Kudos
to the Nigerian military for getting back its groove. For too long, we
have wondered what went wrong, thrown our hands up in despair at its
seeming incompetence and confusion, at the way it allowed Boko Haram to
keep it on its back foot, or even often with its back turned in frantic
escape. Much has been said about how this was not the military that did
Nigeria proud in Liberia and Sierra Leone. There were a couple of
particularly depressing episodes that made the news; like the mutiny
last year in which soldiers fired at their commanding officer in
Maiduguri, and then the court martials in which tens of soldiers were
found guilty of cowardice.
Now, that narrative has turned
(for which we are much relieved), it is tempting to start making
exaggerated or prematurely triumphant claims, as many are now already
doing. I’m referring to government officials and supporters of President
Goodluck Jonathan, overly eager to portray him as a miracle worker, as
though he hasn’t been the Commander-in-Chief since 2010. It was the same
thing that happened with Ebola. The Federal Government has now grown
comfortable with monopolising the credit for its defeat, whitewashing
out of the narrative the roles played by several other factors
(including the unobtrusive but omnipresent Luck). With Boko Haram, as
with Ebola, there is a complicated interplay of varying forces at work
behind the recent turning of the tide. And what fervent supporters of
the President fail to realise is that any attempt to singlehandedly
credit him with the turnaround will throw up the deeply embarrassing –
and unanswerable – question: Mr President, why now?
In
my opinion, credit for the success should go to all of the following:
the Nigerian military for waking up to its responsibilities; the
opposition All Progressives Congress and activist groups like the
#BringBackOurGirls Movement for consistently putting pressure on the
President and his government; President Jonathan for finally realising
that he has a critical role to play as the President in inspiring the
troops and providing leadership (we saw him pay his first, long overdue,
visit to the troubled region in 22 months, in January; someday,
perhaps, in his memoir, he will be able to explain why he stayed away
for so long), and the neighbouring countries of Niger, Chad and Cameroon
for finally realising the need to directly collaborate with the
Nigerian government. And we must of course not forget to thank the
forthcoming general election, it played an important role as well in
jolting the Commander-in-Chief into taking his C-in-C responsibilities
seriously. There must be many Nigerians today, especially in those
troubled areas, who must now be wishing that presidential election
happens every other month in Nigeria. Then, they would get to see their
President often, and enjoy the relief of knowing that Boko Haram can and
will be restrained and even punished.
The role of the three
countries that share a northeastern border with Nigeria deserves further
assessment. For some reason, until January this year, all three mostly
stayed away, offering very little in the way of direct help and support
to their Nigerian counterparts. Cameroon was the worst offender, staying
out of the Baga-based Multi-national Joint Task Force, preferring
instead to operate solitarily, even though its territory offered, in
much of 2013 and 2014, refuge to Boko Haram fighters in between their
attacks on Nigeria, and even though its territory was also occasionally
suffering attacks from the sect. Finally, in January 2015, all three
countries banded together with Nigeria to present the formidable
offensive that has significantly rolled back Boko Haram’s bloody
footprints. (Since that collaboration started, Boko Haram has turned its
sights to Niger and Chad as well, as Abubakar Shekau promised in a
January video – the first reported attacks on the two countries happened
in the first half of February 2015).
The discerning will of
course not fail to note the irony symbolised by the operations of the
Chadian forces on Nigerian soil. Three decades after Nigeria asserted
its authority by pursuing Chadian insurgents out of Borno State, deep
into Chad, the roles have reversed themselves. We have come a long way
from the Babangida years, when “the Chadian question” loomed large on
our foreign policy menu, and when we hosted, in Abuja, talks aimed at
finding a permanent solution to the Chadian civil war. It is now the
turn of Chad to chart out a plan of action for “the Nigerian question.”
But
this is hardly the time for giving in to nostalgia. This particular end
– the crushing of Boko Haram – will justify whatever means are deployed
to bring it about, even if those means require the constant pricking of
Nigerian pride. And now that Nigeria and its coalition partners are
winning, all the countries involved need to do everything they can to
ensure that defeat is not snatched from the jaws of victory.
Which
leads us to the most important question: that of what next – what will
follow after we have managed to push Boko Haram out of the lands and
lives of Nigerian citizens in the north. A victory over Boko Haram will
be, not an end, but a beginning. We will need to rebuild the schools and
hospitals and prisons and villages and towns that the insurgency has
destroyed. It is a task that will cost billions of dollars, and take
years to accomplish. And that brick-and-mortar work will merely be the
easy part. How do we rebuild the faith of citizens in a government that
abandoned them to their fate for years? How do we heal the trauma of the
tens of thousands who have lost family and loved ones? How do we teach
people to build their lives back from nothing, in the same villages and
towns in which those lives swiftly and dramatically fell apart? And,
very importantly, what are we going to do with the thousands of armed
civilian joint task force members, after the hostilities have quietened?
Will there be an equivalent of a Niger Delta Amnesty programme, to
ensure that we do not have on our hands large numbers of armed, jobless
youths living on the edge of frustration? Will they be co-opted into
some sort of statutory civilian defence squad, the beginnings of state
police? If they are demobilised, what sort of jobs will be available to
them, in a region experiencing several layers of blight?
The
last time we were faced with a task of national reconciliation as grand
as this one, was more than 40 years ago, when the civil war ended. The
circumstances, of course, were very different from today’s – Biafra was
not a terrorist insurgency by a band of psychopaths seeking to assert
their authority in the most brutal, bloody manner possible.
But
the reconciliation that will be required will need to be just as
ambitious as Gen Yakubu Gowon’s post-war programme (and the jury is
still out as to how much Gowon succeeded). Already, the Federal
Government has established the Presidential Initiative for the
North-East, to implement a Marshall Plan of sorts for the troubled
region. There will be lessons to learn from the Niger Delta, where
recent big government post-conflict. interventions – the Ministry of the
Niger Delta Affairs and the Niger Delta Development Commission – have
largely failed to make the sort of impact one would expect in bringing
prosperity and development to the area, and have only succeeded in
mastering means of diverting benefits meant for the many into the
pockets of a few.
The foregoing of course assumes that the
momentum against Boko Haram will be sustained in the coming weeks and
months, and that things don’t somehow spiral out of control and put us
back where we were in 2014, arguably the most humiliating year in the
history of Nigeria’s military.
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