Enough blames to go round

President Goodluck Jonathan’s reply, delivered last Saturday at the PDP’s North East zonal rally in Bauchi, was equally shocking. A sitting president blamed the insurgency on state governors’ failure to ensure that all children go to primary and secondary schools.  In apparent reference to Nyako, Jonathan said, “I feel disappointed when a governor that spent […]

President Goodluck Jonathan’s reply, delivered last Saturday at the PDP’s North East zonal rally in Bauchi, was equally shocking. A sitting president blamed the insurgency on state governors’ failure to ensure that all children go to primary and secondary schools.  In apparent reference to Nyako, Jonathan said, “I feel disappointed when a governor that spent nearly eight years in office and children in the state could not attend primary and secondary schools comes out publicly to blame the Federal Government on insurgency.” The charge Nyako made was more serious than Jonathan made it to look; he accused the President of sponsoring the insurgency, not just of creating the conditions for it.
Inevitably, the public trading of blames by these two big guys opened the mouths, so to speak, of many Nigerian conspiracy theorists who have been saying the same things for years. Like the leaders, they are perplexed by the insurgency and are hard put to explain it [away]. I thought there was something wrong about the timing of this blame game when the war against the murderous Boko Haram sect is still raging. Usually, all energy should be concentrated towards ending the insurgency. Afterwards, there will be plenty of time to apportion blames as part of the search for a long-term solution.
One of the longest subsisting theories is that the Boko Haram insurgency was caused by poverty. That is possible because poverty created a large pool of disadvantaged youths from which Boko Haram could easily recruit, but it does not tell the whole story. No one should think that a murderous insurgency would not happen if there is no poverty. In fact, I once read a tract in the 1970s by a sociologist who said “India’s masses cannot do a revolution because they are too poor.”
Another snag with the poverty theory is that across the world, we witnessed the rise of murderous quasi-religious cults even in very rich societies. Remember the Reverend Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple of Guyana in 1978 or David Koresh’s Branch Dravidians in Waco, Texas in 1993. The Aum Shim Rikyo cult that released sarin gas on the Tokyo subway in 1995 was not due to poverty. I faintly recall an episode in the 1990s when members of a certain doomsday cult jumped off a cliff in Switzerland, one of the richest countries on earth.
Those who are attributing the rise of Boko Haram to the difficult post-SAP economic conditions in Nigeria since the 1980s will be hard put to explain the rise of Maitatsine in 1980, the crest year of the Oil Boom era. As for those who attribute the phenomenon to colonialism and neo-colonial economics, they should find an explanation for the Satiru revolt of 1906, when Malam Makaho created a Mahdist community that rose against both the British and the Sultan.
The conspiracy theorists were delighted that a man of Murtala Nyako’s stature waded in on their side. Nyako is a retired Navy Admiral, a former member of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, a former Chief of Naval Staff and a former Deputy Chief of Defence Staff. No doubt the theorists felt vindicated that a man with such impeccable security credentials said the same thing they have been saying.  
My highest security experience was as a boy scout, but I must still ask, what evidence did Nyako adduce to support such a sensational allegation? He said there is nobody in the North East rich enough to finance the insurgency. This is a weak point because insurgency is not as costly as a standard military operation; fanaticism makes up for its financial shortcomings. Besides, Boko Haram is thought to have links to Al-Qaeda. All the sensational bank robberies of 2011 and 2012 were thought to have been carried out by its men.
Nyako also said sophisticated weapons used by insurgents are not made in Nigeria but are brought in through the ports, then hauled all the way to the North East through numerous security check points. He said the only people who could do that are those who drive through the check points unchecked, namely the president, vice president and state governors. Again this point is problematic. Most of the tokunbo cars you find on our streets were smuggled in from Cotonou and drove through numerous check points. Our shops and markets are full of brocades, cigarettes and other products that were brought in illegally and hauled across the country. Petrol, which is moved in very heavy tankers, still makes it to black market points all over the country despite numerous check points. Even with respect to weapons, this country was already awash in small arms long before Boko Haram arrived on the scene. One of the first acts of President Umaru Yar’adua in office was to appoint a presidential committee on small arms. There was no Boko Haram at the time.
Admiral Nyako also repeated the common allegation that in many cases, security check points were removed just before a Boko Haram attack. I saw the Defence Headquarters explanation that military patrols in the emergency-rule states are constantly rotated according to latest security information. It is possible therefore that an attack took place because the check point was removed, not the other way around.
Let me explain. In 1986, when police captured the notorious armed robber Lawrence Anini and his gang, an NTA reporter interviewed Anini’s deputy Monday Osunbor on his hospital bed. The reporter pressed Osunbor to explain why his gang always seemed to know where police check points were before they struck banks. Osunbor said they knew in advance that there was no check point before they struck a bank. The NTA reporter asked how they knew; the belief at the time was that they had informants inside the police. Osunbor’s answer was however less dramatic. He said, “Road wey you pass every day, how you no go know?”
Anyway, Jonathan’s counter-accusation that it was governors’ ineptitude that caused Boko Haram also suffers from inadequate evidence, even circumstantial one. It is tragic that millions of children are out of school, but there are probably more of such in the North West than in the North East. There is no reason to believe that other parts of Nigeria are better run than the North Eastern states. The rulership vices that bedevil the North East are no less endemic to other parts of the country.
In any case, the Federal Government has much greater responsibility for the overall picture than any state has. It is in charge of macro-economic policy, including investment climate, forex management, mineral wealth exploitation, agricultural prices, regional and national infrastructural projects, security, power supply, tax regimes and import controls. Jonathan has been in charge on the Federal Government for four years now, or 7.4% of the entire post-independence period. He cannot escape blame for Nigeria’s overall condition.
I have often thought about the relative contribution of the three tiers of government to the state we are in. In the period since 1999, I think it was state governments that saved this Republic. While local governments generally share out their allocations and vanish until next month, the Federal Government is off expending stupendous amounts on invisible matters. In contrast, state governors, though also generally wasteful, are quite responsive to specific local demands. They are very sensitive to agitation for roads, water, rural electrification, schools and hospitals. Every now and then you see state governors displaying what they have done but you hardly see the Federal Government doing that, even during its hype-filled Good Governance Tours.
We have had enough of the blame game for now. Could we kindly go back to the hard work of ending the insurgency?