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Why We Must Fight And Win This War Against The Zealots By Nosa James-Igbinadolor
Introduction The socio-political landscape of Nigeria has since the 1980s been characterised by varying forms of violence. Beginning with the Maitasine insurgency in 1980, and trailed by a plethora of successive ethnic, religious and social upheavals in the 1980s and 1990s, the Nigerian state has unenthusiastically dealt with these nihilists insurgencies in a manner that laid the basis for the insurrection against the state that we as a nation have had to face since 2004 when Asari Dokubo’s Niger-Delta Volunteer Force (NDVF) threw the gauntlet against the integrity of the Nigerian state.
The battle against Boko Haram can be justifiably coined as the “battle we were supposed to fight years ago but refused to” This counter-terror battle is a battle that must be fought and won with the enemy holding the white flag in surrender. Anything other than that would pose a strategic threat to the sustenance of the Nigerian project.
It has been suggested within intelligence circles both in Nigeria and outside that the clear and present danger we face in the name of Boko Haram insurgency has its roots outside the country. There is ample evidence as consistently stated by the leadership of the United States Africa Command and supported by intelligence reports by our country’s different intelligence services, that Boko Haram has over time received training, funding and logistic support from Islamist elements Mauritania, Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb (AQIM) as well as from the Somalia based Al-Shabaab responsible for the recent deadly terrorist attack at the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya.
This unholy nexus of international terror that seeks to make Nigeria ungovernable with the ultimate aim as relentlessly stated by Boko Haram’ spokespersons of imposing Taliban style Islamist rule in large parts if not the whole of the country presents a clear and present danger to our country and its people. In my view, this situation if feebly handled can only lead to one clear outcome – THE DISINTEGRATION OF THE FEDERAL REPUBLIC OF NIGERIA.
In this article, I intend to historicise the relationship between our failures in the past to effectively tackle simpler and less lethal conflicts and the watercourse of violence and warfare being perpetrated in large parts of Northern Nigeria today. I will also argue that the intelligence and security services need to be reformed and strengthened in order to better fight local and international terror. Finally, I will recommend a series of holistic measures to fortify the capacity of government to meet its social contract with its citizens especially with respect to ensuring their security.
In The Beginning To better understand the Boko Haram violence and the silence if not covert support of certain sections of the country to the stated mission of the terror group, there is a need to go back in Nigerian contemporary religious history and understand the conflict that existed in the 1960s and 1970s between the Tijaniyya sect of Islam which was then overwhelmingly dominant in the Muslim North as a result of Usman Dan Fodio’s jihad of 1804 and the emergence of the Wahabist form of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia by Sheikh Abubakar Gumi under the patronage of his mentor, the late Premier of Northern Nigeria and Sardauna Sokoto, Sir Ahmadu Bello.
Al-Tarikah al-Tijaniyya, or ("The Tijani Path") is a sufi tariqa (order, path) originating in North Africa but now more extensive in West Africa, particularly in Senegal, The Gambia, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, and Northern Nigeria and Sudan. Its adherents are called Tijani. Tijani attach a large importance to culture and education, and emphasize the individual devotion of the disciple.
Wahabism is a form of Sunni Islam and it is the only officially accepted religion of Saudi Arabia which brutally suppresses other religious tendencies whether Islamic or non-Islamic. It was founded in the 18th century by Mohammed Ibn Abdulwahab. This brand of Islam is particularly intolerant of Shia and Sufi faiths which it considers heretical.
Over the past fifty years, Saudi Arabia flush with rents collected from its massive oil fields has pumped billions of petro-dollars into propagating the Wahabist doctrine and ideology through the funding of Madrassas, the construction of Mosques and the training of hate preaching clerics. In Africa, Sudan and Nigeria have been the biggest beneficiaries of Wahabist funding, thoughts and ideas.
For over one hundred and fifty years, there has been the ‘Mahdist’ tradition across West Africa where Prophets materialize and declare their own “messagership”, for instance in the case of Mohammed Marwa known as Maitasine who attracted large support and incited violent disturbances, but was killed in clashes with the Army in 1980. Maitasine made claims for his own powers going far beyond the proprieties of orthodox Islam verging on heresy.
Many different Muslim groups and sects exist today. The Qadiriya and Tijaniya brotherhoods which have been well-entrenched in Nigeria are well represented. The Islamists deplore the existence of the secular state; believe it is the vehicle of corruption and decadence that will lead back to the state of barbarism – the Jahiliya that prevailed before the advent of Islam.
Of the more extremist Islamists groups with the Sunni community, the Yan Izala is foremost. It was founded by Sheikh Abubakar Gumi with the backing of Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, and opposes the activities of the Sufi brotherhoods (Note: one of the reasons if not the major reason Emir Muhammadu Sanusi of Kano was deposed and exiled by Ahmadu Bello had more to do with the struggle between Sufism as practised and propagated by the Emir and Wahabism as promoted by the late premier)
The Izala group which like Al-Qaeda, Taliban and other extremist groups believe in the literal interpretation of the Quran was headquartered in Jos by the duo of premier Abubakar and Sheikh Gumi because Jos was seen as the frontier of Christianity and Islam. Its goal is to stop the growth of other religions and sects that do not belong to Izala (Wahabism). The Izala can be found not only in Nigeria but in large numbers in Chad, Niger and Cameroon. That is why anytime there is a religious crisis in Nigeria, Izala adherents from these countries flood into the country to engage in combat (Note: Boko Haram leader Mohammad Yusuf belonged to the Izala group until he broke away when he believed that the group had become more tolerant of other Islamic tendencies).
It was only after the terrorist attack on the khobar towers in Riyadh in 1996 that the Saudi authorities began to appreciate the impact of its permissiveness towards the Wahabists, and its security services especially the prince Nayef Ibn Abdul-Aziz led Interior Ministry and the Prince Turki Ibn Faisal led General intelligence Directorate began to clamp down hard on the extremist and violent wing of the Wahabist/Salafist groups.
Note that any country that the Wahabist ideology and the funding has permeated has been involved, is being involved or will be involved in future in one form of crisis or the other –Sudan, Nigeria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan, Indonesia are examples of societies that have experienced or are experiencing Wahabist fuelled crisis of one form or the other. The reason is simple: unlike other sects of Islam such as Sufism, Agha khan, Shia, Ahmadiya, etc, Wahabism as a religious ideology is totally opposed to any form of compromise or co-habitation with any other religion or Islamic denomination, it seeks to eliminate every thought, nostrum, idea and activity that is not in line with their extremist beliefs. As such Wahabism is as much a religious ideology as it is a political movement (note: King Abdul Aziz Al-Saud, the founder of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia went into alliance with Wahabist leaders allowing them large influence over religion and politics in exchange for their support in his conquest of the varied Bedouin tribes and amalgamation of these tribes into a unified kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1902. Since then the sons of Abdul-Azeez Al-Saud who have ruled successively after the death of their father in 1954 have maintained the tradition of allowing the Wahabist clerics to preside over issues of law, education, culture and many parts of Saudi society while they the Princes preside over the politics of the state.
The Season of Anomie From the early 1980s Nigeria began to increasingly experience political, social and economic crises of varying proportions. These crises however differed in quality, typology and brutality between the North and the South of the country. While in the South, majority if not all of the crisis and attendant violence centred around issues of land, ethnic identity and the outrage against military rule and its concomitant policies, the preponderance of the violent conflicts in the northern part of the country have been and remain overtly or covertly religious in nature. Whether tied to issues of identity or land conflicts, religion was and remains a tool for mass mobilization of conscripts to do battle between the competing divide.
No period typified this era of ecclesiastical/jihadist warfare more than during the Babangida regime where one religion was seen to be government protected and promoted to the detriment of other religions. During this period, violent and hate-filled sermons against Christianity and Christians, Jews, Shia’s, Sufists, Ahmadiyans and other Islamic sects by late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi and other Izala preachers in Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto, Maiduguri, etc provided the platform for the young subscribers and adherents of these extremist preachers to become the jihadist of today. It was no wonder that there were constant religious crises in the 1980s and early 1990s whether at ABU Zaria, Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Bauchi and later Plateau and Borno axis. Because successive governments neither made any effort to discourage these hateful messages nor attempted to sanction the purveyors of these hateful Izala sermon, impressionable young minds such as those of Mohammed Yusuf were suborned to regard every teaching and message that differed from the Izala/Wahabist strand as satanic and Christianity especially as “westerntoxification”. On the contrary, these ideologues like Sheikh Gumi and his assistants were welcomed by the highest authorities in the land as pious reinforcements against threats to their hold on power. Thus was established in the minds and beliefs of many Muslims the supremacy and infallibility of their religion and the inferiority of other religions which were regarded as unwelcome competitors in the market place of proselytization.
The election of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo as president in 1999 was regarded as “haram”, an affront to Islam amongst many Izala/Wahabist and other extremists. Every avenue was used to create upheavals of one kind or the other in order to delegitimize the regime. Furthermore, the elections of Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan have decidedly deprived these leaders of access to power and the perks of having access to power. As a journalist then reporting in Jos, I closely followed the planning and execution of the September 9, 2001 crisis in the state and there is absolutely no doubt that religious leaders in Jos North and Bauchi state especially Izala leaders used the banner of Islam to initiate and sustain the pre-meditated violence.
Other violence perpetrated by Islamic groups included killings and destruction in the Danish Cartoon aftermath, the resentment to the holding of the Miss universe beauty contest in Nigerian and the use of the Thisday Newspaper article as an excuse to demean the contest, to riot maim and kill. There was also the killing of persons and burning down of churches and businesses of Christians in Borno state in response to the eclipse of the sun where the alleged sinful lifestyle of Christians was blamed for the eclipse. There are a plethora of violent attacks to point to, planned, initiated and executed by extremist Islamic groups for which no single person has been indicted and judicially sanctioned. The outcome of the constant lethargic and lackadaisical response by the federal and local authorities to the constant breach of the peace and law by Islamic groups has been the emboldening of these groups to mutiny and levy war against the Federal Republic of Nigeria. For many of us, it was a prophecy foretold.
The Security Infrastructure It is my sincere opinion that the Nigerian security services are not fit for purpose in the fight against terrorism. I will be the first to admit that terrorism is difficult to eliminate as experiences from Israel, India, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka have proved. However terror campaigns can be contained if not eliminated.
In my view, the weak link in the Nigerian security infrastructure is the Nigerian police force. The police as the largest and most widely tentacled of the Nigerian intelligence community should be able to constantly provide real time information on perceived threats to state security, actual threats, terrorists’ movements as well as other critical information. However years of poor capacity building, poor funding, maladministration, and corruption have made the behemoth inefficient and incapable of meeting its mandate.
I posit that the first way to start the reform of the police force is to develop a five year medium term restructuring programme (MTRP). This restructuring would encompass the following:
§ The Federal Intelligence and Investigations Bureau of police as well as the various SIIBS should be placed under the leadership of officers of the Department of state services and the National Intelligence Agency who have the requisite experience in Security intelligence and operations instead of the current situation where criminal detectives with questionable capacity head these departments. § Officers of the state security should be seconded to the various SIIBS to serve as field operatives and operations’ managers for a period of five years in order to build the capacity of middle and low level FIIB and SIIB officers in contemporary security intelligence/operations § There is an urgent need to adopt contemporary scientific and technological tactic in the fight against terrorism. As such ,each police command must have a standard forensic laboratory that will handle issues such as DNA, finger-prints (Note that one the greatest weapons in John Edgar Hoover’ FBI fight against organised crime in the united states was the use of finger print) Finger prints from registrants at INEC, the NCC and the FRSC could be collated and a sizeable databank of prints would be available to the security services in the fight against terrorism § There is equally an urgent need to train police officers in customer service and relationship management techniques. This is necessary because the police are viewed with suspicion across the board and only a novel public affairs management strategy would suffice to engender trust between the public and the police. People will only willingly give information to those they trust § The question must be asked, must the leadership of the Police, SSS and the NIA be officers from the same organization? Isn’t it a truism that the constant resort to appointing serving police officers as Inspector-General only lead to the calcification of the top and the negation of new ideas, views and strategies that will otherwise have been available and adoptable when appointments into the leadership of the police and other security outfits are not solely tied to membership of the service. George Tenet, William Casey, Leon Panetta, as well as General David Petreaus were not intelligence officers nor worked for the CIA but they did provide excellent leadership for the firm. Most of the Directors of the FBI were legal practitioners, Judges or prosecutors with excellent knowledge of law enforcement. Practically all sheriffs in the United States are elected persons with sparse law enforcement knowledge. I posit that allowing for external input in terms of leadership would go a long way in expanding the capacity of the security services to enforce their mandate efficiently.
Counter-Terrorism Strategy If it is accepted that Boko Haram/Jihadism as a movement must be fought to a standstill, what then would be the acceptable strategy to meet the challenge and defeat this group/movement. I posit unequivocally that the first step to take to
§ Deny the movement and other terrorist groups the oxygen of publicity which they so need and use effectively to put fear in Nigerians and exercise fear over those who would otherwise have wanted to assist with information. Using the state of emergency as a platform, there is an urgent need for the federal government to forward a bill to the national Assembly that declares Boko Haram a terrorist and as such be denied publicity on the page on newspapers and electronic media in the country. The bill should make it an offence to print or air the voice or words of any Boko haram official or spokesperson. This strategy was used effectively against the Irish Republic Army by Margaret Thatcher. Naturally the press lobby would protest heavily against it but it can stand and it can achieve the purpose of reducing the publicity that the Jihadist so desire § Secondly there is the need to discontinue the use of civilian courts to try terror suspects as the Nigerian judiciary as proved to be either inefficient in protecting the integrity of the nation or complicit in the insurgency against the state. I recommended that the government seriously consider the use of special tribunals with civilian and military jurists or full military courts to try the jihadists who levy war against the Nigerian state. This strategy is like the first recommendation likely to engender a backlash from the press, the civil society groups and the bar/bench but it is a strategy that can stand the criticism and achieve the goal of keeping terrorists and their backers out of circulation. In this regard, terrorist fighters captured in the field and their identified comrades, financiers and backers should be denied the opportunity of maximising the benefits of our extra-liberal judicial system to escape justice and engage in further terror. § In the fight against Umkhonto we sizwe in South Africa, the South African security services employed the strategy of specialist but overwhelming force through the use of special counter-insurgency/terror units made up of operatives of military intelligence, the Bureau of state security (BOSS), and Army/naval special Forces to engage and overwhelm the armed cells of the ANC’s Umkhonto we Sizwe. In times of war and peril to the life of the state, unconventional warfare becomes necessary. This strategy has worked in South Africa, Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Israel, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and North Ireland. There might be the need for accountability at the end of the conflict but this strategy is perhaps the most effective in eliminating further threat to the peace and integrity of the country § A further strategy to deal with the jihadist menace is to offer Nigeria as the base for the United State Africa Command Headquarters. While this strategy will not be popular, it sends a strong signal to the enemy and to the international community that the Nigerian government has no intention of allowing the country to fall apart. Furthermore it allows for adequate assistance of all types in the fight against anti-state tendencies. This is worth looking at but might be untenable due to popular perceptions of independence, and territorial integrity. § Furthermore, there is the urgent need for the Federal Government, in conjunction with the National Assembly to criminalise hateful sermons that incite persons or groups against people and properties of any religious groups. Hate-mongering preachers should be clamped on by the law and made to pay a serious price for their hateful and inciting statements. The denigration of any religion or denomination should be criminalised. The objective of this is to serve notice that government will protect the right of every religion to be practiced in PEACE. Thus hateful word such as “infidel”, “kaffir”, “bad Muslim”, “bad Christian”, etc should be criminalised as well as legislated as defamations for which one could sue for damages. (Note: in order to allow for racial harmony and unity between races, the U.S government had to criminalise the use of hate words such as “nigger”)
Social contract The government has an obligation to the people of Nigeria. In security studies, it is an evident trutht that to achieve overall national security objectives, the welfare needs of the people must be met, there is a need to assuage the feelings and bottled up anger of Nigerians as to the unfair system in place through the convocation of a National Conference whether sovereign or not that would debate, deliberate and dissect the Nigerian question.
Whether the government likes it or not , divisive issues that have persistently plagued the polity including the questions of indigene/settler dichotomy, secularism versus multi-religion, federal character, devolution of powers, revenue sharing, unity of the country, security, sharia, federalism and others can never be decisively resolved through the national assembly but through a forum of ethnicities that would effectively decide the course of the country over the next hundred years and usher an era of peaceful co-habitation. A situation where people are not allowed to discuss freely if and how they want to live within an entity will only lead to further confrontations and crises. As long as we continue to shy away from this fact we will only continue to postpone the evil day.
I conclude by urging the imperative to defend the unity and existence the country from the centrifugal forces that are bent on tearing it apart.
Nosa Igbinadolor is a Political Economist with strong interest in National and Global Security Affairs
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