Niger Delta militancy ≠ Boko Haram

The remarks reportedly made by First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan last Friday night represented a dangerous misunderstanding of the Boko Haram insurgency with potentially grave consequences for the manner of its handling by the Federal Government.Some of the president’s actions at the weekend suggest that he is at least partially in sync with his wife’s […]

The remarks reportedly made by First Lady Dame Patience Jonathan last Friday night represented a dangerous misunderstanding of the Boko Haram insurgency with potentially grave consequences for the manner of its handling by the Federal Government.
Some of the president’s actions at the weekend suggest that he is at least partially in sync with his wife’s views on this matter. It was a surprise that in addition to the Borno State governor, Jonathan summoned the Borno Commissioner for Education and even the Principal of the Chibok school from where the girls were abducted. He also set up a “fact finding committee,” meaning he does not believe what he has been told so far.
No doubt the State House is feeling the heat from the Chibok schoolgirl abductions. More than 200 schoolgirls have been held captive by insurgents for three weeks now and demonstrations demanding for their rescue have spread from Nigerian cities to foreign cities as well. Maybe her husband has not been having a good sleep so Mrs Jonathan waded into the matter to take some heat off his shoulders and dump them on someone else’s shoulders for a change. The problem is that Nigerians have agreed in recent weeks that there should be no scoring of cheap political points with respect to the insecurity challenges facing the country. Now Mrs Jonathan has wrecked that consensus.  
The First Lady now says Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima should produce the over 200 girls abducted from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok. She said if the girls are not found within 24 hours, she would lead a protest march to the Government House in Maiduguri to demand their whereabouts from the governor. She spoke at a meeting she held with wives of state governors, which took place even as President Goodluck Jonathan was holding an emergency meeting with military service chiefs.
Dame Patience said as the chief security officers of their states, governors must be ready to take responsibility for security challenges in their states. She then said, “During Obasanjo’s time, anytime an oyinbo was kidnapped in Bayelsa State, he would call the governor (Jonathan) at 2.00am and give him 24 hours to produce the kidnapped person. We now know who to ask for our children. We don’t need to embark on demonstrations from state to state.”
Mrs Jonathan also summoned some people for questioning over the circumstances that led to the girls’ abduction. They include Borno’s Commissioner of Police, Commissioner for Education, Chairman of Chibok Local Government Area; Divisional Police Officer of Chibok, wife of the village head, the school’s principal and its gate man as well as two teachers from the school, leaders of the Parent/Teachers Association and parents of the missing children.
To begin with, it was very untidy that the first lady was holding a virtual security council meeting at the same time that the President was meeting with the service chiefs over the same issue. If Mrs Jonathan was only meeting with women groups in order to listen to their pleas and console them, that would have accorded with the traditional role of first ladies in all democracies. Mrs Jonathan however launched into an effort to rewrite the Chibok incident’s script and to reapportion blames and responsibility for the rescue effort.
Even though Mrs Jonathan is a perm-anent secretary in Bayelsa State, her com-ments did not convey a sufficient knowledge of the Constitution and the country’s security set up. The Borno Elders Forum had to remind her that her husband is still the Commander-in-Chief. She would probably reply that President Obasanjo was also the Commander-in-Chief when he demanded that her husband rescue the abducted oyinbos. We assume here that the story she told is true, since it is not beyond Obasanjo to do that.
The question to ask is, when Obasanjo gave that order, did Governor Jonathan produce the abducted oyinbos? If he did, then the inescapable conclusion is that old man Obasanjo knew what he was talking about when he charged him to produce them. I am not suggesting that Jonathan, as governor of Bayelsa, was complicit in the kidnap of expatriate oil workers but Obasanjo knew that the political leaders of the Niger Delta states had at least backchannel communications with commanders of the militancy.
When President Umaru Yar’adua declared amnesty in 2009, governors and other Niger Delta elite promptly produced the militancy’s leaders at the State House. One by one these men were flown to the State House to meet with the president. All that was possible because the Niger Delta elite shared in the militants’ broad agenda, if not their methods.
In contrast, there is no such meeting of minds between the Borno elite or the larger Northern elite with the goals of Boko Haram, not to mention its methods. Boko Haram’s leader Abubakar Shekau recently said in a video that the Western plot to destroy Islam has three agents namely secular education, sports and music, views consistent with Boko Haram’s goal of overthrowing the constitution, dismembering the Nigerian state and installing a theocracy in its place. These goals are not shared by the Borno and Northern elite, to put it mildly.
That the Northern elite is highly desirous to maintain Nigeria as one country is a fact well known to other regional elite, hence the latter’s regular recourse to calling for a sovereign national conference to blackmail the Northern elite. Of the three satanic agents mentioned by Shekau, the Northern elite has invested fairly heavily in Western education and sports; its members also heavily patronise local music.
The summary of it is that Boko Haram is an extremist religious phenomenon beyond the control of the Northern elite and at cross purposes with the latter’s political goals. This is not difficult to imagine for anyone with some knowledge of the North’s history since the late 19th century. Even Northern Emirs, at the height of their power and prestige in the pre-colonial and early colonial periods, faced Mahdist uprisings staged by extremist religious sects. Compared to the old emirs, the modern Western-educated elite is much easier to repudiate given its physical distance from the grassroots, its alien customs and its more selfish disposition. The most recent such phenomenon before Boko Haram was the uprising led by Muhammadu Marwa Mai Allah Ta-tsine, better known as Maitasine. In 1980-1993 his sect staged bloody riots in Kano, Maiduguri, Kaduna, Yola, Gombe and Funtua.
That Boko Haram is beyond the control or even influence of any element of the Northern elite should be apparent from its indiscriminate shootings and bombings, the havoc it wreaked in Maiduguri, Damaturu and Kano, its killing of major clerics and politicians, its killing of the eminent soldier-statesman General Muhammadu Shuwa, its abduction of Borno’s most eminent elder statesman Shettima Ali Munguno and its targeting the Shehu of Borno, Emir of Kano and Emir of Fika.
Even if Jonathan were to declare an Yar’adua-style amnesty for Boko Haram today, neither the governor nor any Establishment figure in Borno or the North would be able to fly in Shekau or his Shura Council members to the State House to dine with the president. The summary of it is that Mrs Jonathan launched this desperate gambit of shifting all responsibility to the door of Governor Kashim Shettima in response to the allegation by Adamawa State Governor Murtala Nyako that the Presidency is sponsoring Boko Haram in order to destabilise the North.
Well, I have written on these pages my total disagreement with Nyako’s views on this matter. His was an outrageous conspiracy theory not backed by any solid evidence. Mrs Jonathan’s counter-allegation falls into the same category; it lacks solid evidence and flies in the face of history, logic and Constitutional order. I see no proof in either of these extremist positions. Trouble is, if many Nigerians take sides with Nyako and many others take sides with Dame Patience, then we will never find a solution to Boko Haram.