all levels must make short and medium term plans for the return of refugees, locating lost family members, rehabilitation of burnt homes and alleviating economic losses. Borno State Government has been feeding these biblical-scale multitudes and may have to do so for some time to come. This country’s Islamic leaders also need a long term plan to reign in radical clerics within constitutional limits. And it is perhaps time to end almajirci once and for all.  
One of the most urgent tasks I think is that the people must be taught in a real way not to take the law into their hands. Not many people will have sympathy if real sect members who committed atrocities against fellow human beings are to suffer tragic fates. But then, if local communities are allowed to engage in wholesale de-Boko Haramisation campaigns on their own, witch-hunts and the killing of innocents are inevitable.
And so, one big lesson to learn from the very sad death of Professor Ahmed Falaki is to begin right now to teach communities all over the North, especially in the states worst afflicted by Boko Haram, how to behave in the post-Boko Haram era lest we end up doing more damage than Boko Haram did.