Nigerian Bombs: Boko Haram’s Senseless Mission

Bayo Onanuga

It was a triumph that was short-lived and spurious. After three days of intensive and repressive campaign against Boko Haram militants in Yobe and Borno states, and with 59 militants dead and arsenals destroyed, Nigeria’s army announced it had dealt the military wing of the sect a mortal blow. But doubts crept in hours after about the possibility that the crackdown against the Boko Haram did not achieve its objective and the people killed may not have been the militants targeted. On Christmas day, a suicide bomber from the group struck at the SSS headquarters in Damaturu. Several operatives were killed. Another suicide bomber, hundreds of kilometers away, drove powerful explosives into a crowd of worshippers at St. Theresa Church in Madalla, Niger state, killing, at the last count, 42 people. A night before, also in Yobe state, the Boko Haram militants threw grenades at Christians, keeping a Christmas night vigil, killing not a few people and injuring many.

While it may be plausible to reason that the Boko Haram counter-attacks on Christmas were planned even before the military assault on their bases, what is no longer debatable is that the insurgency has become the gravest threat to the Nigerian nation and the survival of the seven month old Jonathan presidency.

What do the insurgents of the Boko Haram Movement really want to achieve with their murderous, vicious campaign against the Nigerian people, the Christians and Nigeria’s central government? Denounced and renounced by leading Muslims, traditional leaders and ordinary people, the Boko Haram remorselessly carries on its campaigns of terror, hitting targets after targets, almost with impunity. The police, the army, the air force, the churches, the UN headquarters in Nigeria, the banks have all been fair games to the militants. At the last count, the group was credited with the murder of 500 people this year alone. And there are threats of more strikes, if government fails to meet its demands. According to its spokesman, Abdul Qaqa as quoted by Daily Trust: ” By the grace of God…There will never be peace until our demands are met. We want all our brothers who have been incarcerated to be released; we want full implementation of the Sharia system and we want democracy and the constitution to be suspended.”

Discernible at first blush is some implicit arrogance in Qaqa’s statement: He spoke with such authority as if Boko Haram were a mass movement representing the entire Muslim North or Muslim Nigeria. Certainly, with the denunciations all around, we can safely declare that Boko Haram is not the voice of Northern Muslims; it does not even embody the aspirations of Northern Muslims. My educated guess is that if we excise the political thugs, assassins and bandits among this amorphous group, the remnants do not even constitute the biggest Islamic sect in Northern Nigeria. Just like the Niger Delta militants, the Boko Haram members are a bunch of disgruntled elements, which want Nigeria cast in their own shape. Because their campaign weapon is violence, we cannot ignore them for the sake of the peace of our society. Groups after groups, leading opinion molders have already canvassed that the leadership engage this guerrilla movement in talks. I support this idea. Even if it is a grudging concession, in a democracy, government must try to engage all tendencies with a point of view, a cause, and an agenda. We know Boko Haram has an agenda.

Just what does Boko Haram want from Nigeria?

Implicit in the spokesman’s statement are three demands of the group: it wants its incarcerated members released, it wants Sharia implemented all over Nigeria, and it wants the Nigerian constitution and democracy suspended.

For a government that once engaged and pacified Niger Delta militants, with carrots of amnesty, money and empowerment, the demand of the release of detained Boko Haram members can be met: at least government can release those members, after meeting the leadership, as being canvassed by Nigerians, as a gesture of goodwill. It is the easiest of the demands that is doable, as I see it.

But the other demands just do not make sense.

Boko Haram demands Sharia and the Islamisation of Nigeria. This is plain nonsense. It will never happen in this country unless the Boko Haram militants are ready for a full-blown sectarian war. Religion is a very emotive thing in our country. From reactions to the attacks on churches and the Quranic School in Sapele, it is quite clear that both adherents of the two popular faiths are prepared to die in the defense of their religions. Two centuries ago, the Jihad of Uthman Dan Fodio, tried to achieve the same objective and even tried to ‘drop the Quran in the sea’. But the march was halted at various fronts, including the Kanem-Bornu axis, where a brand of Islam was already in place, and swaths of land we now know as the Middle Belt—Plateau, Benue, Kogi, Taraba, parts of Gombe and Adamawa, parts of Kaduna and Nasarawa and so on. In present Nigeria, the population of Christians and Muslims are almost 50-50 of the 160 million Nigerians the last census claims to exist. In my view, the ideologues of Boko Haram must really be living in the clouds thinking they could achieve the Islamisation of Nigeria by their present campaign of bombing.

Besides, the demand for Sharia is superfluous; Sharia is already in the Nigerian constitution, available for those who want it. And as we know, some states have taken advantage of this and announced Sharia in their states. Putting it on the table as a condition that we must meet before the cessation of bombings calls into question the reasoning of the Boko Haram leaders. Have they not read our constitution? Don’t they hold strategic sessions?

Also stupid and impracticable is the group’s demand that the Nigerian constitution be suspended and democracy scrapped. Scrap the constitution for Sharia? Replace the Nigerian democracy with Islamic Theocracy? These ideas will not work; they will never fly, they are simply puerile. And the intransigence of the Boko Haram dissidents on this issue may be at the root of why the government has not been able to reach some accommodation with them, why government has chosen to treat them with scorn. Boko Haram leaders: you are asking for the impossible!

This impossible objectives that Boko Haram is pursuing has spurred has suspicions that the Boko Haram movement is waging a political campaign, masquerading as an Islamic Jihad. The conspiracy theorists allege that the group has sponsors who want to plunge Nigeria into a religious war and also want to overthrow the seven-month-old government of Goodluck Jonathan.

If this is the hidden agenda, again it is achievable only via a full-scale civil war, 40 years after Nigeria ended its first war and is preparing to bury the leader of the rebellion.

If the Boko Haram militants do not want Jonathan, they have to wait till 2015, and vote him out in a free and fair election. Nigeria’s first South-South president had been elected for a four-year term. The Supreme Court had just validated the election. The opportunity to change our leaders at periodic, fixed elections is one of the attractions of democracy. Even budding theocracies in the Arab world are using the ballot boxes to make choices about who to lead them.

If sectarian strife is what the Boko Haram militants and their sponsors are also working hard for, they should heed the warning of General Theophilus Danjuma in 1979, when he said, with prophetic emphasis, that Nigeria having survived a civil war, will never survive a sectarian war.

Boko Haram bombers and their sponsors: think! There may not be a country to inherit after all these bombing missions!

Onanuga is the editor-in-chief of P.M.NEWS and TheNEWS.
More views by Onanuga available at his blog:www.bayoonanuga.com or http://bayoonanuga.com