Terror that goes around

This was significantly more than the 35 dead that the state’s deputy police commissioner announced on Friday. The Nigeria Police is well known for its tendency to minimise casualty figures even when someone did the killing job, not its men. Now, 100 people dead and hundreds more injured by multiple bomb blasts, gunfire, smoke and […]

This was significantly more than the 35 dead that the state’s deputy police commissioner announced on Friday. The Nigeria Police is well known for its tendency to minimise casualty figures even when someone did the killing job, not its men.
Now, 100 people dead and hundreds more injured by multiple bomb blasts, gunfire, smoke and stampede is actually well short of the perpetrators’ intentions. Anyone who plants three bombs in a Nigerian Juma’at mosque, for that matter in Kano City and in its central mosque, must be hoping for casualties in the thousands. A Juma’at mosque is one of the most crowded places in Nigeria. It is more crowded than a molue bus. People stand in it rubbing shoulders with very little leg room. At least a church has chairs; people are packed in a Friday mosque in very tight rows. The only demographic group in the Muslim community that does not attend Friday prayers is women; almost all adult men are there with lots of children.
There are many reasons to believe that Boko Haram did this job. For one, it has a near monopoly of the use of bombs in Nigeria. As part of its trademark, gunmen also stand by and shoot at people who are fleeing from the scene of its bomb blasts. Boko Haram has absolutely no qualms in attacking soft targets. It is known to have strong cells in Kano City and it once launched multiple bomb attacks across the city. It also once tried to kill Emir Ado Bayero. According to new Emir Sanusi, it planned this attack for two months. To boot, it probably did so because the emir said people should defend themselves against the sect.
An observer far removed from the Nigerian scene must be scratching his head and asking himself this question: if Boko Haram is “Islamist” as everyone is saying, why should it attack a mosque full of worshippers on Islam’s holiest day of the week? The only answer I can think of is that the sect defines its enemies in the broadest way possible. Boko Haram has carried the concept of “if you are not with us, you are against us” to a level previously unknown in politico-religious extremism. One would have thought that if the sect ever succeeds in its goal of establishing a Muslim Caliphate, at least it needs Muslims to live in there. However, the sect wants only zealous jihadists as its citizens. It does not have the patience to try to transform moderate Muslims; the sect seems to believe that a Muslim is better dead if he does not start out as a zealot. Even the German Nazis did not define their enemies quite as broadly.
Before the mosque attack, there were many attacks on Christian churches. It could be that many Muslims did not feel outraged enough or threatened enough when bombs were going off in churches, including the devastating one at Madallah, Niger State on Christmas Day 2011. The clear aim of the church attacks was to precipitate an inter-religious war in the country. It came close to succeeding in June 2012 when Christian youths reacted to an attack on a church at Tirkaniya, on Kaduna city outskirts by blockading the Abuja-Kaduna Expressway and killing any Muslim traveller they could find. Otherwise, except for the unhelpful statements of CAN President Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, Nigerian Christians generally ignored the bait and shunned reprisal attack. I often wondered at the time if Nigerian Muslim youths would have behaved with the same restraint if a fanatic Christian sect were to target Friday mosques for serial bombing.
Apart from the church and mosque attacks, there were the attacks on schools. Boko Haram’s antipathy to Western education is well known. Still, to explode a bomb during a school assembly in Potiskum, to raid the Federal Government College at Buni Yadi and the College of Agriculture in Gujba, both in Yobe State and to shoot every student in sight and to raid the Chibok girl’s school and cart away 250 schoolgirls left all analysts gasping for an answer. Children may be the ones in the schools but they hardly sent themselves there. Left to them, many kids would not be in school. Personally, I know that if not for the fear of my stern grandfather and his horsewhip, I would have rather done something else. Now, if someone had shot me at the school on account of his opposition to Western education, that would have amounted to double jeopardy for me.
Or think about exploding a bomb at a very crowded market such as Maiduguri’s Monday Market. Boko Haram’s choice of soft bombing targets betrays the classic Third World mentality of emphasizing quantity over quality. It is more impressed by the number of people it could kill than by the political and military quality of its targets. Some of its bombing targets do have a certain Doomsday logic. The bombing of luxurious buses at Kano’s Sabongari Park, for example was designed to precipitate a reaction in the East with the hope of engineering Nigeria’s break up. It was not the first time that this happened. During my NYSC days, I was sitting in the staff common room in the heart of Igboland when I heard fellow teachers saying that some Igbos were killed by a Muslim mob in Kano. I glanced around to see if I had any chance of escape from a possible reprisal attack. One would have thought that a Nigerian Muslim man in Kano would not want any harm to visit his ethnic/religious relative living in Onitsha but the logic of Boko Haram’s attacks is precisely to imperil such a clansman.
I cannot recall any terrorist group in recent world history that goes for soft targets quite as much as Boko Haram does. Imagine an attack on people queuing up at an ATM or on people about to enter a commercial bus. Even  though we are quick to blame security agencies for not protecting us, security agencies around the world tend to make certain assumptions about soft targets such as schools and worship centers. We often see how American schools are sitting ducks for any deranged youth with a gun. Nigerian security agencies have also been accused of doing a poor job of “winning hearts and minds” of local citizens in this war. Their only saving grace has been Boko Haram’s even worse policy of winning hearts and minds which includes slaughtering all the youths and carting off the young women of any village that it overruns.
In a perverse way, last Friday’s attack on the Juma’at mosque helped the Nigerian Muslim community to make the case to its Christian compatriots, in particular, that it is not the sponsor of Boko Haram and that it is as much a victim of it as everyone else. This point has been difficult to make over the years for several reasons. One is the coincidence that Boko Haram violence escalated in Muslim lands around the time that the Northern elite is sulking after it lost political power at the Federal level. The second complicating coincidence was the glib talk made by some Northern elite elements about making the country ungovernable for President Goodluck Jonathan.
The general incompetence of the Muslim community’s youths as they laboured to make the same point on the social media was yet another factor. Since 2010, I watched with horror the kind of exchange taking place on key national issues between Northern youths and their Southern counterparts, in particular on Facebook. Both sides exhibit very little, if any knowledge of history, philosophy, geography, economics, science or comparative religion. They instead try to outdo one another in the use of “invective, insult, imprecation and incivility,” to borrow a phrase from Nancy McPhee’s Book of Insults.
Boko Haram has now helped to settle this argument. My, but look at the cost.