Day we wept while on dialogue assignment – Chairman, Presidential committee
What would say were the greatest achievements of the Presidential committee on Dialogue which you chaired?We were able to record quite a number of achievements. Our greatest achievements are one, we were able to establish links with the insurgents, both the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad (Boko Haram) and the Ansaru sects. We’ve been able […]
What would say were the greatest achievements of the Presidential committee on Dialogue which you chaired?
We were able to record quite a number of achievements. Our greatest achievements are one, we were able to establish links with the insurgents, both the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad (Boko Haram) and the Ansaru sects. We’ve been able to change their thinking and position about dialogue. We’ve been able to make them realise that despite whatever differences they may have with government, arising from whatever situation or circumstance, that dialogue is inevitable, especially regarding their position as muslims.
Two, we’ve been able to supply them strong verses from the Holy Quran, not only the views expressed by and contained in the Hadith and sunnah of the Holy Prophet Muhammed (saws), but also the views of great Islamic scholars. And three, that we were able to get them to agree to talk to us at all is a great achievement. Establishing links with them is one thing, but to be able to get them to come out and talk with us is, perhaps, the committee’s greatest achievement.
Beyond that, we’ve been able to build confidence. When we started, members of the sects were skeptical, suspicious actually, of the intentions of government and those of the committee. For us to make them overcome those suspicions and win their confidence was no mean feat. Despite the fact that they had tremendous respect for individual members of the committee, they were still suspicious of them coming together as a committee constituted by government. So for us, to be able to win their confidence was a rare achievement.
The fact that we were able to build that confidence to a position of trust, made them come out from wherever they are, talk to us and they went back without let or hindrance was one of the ultimate things we were able to do. There were so many other things the committee had been able to do that if I start listing them out here, some would say the committee’s chairman is blowing his trumpet. But I’d rather members of the public blew that trumpet for us when they start realising what we’ve been able to do.
Considering how far you succeeded in contacting and discussing with the insurgents’ leaders, one would think the two parties would agree to a ceasefire. Why didn’t that happen?
It is important Nigerians appreciate the fact that ceasefires do not happen overnight. Ceasefire, usually, is the concomitant result of series of serious and intense, high-yielding discussions among various parties involved in the matter in question. For us in the committee, the process was to first establish links with the insurgents. After establishing links, you reach out to them and then build confidence and trust. After building that trust, you will then open up series of discussions with their key leaders. It is the result of these discussions that will take you to where you can be talking of a ceasefire.
The fact you are having a ceasefire means terms have been agreed upon and you are having a ceasefire as one of the terms. We’d do this at our perspective and they would also be expected to do that at their own perspective, which would necessarily involve not only the issue of ceasefire but also the surrender of arms. This would also lead to the issue of deradicalisation and necessarily the issue of reintegration of the insurgents into the society.
We are now at a point where we’ve taken the discussion to the highest level. Unfortunately, we’ve not been to reach the stage where we can say, “what are you terms?” and “these are our terms”. And we’ll be asking them, “who are the groups, who are the persons, who are the individuals that will be representing you?” While government would easily say, “these are our representatives”, it is important Nigerians appreciate it’s the insurgents themselves who must say, “these are who our representatives are.”
The people we’ve been discussing with, though some of them are key leaders of the insurgents, may not necessarily be, at the end of the day, be those the groups would necessarily choose as their representatives for the purpose of entering into final negotiations with government that could lead to a ceasefire, lead to deradicalisation, lead to disarmament and lead to reintegration. But we are gradually but surely getting to that point.
Why didn’t your committee seek an extension from the President so you could get to that high point?
We have about six major issues that are contained in our terms of reference. Dialogue is just one of them. We have been able to conclude our assignment in respect of the terms and we’ve made comprehensive recommendations to the federal government, recommendations we believe government is studying.
On dialogue, we’ve been able to take it to a level where we believe it doesn’t necessarily have to be this committee that will conclude it. Nigerians need to understand that there are a lot of elements to final dialogue, as far as discussions with the insurgents are concerned.
One, there is the issue of disarmament. This is something that is very technical. It may not necessarily be this committee that will handle it, even if we’re granted extension, because nobody will expect that it is members of the Dialogue committee that will be collecting arms and ammunitions from the insurgents. This area requires a lot of professionalism, so it is government that will decide which of the security agencies – military, police or any of the other security agencies – that will take the front seat on disarmament.
There is also the issue of whether or not reintegration should come in at a point in time for everybody. We should not forget we have detainees some of whom are facing trial. Here, government would need to bring in the facilities of the Ministry of Justice and use the expertise of the Attorney-General of the Federation.
So there will necessarily be a lot of organisations that will be involved, beyond the committee. As much as we would want to do it, and as much as Nigerians would be expecting a lot from the committee, the situation at hand is not one that the committee alone can drive to a conclusion. We’ve got to a point where other stakeholders and agencies who are important to an effective resolution of the crisis are brought on board.
Regarding the issue of extension, we’ve been granted extension twice. The first time, Mr. President granted us an extension for two months. And when we finished, in the course of writing our report, he again granted us extension for two weeks.
We’ve got to a point where discussions have been heightened. Now, this committee, or any other committee may be set up, as we recommended, as a standing committee to advance on the dialogue issue where we stopped. We recommended that some members of the committee who are involved directly in the process of discussion with the insurgents should also be incorporated into the standing committee.
Mr President, when we were submitting our report, had accepted to do that. Till now, the issue of dialogue has not been stopped. It is on-going pending the time the standing committee will be constituted by Mr. President. We are doing this to ensure there is no vacuum in dialogue, because if we allow a gap to set in, there is every possibility that the gains that have been made by this committee may be frittered away. The president is so much concerned that this momentum is sustained. And this is why even before the constitution of the standing committee, some of us that have been involved directly in dialogue with the insurgents are still discussing with them to sustain the momentum.
Were you able to ascertain that the representatives of the insurgents you had dialogue with were their genuine leaders?
Yes, we were able to ascertain the authenticity of the claims of their representatives we discussed with, and their genuineness. We should note that on the committee were members from the military and security agencies. We had members from the SSS, from the Office of the National Security Adviser, from the Defence Headquarters, from virtually every segment of the society.
What we usually did from the beginning was that as soon as leaks were developed and we commenced discussions, we would do a security check with the security agencies on them, requesting, “we are having a dialogue with so, so, so and so persons, we want you to run a check on them. Are they genuine members?” This was because we knew there had been a lot of people masquerading as members of the sects.
We should not forget we suffer from a terrible attitude here. Some people believe the easiest way, the best opportunity for them to make fortune is from other people’s misfortune. So we saw people who came out purely for the purpose of making a fortune out of the crisis, thinking the committee had a lot of money in its coffers. So they came out to say, “hey, we can lead you to members of the insurgents.” Some even came out to pretend to us that they are actually members of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad.
But in the course of having discussions with them, in addition to the checks run on them, we discovered they were not genuine members. After confronting them with the facts, they would them confess and ask for forgiveness. Because we are not a body that was out for sensationalism and to create controversies, we allowed them to go in peace. We could have handed them over to the security agencies and possibly pressed charges, but that would have caused a lot of distractions. We didn’t want anything that would cause us any diversion from the core assignment Mr President directed us to do, so we just allowed them to go noiselessly. So I can confirm to you that, indeed, we have been having dialogue with genuine members of the insurgents.
How do you reconcile what some have described as a conflict of purpose, that while your committee was sitting, seeking peace with the insurgents, the military was attacking and killing them? Wasn’t the peace purpose dead on arrival?
I don’t see any contradiction here. It’s important that we appreciate where we were before Mr President decided to set up the Dialogue committee. It got to a point that some people thought it was either the president did not have the political will to contain the insurgency or he lacked the capacity to do so. But unknown to them, no matter the extent of how matters have deteriorated, it’s painful to the president to direct the military to take up arms against fellow Nigerians. That is one of the most painful decisions that any good leader would have to make. But then it got to a stage that it had to be done.
Even when you are in a war situation – and this is not a war, it is just an insurgency – after winning the war you will still have to win the battle. You will still need to win the hearts and minds of the people. And as I said earlier, there are the issues of reintegration, re-assimilation, deradicalisation and forgiveness for everybody to come back together and continue living as before.
The president then asked himself why must he have to wait for the conflict to be resolved before he did that. He then decided he would approach the issue from a twin perspective, the carrot-and-stick approach. So he set up the committee on Dialogue, providing an opportunity for those who were willing to dialogue. For those who think they would never dialogue and were bent on fighting, then they would have to be engaged by the armed forces. And that was what had happened.
When the state of emergency was proclaimed soon after the Dialogue committee was inaugurated, a lot of people thought it was a deliberate act to scuttle the success of the committee and prevent it from gaining a lot of mileage. For one, people should know that the way Mr. President handled the issue of the proclamation of the state of emergency constitutionally has earned him a lot of respect. We saw how, in the yesteryear, when there were proclamations for state of emergency, the democratic structures in some states were sacked, unconstitutionally. But Mr President has done it exclusively and absolutely within the parameters of the Constitution.
Nigerians’ confidence can now be rekindled that, indeed, government has the capacity to protect the lives and properties of all law-abiding Nigerians wherever they may be. Now, the state of emergency has afforded the Nigerian military and other armed forces and the police that are engaged in operational activities under the Joint Task Force command to be able to carry out some extra activities which they may not do constitutionally without incurring some litigation from the citizens.
An example I’ll give is the suspension of the GSM services. It’s something that could warrant a court action. But because it was done within the constitutional ambit of the state of emergency, not only are the government and JTF immune from prosecution, the telecommunication companies too are. The suspension of the GSM services has been able to give the military engaged in the operation a great leverage to enable them contain the activities of the insurgents.
Two, the manner the armed forces are operating under the state of emergency within the terms of engagement has also rekindled a new sense of patriotism and nationalism in the mind of Nigerians who live within those areas. It has been able to make the people realise that the responsibility of security is not the business of security agencies alone. We now see Nigerians who initially were aloof, who were indifferent, who were even assisting the insurgents, coming out to say they have a stake in this operation and must take their destiny in their own hands.
And what has been the consequence of this? Nigerians are now coming out, not only to volunteer useful, adequate and timely information to members of the armed forces and other security agencies on insurgents, but even going beyond that to identify them, arrest them and hand them over to the security and law enforcement agencies. That was how the civilian JTF emerged in Borno State.
We’ve seen in Adamawa State, as a result of this, how sarkin samari (youth leaders) are being appointed in virtually all the emirates, all the districts, all the communities, all the villages. Though the approaches may differ, you’ll see a sarki samari appointed in an area and he’ll galvanise the other youths to be working in tandem with the security agencies to ensure that their communities are more secure.
We’ve also seen the effect of this in Yobe State in the enhanced activities of the vigilante groups. We’ve seen also how the activities of the security agencies during the state of emergency have enabled some of the insurgents to realise that there was no two ways about peace but for them to come out voluntarily to talk with the Dialogue committee with a view to arriving at a peaceful resolution of this crisis. So to us in the committee, the proclamation of the state of emergency, apart from the colossal benefits it has brought to Nigeria as a nation, has assisted greatly the workings of the committee.
Why was it impossible for the committee to attract Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad to its talks?
It wasn’t really impossible or we refused to reach out to him. It is important to understand the inner workings of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad. Initially, we had a great challenge in convincing them about the sincerity of government and the committee about dialogue. This was coming from the background of the anger of some of them that they had once been asked to come out for dialogue, they sent representatives but those representatives were arrested and detained. So there was this initial skepticism.
Even when we were able to convince them into agreeing that we meant well, we were sincere, that we were not being used to set a trap for them, they had to first send the lower ranking members of the insurgency as a water-testing mechanism. Of course, they were their real members, but they were not key members. They would talk to us, then go back. When they had come and gone back freely without any hindrance, at the next meeting, the sect would then deploy higher-ranking members.
That was how they were doing it; a very good strategy, I must commend them. It then rose to a level where we began talking to their key members.
What were the demands of the key members you spoke with?
We avoided the issue of demands at this level, because we believed demand was something that should be discussed between both sides in an agreement that would lead to ceasefire. To us, it wasn’t one or two or three people of the sect that would come randomly and speak with us that would be able to tell us what their demands are. We are at the point that we believe that soon they would raise representations and formally say, “these are our representatives for the dialogue.” It is at that level that the issue of demands would be raised.
A lot of complaints have been raised here and there, a lot of them have been addressed by the committee and most have been addressed by government using the instrumentality of the committee. There was the issue of the release of women and children. That was one of their major demands, which has been addressed. There was also the issue of the release of detained people who are not members of the sect. That also has been addressed.
There are a lot of issues that, even before they talked to us, we already knew were issues agitating their minds. We took them up and trashed them out, so by the time we sat down and began to discuss with them, it was only serious and fundamental issues that we discussed and that would lead to the final resolution of the crisis.
How do you think the issue of compensation for victims of the insurgency, which you recommended to the president but he rejected, would affect the peace process?
In the discussions we had with members of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad and the Ansaru, nobody raised the issue of compensation. It is important for Nigerians to appreciate the kind of people that we are dealing with. It is also important to differentiate between what we had in the North from the militancy in the Niger Delta. There is often the confusion of placing them on the same level. In doing so, we will confuse and compound the whole problem.
In the Niger Delta, the agitation was purely economic. These are people complaining that their environment is being degraded as a result of activities of oil companies. They don’t have schools, they don’t have functional infrastructure, they don’t have some basic amenities despite the fact that they are the hen that is laying the golden egg.
So what they had been doing was attack government’s economic interest. They were vandalising oil pipelines, stealing oil and selling; and they were kidnapping foreign oil workers to collect ransom. What they were doing had, whether directly or indirectly, the support and approval of members of their communities. Their kinsmen and women felt the militants were fighting on their behalf and in their interest.
Conversely, in the North, we have insurgents who are hinging their own agitation on ideology; ideology based first on rejecting western education and anything that comes with it, particularly the aspect of it they consider bad. There is nothing economic about their agitation. These are people that are ready to die and go to heaven, as they strongly believe, for a better life there, unlike the Niger Delta militants who are not ready to die but want to have their own better life in the world here and enjoy it to the fullest.
The insurgents are saying “everything in life here is temporary, we want to die and go to enjoy in heaven.” So these are not the type of people you offer money, because they don’t want money. In fact, if you discuss the issue of money with them, you would be insulting their sensibilities. In all the discussions we’ve had with them, the issue of them asking for compensation never arose.
The issue here is compensation for victims of the insurgents’ attacks…
In one of the terms of reference before the committee, the president said we should advise him and come up with a framework that would enable government give support to victims of the insurgency. Such victims are people who had had their properties destroyed, people who in the course of this unnecessary attacks had had members of their family either killed or seriously injured. The whole idea is to assist the victims as much as practicable to return to living their lives in the normal manner they were doing it before the injuries or losses occurred.
When people speak about compensation, it’s not possible for government to offer to compensate everybody. Take Maiduguri, for instance, virtually every family there is a victim. Either the entire members of a family had been killed or injured, or properties had been lost or destroyed. How do you compensate them? A lot of people can’t seem to appreciate the fact that compensation is a legal term, with a lot of things underlining it.
First, compensation has to be adequate. So if you decide to compensate for a life that had been lost, you go to the issue of assessment. What was the age of the unfortunate deceased? What were his qualities? Was he well-trained? If yes, to what level? Was he employed? What was his grade? These are the factors you have to take into account in determining the cost you give to that life.
When you begin to do that, you discover that on the loss of human lives alone, the amount that might be computed as compensation at the end of the day could be something that might be beyond the capacity of government to handle. And don’t forget that it’s not only members of the society that are the victims. Government itself is also a victim, because there are a lot of police stations, schools, hospitals and prisons that have been destroyed. There are the properties to give cost to.
This is why to be on the safe side, we said we should look at giving a form of assistance that would help the victims as much as practicable to continue living normal lives. I remember an incident when the committee visited victims of the Suleija bomb blast. We saw a victim who lost his wife, he himself was seriously injured and one of his sons had lost an eye.
So appreciative that we visited him, what he said was that for him, healing had started there and then, for a presidential committee to have visited him and tell him that, “look, government is aware of your situation, it has not forgotten you and it will come up with a framework that will assist you to continue to live your life as much as practicable.”
He broke down in tears and began crying. When he began crying, members of the committee too burst into tears. It was quite an emotional moment; we were touched. He said he wasn’t bothered about whatever government would be giving him. He added that the fact we were able to visit and sympathise with them was more than enough.
So it’s not just about money. This was why the committee ensured that wherever we went, the critical groups we met and discussed directly with were the victims, and the discussions we had with them were always rewarding. The meetings often ended in both parties weeping; the victims, or families of the victims weeping on one side and the committee members also weeping on the other side.
The visits have made the victims to realise that the fact government has been keeping quiet does not mean government is quiet on their matters. We know what some governments – whether state, federal or local government – have been doing. In some states that we visited, we saw some interventions by the state government; in some, we saw interventions by the federal government.
Let us make no mistake about it, the issue of giving support to victims will be colossal and will require the support of virtually every member of the society, beyond the federal and state governments. It requires the support of even well-spirited individuals and organisations. We can assist the victims according to their needs so at the end of the day we will be able to support them to once again live normal lives as much as practicable.
It would be difficult to restore them to status quo ante; if somebody has lost a hand, how do you restore him to status quo ante? It is not possible. Even the psychological trauma alone that such a victim has gone through will be difficult to repair. And if you want to pay him for such psychological trauma, how much can you pay to repair such trauma? It is something that is beyond the capacity of anybody.
That is why when anybody starts speaking, and so ignorantly so, about no compensation for victims of the insurgency attacks, we caution them. We say, of course, we’ll support them. Support can come in any shape and form and will be continuous. But when you start speaking about compensation, then you are veering into other areas that are much more technical than how people understand them to be.
What did your committee recommend as support to government on cases of people unfortunate to have been arrested and traumatised by security agents on suspicion that they were members of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad?
I will not agree with you that the mere fact that a person has beard and is walking on the street, he would be arrested just like that by security agents and taken into detention. But it is a fact that there could be a lot of innocent, unlucky people who would happen to be at a place of crisis – may be a bomb blast – at a particular time and the first thing security agents would do would be to effect arrest and those people may be arrested.
We have seen people who have fallen into this kind of category. First, there were people like this that the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) in the Federal Ministry of Justice advised should be released. And we ensured that they were released.
The second category were those whose cases have not even been investigated. The investigation is in progress. It is when the investigators complete their work that the files will be sent to the Federal Ministry of Justice for the DPP’s advice. There is the need to advise the government on such cases.
But even before we finished our assignment, there was the need for segregation to be done. The federal government promptly set up a committee under the chairmanship of Abubakar Gumi to visit detention centres, identify those who were not members of the insurgency and submit a report to government. That report has been submitted to government and I am sure government is working on it.
It should be understood that members of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad or Ansaru are never shy of admitting they are members of the sect. When you meet them, you will know immediately because they will tell you, “yes, we are members.” And they have no regret about it. But when you see a person who is fidgety, then he is not a member. Those who are members will also say honestly that such and such people who are truly not members are not members, that such people were just unfortunate to have been arrested. That’s why it has not been difficult to separate those who are not members from those who are members. So a lot of those who fell into those categories who were not members of the sect have been released.
Would you say it’s time we had a Ministry of Religious Affairs, headed and staffed by experts on the issue, who could proactively handle the sensitive affairs that religious matters are before they get out of hand?
It would not be out of place if that is done. I am aware that some states already have portfolios for Religious or Inter-religious Affairs. Where ministries have not been created, there are Special Advisers advising the governors on religious matters.
It is important to realise that the beginning of solving this problem will also have to do with our academic curricula. When most of us were in primary through secondary schools, it was compulsory to read either Islamic Religious Knowledge (IRK) or Christian Religious Studies (CRS). You had no option. If you were a Muslim, you must read IRS; if you were a Christian, you must read CRS. But you were given a choice. A Muslim could choose to read CRS and vice versa. You must read one. I learnt now it’s no longer compulsory. A lot of things you were not able to learn as young ones at home then, you learnt in the school, and so you began to understand a lot about either religions right from school and you grew up with that understanding.
You will discover that a lot of people recruited into these movements are people that are not well-educated. It’s said that an idle mind is the devil’s workshop. The situation has even gone worse now than that of an idle mind; it’s a vacant mind. Somebody that does not have religious knowledge and does not have western education has a vacant mind. So when they are being recruited, it’s like having a brand new computer that has not been formatted.
When you now put highly radicalised stuff into their brain, you are formatting the brain. That kind of knowledge, as it were, that is now being stuffed into their brain is what they will use to get any other information that comes their way. You can imagine, therefore, how lopsided their thinking or reasoning will be.
It is important that we begin to educate our young ones right from their tender age on religious teaching. You discover that more and more, parents no longer have time to undertake the important responsibility of training their children. Our society is not what it used to be. Then, even if you had no time for your children, members of the society would be there for you. They would be there for your children. Any adult seeing any child misbehaving or doing any untoward act would reprimand that child.
But nobody does that now. Chances are that if you see anybody flogging your child, you would go to the police station or head to court straight. Increasingly, because of our struggle to make ends meet, we usually tend to forget our primary responsibility towards our children. We are not there for them, as the society is not there for them. We highly abandon them. Apart from abandoning them, they are not well-tutored, they are not well-educated. Because they are not well-tutored and not well-educated, they become susceptible to all kinds of trappings.
As soon as they get trapped by such people who do not wish Nigeria well, people who are extremists, it becomes easy to pump these negative acts of extremism into them. That is the beginning of losing our children to such groups. So it is important that as parents and members of the society, we should be there for our children and wards. We should also be there for the children and wards of other people so that they can extend the same kind of positive treatment to us. We are now in a situation where it has become necessary to take more than a passing interest in moral teaching.
Talking of illiteracy and the sects, we understand there are well-lettered professionals among their members. So where does education become irrelevant here?
Yes, there are. We met a young man among their members who made first-class in electrical engineering and has a Master’s and was on his way to the group’s training camp in Mauritania. He was arrested in Niger Republic by the Nigerien security agents. Yes, a lot of them are well-lettered and are intelligent. When you discuss with them, you realise this. There are motivators among them, as there are orators. They are a phenomenal kind of people. Many of them are well-educated, even in Western education.
So what could have motivated such well-educated minds to join such end-time kind of movements?
There are a lot of factors. First, you need to understand the background of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad group even before they broke up to produce Ansaru. These are people that are Salafist. Salafi is a movement started by Ibn Taymiyyah and a lot of other great Islamic scholars. What they seek to achieve is to refine Islam. Remove innovations, remove all untoward things and return to the strict practice of Islam as it were during the time of the Prophet Muhammed (saws).
If you read a pamphlet written by the late Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad leader, Muhammed Yussuf, titled, “This is our dogma”, you will find substantially that what is contained there is something that is within acceptable Islamic principles and injunctions. But more often than not, in their course of practising and practicalising it, they gradually get to a point of departure where they steadily veer off-course.
Often, they would take Quranic verses out of context. And when you take Quranic verses out of context, chances are you miss the flavour and the lessons those verses are trying to teach. You also miss the message behind those verses.
During the committee’s sitting, those who are well-versed in Islamic knowledge among us would take them up and begin to discuss with them. We had to make them realise that they were taking those verses out of context and point out to them the right context that they should use them. In the course of these serious dialectical discussions between them and members of the committee, we saw them conceding to superior reasons and superior arguments and then admitting they were wrong. A lot of them accepted that they were misguided.
It would take some time before we can fully deradicalise them. That is why I was saying earlier that with the issue of ceasefire would come a lot of other issues, like deradicalisation. A lot of them have been radicalised and would need to be deradicalised before they can be successfully integrated into the society and become useful citizens to the society. Even if you just reintegrate them into the society with that kind of radicalisation in them, you will be going back to square one.
Between ceasefire and their reintegration into the society, their deradicalisation must be done. We need to further and decisively make them realise that some of the issues that they were tenaciously holding on to were issues taken out of context. After all that and they are reintegrated, they will become useful to the society and be productive to themselves.
Under what atmosphere would you de-radicalise them? If they are in not detention and are caged, how would it be possible to approach and de-radicalise them?
If we get to that point, and we hope we get to that point soon, even if a member says that he doesn’t want Western education, and all he wants is just to learn a trade, certainly nobody will say learning carpentry, vulcanizing or tailoring, for instance, is bad. Vocational training could be arranged for them.
Side by side with that skill acquisition is deradicalisation. They are being taught a trade and are at once being deradicalised. Deradicalisation will involve a lot of interfacing between them and Islamic clerics that will be recruited for that purpose.
Until your committee was set up, to what extent did you and the committee members understand the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad group?
I will agree that there has been a lot of misunderstanding of the sect. It is not a lot of people who have the opportunity of reading the book written by Muhammed Yussuf. Again, a lot of people were afraid to come near them to understand what they stand for.
There is the mistake even among highly-educated Nigerians that the group’s agitation is on the same pedestal with Niger Delta militancy. In doing so, we tend to confuse the whole issue.
Dialogue is the answer to fully understand the group, because when two bodies have talks, one will understand the position of the other and vice versa. In the course of understanding each other, we know the areas of agreement and the areas of disagreement. It is when we know why we agree and disagree that we agree to disagree and eventually disagree to agree in the final analysis. We know this interfacing is important, just as members of the Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad must also agree that interfacing is necessary.
We observed you have not used the word “empowerment”. In the course of the committee’s assignment, didn’t the insurgents’ representatives complain of neglect by the country’s leadership, or poverty as a reason for their agitation and demanded empowerment?
None made such a complaint. Not one.
And none confessed they were being used by politicians, as is alleged in some quarters?
None. There are a lot of dimensions to it. There are real members of the sect who are doing it purely on the basis of the ideology. They may have been misguided on it, but it is mainly on ideology.
But in the course of this interaction with them, we learnt there may have been other people who have developed their own “insurgency”. There are armed robbers who will wear their garb and go to rob, purporting to be insurgents. Those ones are not doing it for an ideological purpose, they are doing it purely for economic reasons.
The chances are there also that there may be political thugs who are also in it for a political purpose. It is when we finally get to the end of all this and the sect’s leaders direct their members to surrender their arms, having settled their differences with government, that we’ll know the impostors. Anybody that then continues with the “insurgency” will be picked up by security agencies and treated like criminals.
Are we expecting government to establish a special court to try cases against the insurgents, thousands of whom are in detention, in order to speed up and conclude their trials?
Part of what we were asked to work on was the issue of amnesty. At the extreme level, you go into a war and you conquer your opponents. On the other hand, you have a situation where you sit down and you resolve things amicably.
What we hope to achieve at the end of the day is that through the instrumentality of the work we have done, there will be a peaceful resolution of this matter. It is when they choose their own representatives and they sit with government’s representatives and both parties jaw-jaw on issues that a final settlement of the crisis will arise and then other things will follow.
I am not overruling the grant of amnesty in deserving cases. But on whether or not there will be prosecution at the end of the day is a question that will have to be determined by what will come out from the final agreement between the insurgents and government.
The outcome will also depend on what terms will be negotiated. But I know the issue of amnesty will definitely come up in the final agreement. What view government will have on it will be better determined when the time comes for that.
How optimistic are you on an early and final solution to this insurgency crisis, given the fact that the insurgents have not desisted in their attacks?
I am very optimistic the crisis will soon end, given the volume of job we have done on dialogue and also given the amount of concessions that the president has made. I told you a lot of their key members were arrested but they were released in the course of the dialogue. Many Nigerians may not know the lot of work that has been done in resolving the crisis, but these are moves that have helped in building confidence to a level of trust. So I believe that very soon, we will able to arrive at a final, effective conclusion of this crisis.
Why have you been referring to the group by its real Islamic name rather than the Boko Haram name that it is famous by?
In the kind of assignment that we undertook, when everybody calls somebody “Sparrow”, but he says, “no, that is a nickname I don’t like, my name is John”, then you call him John. If you want to make peace with John, you must call him the name he said is correctly his. The Jama’at Ahl-as Sunnah lid-da’wah wal-Jihad members said the name of their group is not Boko Haram, so we must call it its proper name. They don’t like the Boko Haram nickname.