The Northern elites claim not to support Boko Haram, who are the men behind the mask?  Here are the views of two eminent Nigerians, Professor Wole Soyinka, a Nobel Laureate; and Sam Nda-Isaiah, Publisher of Leadership Newspaper: 

 

• Prof. Wole Soyinka 

"Those who unleashed Boko Haram on the nation are politicians. These are the ones behind Boko Haram. Unfortunately, one has to point to what section they come from, and that is the North. This minority is very focused, very powerful, very rich. They used to be in government; they've accumulated billions; they are the ones who unleashed this monster on the nation. They have articulated their conviction that it is their turn to rule Nigeria."

 

Both religious and political forces are driving the insurgency by the extremist Islamist sect, Boko Haram, that has killed hundreds of people in Nigeria, says Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka, in an interview with Reuters in Pretoria, South Africa.

He accused "power-hungry politicians from the North of using indoctrinated young militants, drawn from the ranks of the poor unemployed and educated in Islamic schools" as foot soldiers in a battle over who should control the country.

Interview with TheNEWS - Let me begin by reminding everyone that Boko Haram has a very long history, whether you describe Boko Haram as an army of the discontent, or even as some people grotesquely try to suggest, “revolutionaries,” or you describe them as, legitimately, this time, as marginalised or feeling marginalised. When I say that the phenomenon has a very long history, I am talking about a movement that relies on religion as a fuel for their operation, as a fuel for mobilisation, as the impetus, an augmentation of any other legitimate or illegitimate grievance that they might have against society. Because of that fuel, that irrational, very combustible fuel of religion of a particular strain, of a particular irredentist strain; because of the nature of that religious adherence, which involves the very lethal dimension of brain-washing from childhood, all a man needs to be told is that this is a religious cause. All they need to be told is that this is an enemy of religion and they are ready to kill. No matter the motivations, no mater the extra-motivations of those who send them out, they need only one motivation: that they are fighting the cause of that religion.

People wonder, sometimes, if they are fighting the cause of religion, why are they also killing fellow religionists? It is very important for us to understand that they have a very narrow view of even their faith. Anyone outside that narrow confine, narrow definition (in this case, we are talking about Islam), is already an infidel, an unbeliever, a hypocrite, an enemy of God (they use all these multifarious descriptions) and therefore is fit for elimination. If they believe that this environment contains any non-believer in their very narrow strain of Islam, that person or that very area is due for sanitation. And if there are those who also believe, who are confined within the very narrow limit of their arbitrary religion, any chance that there are such people, they consider them matyrs, who will be received in the bosom of Allah, with double credits as having been killed accidentally.

What I am saying is not any theorising; it is not any speculation. Examine this particular strain of Islam from Afghanistan, through Iran to Somalia to Mauritania. We are speaking in fact of a deviant arm of Islam, whose first line of enemies, in fact, are those who I call the orthodox Muslims with whom we move, interact, inter-marry, professional colleagues and so on. They don’t consider them true Muslims.

So the seeming paradox is explained in that. And this mind is bred right from infancy. We are talking about the madrasas, we are talking about the almajiris. They have only one line of command: their Mullah. If the Mullah says go, they go; come, they come; kill, they kill; beg, they beg. They don’t believe in leaving their narrow religion, which teaches them that they have to be catered for either by their immediate superior as an authority or by the community or sometimes an extension of that by the town. When they go out to beg, they believe that this mission of begging is divinely ordered and it is the responsibility of the person from whom they are begging to give them alms.

They sit before their Mullah or their Emir or their chief or whatever and memorise the Qu’ran. Their entire circumscription or mental formation is to be able to recite the Qu’ran from the beginning to the end. Outside of that, there is no educational horizon. So, I want us to distinguish very carefully. If you don’t distinguish, if you don’t narrow these things down to the specifics, we are likely to be misunderstood, as people like me have been misunderstood, because I have been against fundamentalism all my life, of any religion, whether it’s Christianity, Orisha worship, Buddhism, Hinduism or whatever. Any kind of extreme in faith that makes you feel that you are divinely authorised to be the executioner of your deity or that there is only one view of the world, or that only one view exists, for me, is pernicious and it is anti-human. That is why I am making this preliminary explanation.

The second elaboration I want to make is that I have never liked the expression, “the core North”. We are talking about North because the North is very much identified with Islam. And for one reason, there is no core South. I don’t know about the core East, I don’t know about the core West. So why that expression? For me it is too general, too loose and it confuses the dramatis personae of our political life.

I, however, identify hard-core northerners, as in hard core pornography. There exist hardcore northerners. They may be in the minority, but they believe that they are divinely endowed to run any society.

They are hardcore Northerners, whether you are talking about Sheikh Gumi and others. For a character like Sheikh Gumi, politics fuses with religion. A man who said Christianity is nothing, who said a Christian would rule this nation over his dead body. So, we have hardcore northerners, hardcore northern Islamists like the late Sheik Gumi. Among those that I describe as the hardcore northerners, (note I didn’t say Islamists), are people like Sani Ahmed Yerima, the former Zamfara State governor, who is now a legislator. There are hardcore northern Islamists. Why do I use Yerima? Because in him, you also encounter the fusion of a credo in Northernism and at the same time in Islamism. So you can see somebody like him as an opportunist. And I say this, you know, because he himself admitted to some of our people in NALICON during the immediate post-Abacha era, when he was asked why he decided to turn Zamfara into a theocratic state in a secular dispensation. He said, and I dare him to deny it, that it was the only weapon he had to snatch power. He said the PDP machinery was so strong that he needed something which would appeal to raw emotions, to mobilise and get the governorship.

If, periodically, I refer to this individual, it is because he represents to me, the opportunistic face of Islamism. And, of course, he had to deliver after he became governor. He is not the only one. I distinguish between him and Gumi because Gumi never sought political power. He was just a raw believer in raw Northernism and Islam. The two tributaries fuse in a personality like that.

In the case of Mr. Yerima and a number of others, Islam is just an instrument. I don’t consider them genuine Muslims. For them, however, they are willing to go the full length of Islam because it pays them politically. Having said that, I do not say for a moment that he is responsible for Boko Haram or that he has any hand in it. But I say that his school of thought and his school of opportunism is responsible for the birth of a movement like Boko Haram.

Now let’s get to the specifics. And I dare anybody to contradict what I am about to say. General Obasanjo came to power as a civilian ‘President’ on the platform of the Northern caucus. If you remember, there was a huge controversy: Did he sign? Didn’t he sign? Did that one sign, didn’t this sign?

Before the presidency was, shall we say ‘conceded’ to him, it’s quite true, and he’ll be the last to deny. In fact, he admitted that he was even brought a paper to sign but he refused.

The first signs that the sponsors of Obasanjo got that they made a mistake was when he dismissed military officers, who had held political offices. That was the first time those who sponsored Obasanjo, who were hardcore northerners, felt they had got themselves into trouble because as it happened, those who were most affected were northerners. That was the first sign of trouble.

And they just didn’t take it and say ‘oh let it pass’ until later. They then opened a war office at that time. I’m talking of a physical office in which every single thing he said, every clipping, was stored. Ask Olusegun Obasanjo. I personally told him this. I said: ‘By the way, I hope you realise that the people who sponsored you have declared war on you; that they have opened an office on you, specifically an Obasanjo office!’ How do I know about this? If anybody denies this, I will come back to you and I will tell you how I knew about it. I am not ready to divulge. So, that is the first. The second phase was when Obasanjo proceeded and began privately to plan his re-election (that is the second term in office). At that time, what I called the hardcore northerners began to mobilise at what level yet, I cannot categorically say.

I don’t have the slightest interest in whether Obasanjo was right to seek a second term or not. I am not going to discuss whether it is right or wrong for anybody to try to impose a limitation, which is not backed by the constitution, on any individual candidate. I’m just telling this nation certain facts which no one can deny.

Obasanjo decided to have a second term, that is a southerner, not just an ex-military man, but a southerner. The language at the time was very overt. It was ‘we are just lending you the presidency, we will take it back at the end of your term.’ It was a feeling, a belief, which percolated through the various levels, various ranks of politicians and across all ages.

I remember one incident. I was invited by Fani-Kayode (Femi) and Akin Osuntokun to a meeting of a group they had. There was a very young man, very intelligent, at the meeting. A lot of young northerners gravitated towards me, by the way, and I interact with them. Even back in the Abacha days, some of them used to come and see me in Harvard University, where I relocated and taught. And each time I meet a generation that does not belong to the hardcore northerners, I am always delighted to exchange ideas with them till tomorrow. And this young man, I remember I met him. And I wanted him to join us. I sent his name to Fani-Kayode and I said this is the kind of man you people should interact with. These are very progressive people. It almost ended in a disaster because that young fellow, whom I discussed with, made a mistake by saying: ‘After all, I don’t know what you people are complaining about. We did concede after Abiola. We did concede the thing to you.’ Fani-Kayode wanted to take that man’s head off. He blew up, it was difficult for me to separate them. I say these things only to explain that, even among some of the young generation that one thought could be weaned away from such ideas, such notions exist. A lot of people there that day can check on the incident. And it’s only one of such incidents.

So, the next sense of betrayal was when Obasanjo got a second term. Some of them even said openly that they had been misled that the man they thought was going to hold the forte for them turned out to have an agenda of his own. So far, so bad. The next phase that can determine at which time, I won’t tell you, the hardcore northerners began to activate what I called secret army, when they began to send their people to training. They felt they had to fight to take back what they felt belonged to the North.

So I suspect that the breaking point was when Yar’Adua took ill and the question of succession began. ‘If Yar’Adua dies, you mean another southerner is going to get into that position?’ This now became a real nightmare. For this, hardcore northerners (it’s too long, let’s just use the word cabal, even though that word is misused, to narrow it down to make sure we are talking about individuals, not about a region).

They decided that something drastic had to be done. Around this time, they had begun to activate, they intensified the training, this set of foot soldiers, they began to make intensified contacts, alliances with international religion-based insurgents like al-Qaeda. And their soldiers began to go to Mauritania, Sudan and Somalia, particularly those who were categorically confirmed by the security services. They began to send them seriously for training. That is not the problem, al-Qaeda has always been interested in Nigeria, as in Kenya and Mauritania. Osama bin Laden listed, if you remember, it’s published, Nigeria among the nations to be Islamised.

And so, these people went for training, they came back lying low, waiting to be activated. Remember all these didn’t begin with the period I’m talking about. They have a long history of extremists. People tend to forget about Maitatsine; that was a different calibre altogether. So there is nothing new about what we are seeing. It is the intensification and the murderous dimension that this narrow Islamism is taking.

I am talking of accumulation of grievances of this narrow group. And this is why even some of their own fellow northerners were targets because these were considered malodorous among them and in any struggle of this kind historically, you find that the first stage is to clean out your rearguard, those whom you consider might stab you in the back–the rearguard traitors. You wipe them out first. And that is why we are seeing the intensification of the antagonism towards certain progressive liberal northerners.

Matters became worse, of course, when Jonathan decided that in his own right, he was going to contest elections. That is when the last restraint vanished from the hardcore northerners. That is when they activated the extreme, murderous strain of religion. That is why they began to identify political enemies as religious enemies. What we are reaping today is largely a political problem. It’s true that in my article, precisely the last one, used in Newsweek, I emphasised the religious strain because it is true. I did not want to make statement of a political nature; I did not want to elaborate, but I said enough in that article where I used the expression: ‘those who lost out in the political stakes are the ones who are now intensifying, who are now mobilising, activating the religious fanatics in our midst.’ I just hinted as much. But now, we are reaching a place where we are talking in terms of fatalities, we are counting now in four figures. By the time you add together all the fatalities that have occurred in the last year and half, we are talking in terms of thousands now since the real militancy began.

But I think at that point, even before now, we should never even have gotten to this point. But now, we have reached the stage where there is going to be some frank talking among ourselves.

If you read the ‘manifesto’ of the Boko Haram, you will find that there is nothing you can actually hold on to unlike, say, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, MEND, which is categorical on the polluted environment. The oil companies have polluted the environment, all the wealth coming from there goes to develop the rest of the country, you killed our leaders, we turned them into martyrs, land is polluted, air is polluted. There are pulmonary and skin diseases as a result of oil spillage and flaring of gases. Fish ponds have been degraded. You can see what you can hold on to. You can agree or disagree with their methodologies, we are not talking about that now. The important thing is that when you read their table of content, of complaints, at least, it is not on an eerie level.

In this particular case, you can go to Youtube and all what Shekau says is that ‘democracy is haram’. We are going to Islamise’ and so on. What is he going to Islamise? You are talking nonsense because you are saying you were going to Islamise dead bodies. Let’s say there are non-Muslims in this country, a modest estimate, let’s say two million. I say very modest estimate, you know you cannot kill two million. So, what you do to Islamise is you do that over dead bodies and you can’t do that, not even if you say you are Rwanda.

It is because these hardcore Northerners are embarrassed to admit what really is behind this thing. They are embarrassed to admit it. And on the other side, they are inhibited, they don’t want to say it’s North versus South, it’s not even that. It’s a minority versus the rest. And I say it’s not even against the South. It’s a minority versus the entirety of the nation.

PDP is at the heart of the trouble, it’s within PDP they have been making this dirty bargain. “You rule for so long, it’s my turn.” It is not in the constitution. So it’s the PDP members, who really should go and sort out this problem among themselves. But the nation is the one paying the penalty. This is not comfortable because they can protect themselves. They are the ones that divided the country into two–the North and then, the South.

I think that the reason which you might say is on paper, in terms of political planning, are the six geo-political zones. This ‘two’ business, I don’t understand. But they are using this division of North versus South the same way as they are using religion. The issue is completely political. But with toxic element of religion infused into it, it gives them the leg to ally with international terrorist bodies based on religion. Those are only too happy to be of assistance.

It is the same way, as in the days of ideological bifurcation of the world, the Eastern bloc versus the Western bloc. All you had to do was to go the Eastern bloc and say I am a revolutionary, I’m a Maxist-Leninist, Troskyite, Maoist something, and they give you training right away and they embrace you, and are ready to send you even outside your own country to go prove your mettle there and come back.

And, of course, the capitalists would go to the former Nicaragua under Somoza and other nations and they also got their training. So, we are right inside an international programme. And a lot of people don’t understand; it’s not extraordinary, it’s only that we are hiding the truth under blocs, hoping that somehow it will fizzle away.

When we talk about a national conference, it’s because we realise there are serious polticial issues into which religion has also been cropped and that is a very lethal cocktail. But the basic thing is political. Religion is invoked. I am not surprised by the recent revelations being made in the papers such as ‘we have been on the payroll of this governor’. It may be true, it may be half true, it may be totally untrue.

But all these go back again to Maitatsine. In the Maitatsine days, governors courted the sponsorship of Maitatsine. I remember a former governor of Kano admitted that at the beginning, he used to go to Maitatsine, when elections came close, to get support. But he said: ‘I stopped doing that when I realised that it’s a very dangerous organisation.’

The politicians are so desperate; they are the ones who utilise religion. They are not alone. We saw Goodluck Jonathan kneeling before a Christian prelate for his blessing. The only difference is that I am not aware that Goodluck Jonathan has been sponsoring any militant fundamentalist Christians. People turn to religion. We shouldn’t be surprised at this; it’s the extent at which you want to go into religion that makes it a normal aberration, a contradiction in terms by the way or an acceptable kind of aberration. Whether one destabilises, whether one gives you psychological advantage over the followers of that particular religion, there is nothing we can do about that. But when we reach a point where the product of that alliance is destroying us, then I think it’s about time we all spoke up and let these people now admit what they have known, what they have always suspected, so as to assist the security people in determining where the criminal line exists and to take action.

Many people are worried that what Boko Haram is doing may lead to the dismemberment of the country, while some others are saying: “we are too interwoven to split”. On what side do you queue?

If Boko Haram succeeds in its stated agenda to make the country ungovernable, if Boko Haram succeeds in goading those areas that have victim citizens in the northern part of the country into reprisal actions on the nearest targets, not only will this cause a break-up, it will be very messy. That is the reason some of us have been issuing appeals to community leaders to make sure it doesn’t happen in their communities.

It isn’t the break-up as such. Other nations were broken up, but the way in which we will break up will be intensely irremediable, it will be extremely messy. I can reveal to you, for instance, what the third phase of Boko Haram is supposed to be.

The security people know it. I am making it known publicly because I am disappointed that they have not taken action on it. And that third phase is selected assassination of leaders from here. I happen to know for a fact that I am on the list. I am very close to the very top of the list. If you have contact within the security, go and check because I have this information confirmed within the Nigerian security services and from outside security quarters, which I will not name. At least the government security agencies have the responsibility to start protecting those individuals or at least to communicate to community leaders the existence of this threat so that they can take certain precautionary measures. Because if they succeed unfortunately in that particular project, things will be out of control. There are young people, who will not, may not be able to control their reactions.

The reason for this programme, which I know is very much their third phase, is that those pushing this agenda know very well that this could be the last straw that breaks the camel’s back. And they would rather this country broke up and possibly in an inferno, than continue to accept the loss, even the temporal loss of power in this country. For these people, government is the only business around. To the membership of this group that I’m talking about, government is the only business.

We are talking about an unproductive group, who all their lives, have been accustomed to living on the proceeds of power, even when they are not physically in charge. It is the only way of life that they know and so while destabilising the rest of the nation, they want to ensure that they carve out a certain region in which they can dominate, and which they can terrorise through an extreme form of the Sharia, so that they can continue consuming the revenue from that area, such as it is without any opposition. These people believe very much in the divine authority of religious governance.

They secure through terror, total destruction and, paradoxically, they are securing their enclave when they retreat, they have somewhere into which they retreat which is governed on the strictest law of the Sharia. That is their ultimate goal. If they cannot have the entire thing, that is the nation, then they can ally with similar theocratic states and their position is, whatever it is, they are not individual losers, they will be taken care of.

That is why I believe that the country is very much on the verge of disintegration, especially if Bokom Haram succeeds in its agenda, which I outlined. With complete sense of responsibility and with the accumulation of facts, some within the government know what I’m saying, they acknowledge it. Some within the security services, I hope, have reached that analytical truth. I hope so, but they are not acting as if they heard and it is very worrisome.

How do you assess President Goodluck Jonathan’s response to Boko Haram threat and even the President himself as a person?

I don’t believe that President Jonathan understands half of what I have been telling you about. I don’t think that he has a truthful appreciation of the circumstances. I think he is very much some kind of an optimist; he believes certain politicial largesse or panacea here and there will solve this enormous problem. I think he is counting too much on the fact that yes, indeed, there are strongly committed loyalists to his regime from the troubled parts of the country, and ideally that is enough.

He is underestimating the desperation of the forces of the group. I do not believe that he has been able to extract the lesson or lessons of Islamic struggle, that is internal struggle throughout the world. For instance, in Iraq, every year on the holiest day of a certain Islamic sect ( I am talking about the Shiites and the Sunnis) that one group goes and butchers the other, ambushes them, mows them down even on their way to pilgrimage. I don’t think he understands or appreciates the fact that even sanctuaries have become meaningless. Sanctuaries used to hold meanings in all religions. You don’t just assault your opponents when they have taken religious sanctuary. Nigeria is filled with a whole race of mimics.

If one person 419s, tomorrow, a thousand will. They will use exactly the same formula. If they see that this formula has worked in attracting one greedy fellow over there, the next time you will see thousands of people in cyber cafes, using exactly the same formula. If you analyse all the 419 letters, I don’t think you can get more than three models, with minor variations, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of these letters going out. I am sorry to say these are the kind of people who would say: ‘Oh, the Shiites killed just 40 people. Okay, to make ourselves heard, we’ll kill 400.’

That mimic syndrome of the worst kind that is taking place in others areas is somehow very prevalent here. A mistake in London is a style in Nigeria. That is our mentality, which has been carried over into the realm of religion.

And in talking about the almajiri, they are not the “unwashed” faces that you see on the streets now. Some of them who came through the madrasas you see on the streets have gone to universities and some of them have dropped out of universities because of genuine religious convictions. They look around and say: ‘we cannot be part of this sinful environment. This is not true Islam.’ But the more “enlightened” of them just go and carve out their own school of religious thoughts, gather adherents around them and preach and try and convert people. They don’t try and convert, putting a knife to the throat. No, they convert through the soul, through the invisible soul.

Others, however, have come to believe that what is happening in Afghanistan is what ought to be happening here. That they are not true religionists unless they are killing, unless they turn executioners on behalf of Allah. Who appointed them executioners? I don’t know.

But that is what they believe. Unless they are behaving in the most extreme fashion on behalf of their religions, they are not true religionists. And because they have been to universities and because they have travelled, they adopted the sophistication of other religious movements in terms of organisation, in terms of weaponry, in terms of arrogance to look down on those who do not believe in their particular religion, as less than human, as vermin, the extermination of which will make Allah very happy and will guarantee their entry into paradise.

This is the phenomenon we are confronting right now. And, unfortunately, it is not being said and said properly in the right places. The correct people are not being confronted with it. There are only those who understand it and who are willing to exploit it. And those are the hardcore northern Islamists that we are talking about.

There are people who suggest that the solution to this problem is to have a dialogue with Boko Haram. What you think?

I know the Movement for Unconditional Dialogue exists. That may have to do with guilt. In Obasanjo’s case, guilt is definitely involved because it was under his watch that theocratism entered this country in a structured way. And you also note that he cultivated some of these groups because of his own political agenda. So, he owes them, so to speak, in the sense of repayment of the debt. There are others who, for me, have wooly ideas, who believe that, who fastened on dialogue as a magical wand. You dialogue only with those who are willing to dialogue.

These people, as I said, have not articulated what they want to come and discuss at the conference table. You begin talking of dialogue when there is articulation.

They want the suspension of the constitution, they want the enthronement of Sharia…

Throughout the whole nation, and that is why they are bombing us to the table! Alright, those who want to have dialogue with them on those terms, please go and institute the dialogue. We instituted a dialogue without involvement of government in this nation, which was PRONACO. Obasanjo tried to stop it, he threatened us, he charged us for treason. In fact, if you remember, that was when I came into PRONACO. When he said he was going to arrest all those who were organising the conference, I said what? In this country under a democratic dispensation, a group of people cannot meet, and decide and review the constitution and then present their findings to the rest of the nation? And I joined. That was how I came into PRONACO.

To those who believe in dialogue, organise your dialogue. I am not stopping you and then come and give the rest of us what your findings are.

We are not stopping you, but please don’t tell me that somebody attempted to take my life yesterday and then I start begging him, please come to the table. I believe that one should not beg for existence. If the price of not coming to table is that you want to eliminate me, and you can do so, please do so. I am 77.

Please come to the debating table, but you will not persuade me simply because you have the capacity to blow me and my family. You can simply go ahead, blow us up if you think that is the way you can do your conversion. But you will not bomb me to sit with you at the table. Rather, that diminishes me as an individual.

 

 

Responding to a question during a CNN interview on Saturday, Professor Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s only Nobel laureate, said the emergence of Boko Haram was the crude response of the north, having lost power because the PDP did not stand by its earlier arrangement of alternating the presidency between the north and the south.

I do not belong to the PDP, so I cannot speak for the northerners in the PDP. And those that have been following my views will, in fact, agree that I have been against the exigency of power rotation. I have, for a very long time, consistently insisted on true democracy only, devoid of election rigging. I maintained this position even before the PDP was born. Rotation, I have often argued, deprives Nigeria of its best available materials, especially at the very top. And rotation must never be misconstrued as federal character, which I support.

Also, I cannot speak for the north on rotation, but I know enough to know that Professor Soyinka is dead wrong. Soyinka is no ordinary Nigerian and he has done very well for himself and his country by winning the Nobel Prize. Nigerians and indeed the world at large would be right to rely on people like him for mature, reasoned and intelligent viewpoints on issues that relate to the country. On this, the Nobel laureate has oftentimes lived far below expectation. During the same CNN interview, when asked if he was hopeful about Nigeria, the professor of literature used the opportunity to obliquely canvass the break-up of Nigeria as he has done for as long as we have known him.

On the issue of Boko Haram, Soyinka is wrong because Boko Haram is a direct consequence of the failure of government. Boko Haram had existed long before the last election and even their avowed agenda of fighting the Nigerian state and all those against them including Islamic clerics and Christians (in accordance with the hate gospel according to Abubakar Shekau, its self-proclaimed leader) does not make any reference to the issues propounded by Soyinka.

The first thing everyone must know about the Boko Haram phenomenon is that its ideology and belief systems are not shared by Muslims in Nigeria. Ninety per cent of the victims of Boko Haram’s murder expeditions so far have, in fact, been Muslims. And, about six weeks ago in the United States, someone who had misinterpreted the Boko Haram insurrection as a war between Christians and Muslims asked me why adherents of the two religions were at war.

My immediate response to him was that a small terrorist group which had overpowered and flooded out the government was killing both Christians and Muslims. The Boko Haram people must have their grievances. But that does not give them or any other group, including MEND and OPC, the latitude or licence to commit crimes against the Nigerian state including mass murder, which is in fact classified as an international crime or crime against humanity. Today, the whole of the north, Christians and Muslims, including those whom Soyinka accused of renting or organising the Boko Haram as a revenge against the Jonathan government for usurping their right to the presidency, are scared stiff of the renegade sect. This numbing fear is not, strictly speaking, of the sect, but for the fact that it is now clear to every Nigerian that the government cannot protect them from Boko Haram. As it is today, the government officials who should be working their brains out to find out how to protect Nigerians against the terrorist activities of Boko Haram are desperately racking their brains for new ways to protect themselves and their families. The rest of us are on our own, apparently, and must resort to self-help. That’s how bad the situation has become.

Boko Haram is obviously a consequence of the failure of the Nigerian state to live up to its responsibility to its people. In 2002, hopeless youths in Maiduguri started massing around Mohammed Yusuf, who was said to be a brilliant student of another very influential Muslim cleric, Sheikh Jafar Adam. They abandoned their primary and secondary school studies on the grounds that western education was a sin (boko haram). The youths had seen many graduates who had remained unemployed for as long as they could remember. With time, the more militant and violent members of the group took advantage of the growing discontent of the youth and broke away from the main group and relocated to Kanama village at the borders of Niger Republic in Yobe State, the birthplace of Yusuf. By 2004, they had started striking Muslim targets that did not share their doctrine, and it has been said that it was members of the group that murdered Sheikh Jafar, their teacher, in 2007.

Sheikh Jafar was thoroughly against their philosophy. They also killed some of his close associates and several Islamic clerics.

In 2009, 17 members of the group were shot and killed by members of the police force during a peaceful procession. The sect members and their sympathizers said they were killed in cold blood, but a top policeman I spoke with said they were going to bury the bodies of those they had killed. The top police officer said the sect had become accustomed to killing people in cold blood by then. By that time, Mohammed Yusuf had started enjoying an opulent lifestyle and driving around in big cars. This was the point at which some people started suspecting that he must have been receiving sponsorship and funding from outside our shores.

The extra-judicial killing of 17 of the sect members played into the hands of the extremists among them who used that as an alibi to launch a spate of murder operations against Islamic clerics and politicians in Maiduguri who challenged them. Mohammed Yusuf also ordered all his members to gather in Maiduguri as a result. At this point, he had succeeded in reconciling the different tendencies within the sect once again under his leadership. In 2010, an all-out war broke out between the sect and the police. The soldiers were called in to put down the insurrection. The military succeeded in quelling the crisis, killing several hundreds and capturing thousands including Mohammed Yusuf himself. In the war, the sect members killed several policemen including DSP Abdulazeez Farouk, the son of retired police commissioner Usman Farouk, who was the governor of the defunct North-Western State (today’s Sokoto, Kebbi, Zamfara and Niger states) during the Gowon regime. The police force was also accused of extra-judicially killing the former Borno State commissioner of religious affairs, Buji Foi, and the father-in-law of Yusuf, Baba Fugu.

After this incident, a very virulent leader of the sect called Abubakar Shekau emerged. It has even been said that Shekau and Yusuf were never on good terms and that Shekau would have killed Mohammed Yusuf if he had had his way. That would have hardly been surprising, as it was also members of the sect that murdered their original leader Sheikh Jafar. Shekau it was who added Christians to their enemy list.

But Boko Haram has since become a huge franchise for all kinds of outlaw groups. And it will definitely not be correct to blame all crimes on the group. Quite curiously, some Christians were implicated and arrested in connection with the burning of St John’s Catholic Church in Bauchi, said to be masterminded by a certain Lydia Joseph. Another church, God’s Grace International Ministries Church, in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, was said to have been burnt down by another character called Wisdom King who was dressed in kaftan and a turban. Obviously, the more you see, the less you understand. Many armed robbers also operate in the name of the group, even though Boko Haram itself had invaded banks with bombs and grenades to steal money for its operation.

A large part of the Boko Haram membership is now composed of foreigners from Chad, Niger Republic and Sudan with their own fanciful idea to break up Nigeria so that they can use the northern stump as their own Somalia.

Of course, these foreigners who have no stake in Nigeria cannot ply their criminal activities in their own countries because the governments in their lands have been more successful in defeating their terrorist activities. Sudan, Niger, Chad and even Libya have been involved in wars for a very long time and the Nigerian government should have known that the very dangerous weapons deployed in those wars could find their way very easily into Nigeria through our famously porous borders, if not checked. They eventually did. The bombing of the UN building is believed to be an opportunistic attack and some people point at the Libyan elements among them, who wanted to avenge the UN’s stand against Ghaddafi. Otherwise, the UN is an unusual, if not an unlikely, target for the Boko Haram, intelligence sources say.

So, a personality of the intellect of Wole Soyinka should not be as simplistic as he often appears to be. He is dead wrong on his analysis of the origin of the Boko Haram. As to his insinuation about the break-up of Nigeria, I do not think that somebody of the status of Soyinka should be talking like an OPC member. Of course, any section of Nigeria that wants to break off should come for a send-off party, but, at a higher level of discussion, all of us should know that the oneness of Nigeria and its indivisibility is worth defending. We are what we are in world affairs today because of our size and population, the same asset that other countries have put to good use. Indonesia, with a population of 245 million people, is the biggest economy in South-East Asia; Brazil with a population of 203 million people is a global economic power; and, of course, India and China with over one billion people each are forcing a shift of world economic power from the west to the east.

Even in spite of our current embarrassing self-inflicted problems, with a population of 167 million people, Nigeria’s economy is faring better than anticipated. This, of course, is because the private sector has decoupled from the government and our large informal economy has existed as if there is no government. This is so largely because of our size and population. The Nigerian economy will, in a couple of years, overtake the South African economy, according to several international economic think-tanks.

I’d rather align with another literary intellectual, Professor Chinua Achebe, who himself is well-deserving of a Nobel Prize, in the analysis of the Nigerian paradox. The problem of Nigeria, Achebe said a long time ago, is squarely a failure of leadership. Nothing more, nothing less.

 

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