The problem with General Musa’s Al Jazeera interview
On Sunday, January 5, 2025, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, made a spirited appearance on Talk to Al Jazeera, the hard-hitting interview programme on the Doha-based station. Ostensibly, he was there to speak about human rights abuses and corruption in the Nigerian military in relation to the 15-year standoff with Boko Haram. […]
chief of defence staff, general christopher musa
On Sunday, January 5, 2025, the Chief of Defence Staff, General Christopher Musa, made a spirited appearance on Talk to Al Jazeera, the hard-hitting interview programme on the Doha-based station. Ostensibly, he was there to speak about human rights abuses and corruption in the Nigerian military in relation to the 15-year standoff with Boko Haram. Ultimately, the interview left a disturbing impression about our understanding of our enemies and how we have been mismanaging this fight. It left me with a burning question: Do we truly know how to end the Boko Haram crisis?
There are several worrying moments in the approximately 30-minute interview, but the most significant one for me occurs towards the end when the interviewer, Naeve Baker, asks the General why Boko Haram has continued to regroup after the military has claimed to decimate them. The General responds, “We’ve talked to the international community, let’s find out the funding…As we speak now, we have over 120,000 of them that have surrendered. Most of them, when you find them, you find them with hard currency. How do they get it? How are they funded? How are they trained? How do they obtain the equipment?”
At this point, the interviewer interjects to ask the General about his suspicions, and he replies, “Well, maybe international conspiracy, I don’t know. Who knows? How are they able to sustain themselves for 15 years? That is one question I think everybody should ask themselves.”
While the General poses questions that are meant to provoke thought about the crisis, his response is fraught with several landmines that do not portray him, the military, or Nigeria in the most flattering light.
First, there is an evident tendency to shift responsibility to the “international community” both as a saviour and an adversary. The idea of consulting the “international community” to find the source of Boko Haram funding suggests a complete lack of urgency in confronting the enemy that has plagued Nigeria for over a decade, even if in the same interview, the General had admitted that Boko Haram is local and made up of Nigerians. The attitude of waiting for the international community to provide not only intelligence but also the resources to address a local problem is problematic.
Throughout the interview, the General mentioned that Nigeria does not produce the equipment needed to prosecute the war—failing to acknowledge the recent innovations of the Nigerian army in terms of locally produced hardware being used at the front—and that efforts to procure this equipment are being frustrated by—you guessed it—the international community. This aligns with the notion that Boko Haram might be an “international conspiracy.”
Propagating the idea of “international conspiracy” should not come from the head of the military of a country that has been combating this group for as long as we have, especially from a general who has been a theatre commander in the North East and thus a frontline veteran of the war. It is undeniable that the CDS has access to daily intelligence reports, yet for him to proclaim, “Well, maybe international conspiracy, you don’t know. Who knows?” is shocking. So shocking, in fact, that the interviewer had to push back and say, “You must have an idea. Let’s not talk about international conspiracy theories; let’s get some hard facts.”
What does the General do? He replies, “I leave it at that because they know; everybody knows these are the challenges we are facing. The UN needs to come in because we need to trace the funding. How have they sustained themselves for 15 years?”
This is perplexing, and poor Naeve Baker had to ask what the UN coming in meant. “To trace and track Boko Haram funding,” General Musa says. But when asked directly whose interest it is to see Nigeria destabilised, he shrugs and says, “I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”
There is a problem when a high-ranking general at the head of a military with access to classified information implies that a journalist based in Doha knows as much as he does concerning an enemy he has been fighting for 15 years in his own country.
The insistence on inviting the UN and the international community presents several problems. First, it suggests that the general does not even understand the basic function of the UN and that it is not a global intelligence-gathering agency at the disposal of nations. This failure to grasp the role of the UN, coupled with appealing to them to trace Boko Haram funding, raises concerns about the competency of the person leading this fight.
The second problem is that it indicts Nigerian intelligence agencies when the CDS is grasping so wildly as to invite the UN to perform the basic function of these agencies. General Musa’s insinuation that, because there is an “international flow” to the funding, Nigeria cannot trace it raises questions as to why the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Department of State Services (DSS) exist for local intelligence gathering while the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) exists for international intelligence gathering.
An even more worrying insinuation is that the military has collected over 120,000 BH members who have surrendered, according to the CDS, and has no idea what to do with them. How can one claim to have arrested most of them with foreign currency while posing questions to television viewers about where these terrorists obtained the money? One would think that the question would be better directed at the suspects, as would inquiries about their training bases and funding sources. Granted, some of them may be low-level recruits who might not know anything about the organisation’s funding, but they will at least know where they were trained.
The larger implication is that in 15 years of battling BH, the Nigerian military has failed to capture a high-value BH commander who could provide valuable intelligence in that area.
I know some might argue that it is inappropriate for the general to disclose sensitive security information to the public. But that is not the point here. The point is that the general gives the impression of having no clue what is happening and is engaging in the sort of conversations and innuendos that ordinary civilians might share while gathered at newsstands to debate newspaper headlines. You cannot have access to intelligence reports and then resort to simplistic catchphrases like “international conspiracy” as explanations for Boko Haram’s resilience, or suggest that a foreign journalist knows as much as you do about your country’s enemies, or advise the public to inquire about the group’s funding.
In the final analysis, if you have vested interests, whether foreign or domestic, sponsoring Boko Haram to destabilise Nigeria, and you have failed to identify them in 15 years, it reflects not on their effectiveness but on how abysmal you have been in fulfilling your duty. This observation applies not just to the military led by the CDS but to all security institutions in Nigeria.
Hours after the interview aired, Boko Haram attacked a military base in Damboa, with reports claiming that six soldiers were killed and several military vehicles were destroyed. Over the last decade and a half, hundreds of Nigerian soldiers have given their lives to this fight. There is no doubt that if we continue to confront this enemy as blindly as we have been doing all these years, many more will needlessly die along with thousands of Nigerians.
Even though General Musa is optimistic about ending this crisis in two years, and I fervently hope that he and his gallant men succeed in far less time, the reality, as we have seen even after the “technical defeat” of BH, may be far different.