Ẹni tó bá mọ nǹkan pamọ́, kí ó rántí ẹni tó mọ̀ọ́ wá

Posted 11 April 2013

By Dr Gary K. Busch

Ẹni tó bá mọ nǹkan pamọ́, kí ó rántí ẹni tó mọ̀ọ́ wá (Whoever hides things should know there are those who can find things)


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There is a very important current discussion in Nigeria about how to deal with the problems posed by the Boko Haram terrorists of the North and the unruly dissidents of the Niger Delta operating under the rubric of MEND. This discussion affects many more people worldwide than those living in Nigeria and there is increasing frustration internationally about Nigeria’s incompetence and unwillingness to deal with these problems effectively.
One of the prime reasons for the failure of Nigeria to deal with these problems is that it does everything it can to disguise the origins of these conflicts and who is backing these terrorists and dissidents. In the old American cartoon strip, “Pogo” the chief character, Pogo Possum reports to his friends “"We have met the enemy and he is us". Nigeria seems to be locked into a denial of what almost everyone knows is the truth about the origins of these conflicts.

There are two simple, self-evident, facts which must be addressed before any solution can be procured. Boko Haram was established, funded, armed and directed by the Northern elites, including governors, traditional rulers, former presidents, legislators and military chiefs. The Delta dissidents were established, funded, armed and directed by the South-South elites, including governors, traditional rulers, legislators and military chiefs. In many cases the actual leadership of these two groups, Boko Haram and MEND, were trained together in Libya at the same terrorist school in Benghazi.

The notional driving force behind Boko Haram is its ambition to create a Muslim state in Nigeria, governed by Sharia Law. The question of the legal co-existence of a Sharia law system in parallel with Nigerian civil law was raised in 1999 when the civil government of the former General Obasanjo was begun under a new constitution. Before independence the British allowed Islamic law to be practiced but with the first Nigerian Constitution and elections the new Nigerian Constitution did not recognise Islamic law as equal to civil law or binding on citizens unless they wanted to be so bound.

With the return of Nigeria to civilian rule there was renewed pressure for Sharia Law. Despite many misgivings, in 2000 several states were given the option to use Sharia law. Since 1999 Sharia has been instituted as a main body of civil and criminal law in the Muslim-majority and in some parts of three Muslim-plurality states for Muslim citizens. In 2002, in defiance of the authorities in Oyo State, the Supreme Council of Sharia carried out a ceremony in Ibadan's central mosque to inaugurate a panel to rule on civil matters in the region; to be empowered to decide on matters such as marriage, divorce and land disputes... The extension of Sharia law to a southern Christian state (actually the West) was a bold move by the Muslims. It was strongly rejected by the Christians.

This imposition of Sharia Law was predicated on the premise that it could be introduced to parts of Nigeria which had a Muslim majority. That was the rationale for Federal Government permission. The problem this caused was that there was, is and continues to be no true evaluation of what part of Nigeria actually has a Muslim majority. In no region is this problem better emphasized than in Plateau State. While the Plateau Muslims claim that they have the right to insist on the imposition of Sharia Law, the Muslim population is only slightly over 40% at best by every calculation and census figure In regional and local government area elections the Christians have constantly held a majority (especially in centres like Jos). Nonetheless the militant Muslims of Plateau have demanded the political control of the governorship and elected offices in the region; with limited success. That is why the creation of a terrorist organisation like Boko Haram was built and tolerated as it attacked Christian communities across Plateau. This has been echoed in other states where the Muslims claim a majority but in which their actual numbers are well below the majority.

What Boko Haram has found, much to the displeasure of the self-appointed Northern elites is that there are a very large number of Christians in the North. Other than in three states there is a large Christian presence; a presence which is being activated by the open support of the Northern elites; a Christian presence which is gathering its forces together to repel the excesses of Boko Haram and Sharia.

In the latter years of Obasanjo’s second term, the Northern elites felt a growing sense of diminishing power and they felt that the concomitant rise to power of the South-South (particularly the Ijaws) was threatening them, They had been fighting running battles in Plateau State and elsewhere with the largely Christian pastoralists and the felt their interests would only be maintained in Nigeria through the formula of “zoning” in which the powers of the state are divided among the various ethnicities; theoretically sustaining balance. The President, Obasanjo (a Christian Yoruba) was seeking an unprecedented Third Term; the Northern Atiku Abubakar was being forced out of his Vice-Presidency by Obasanjo; and the Efiks. Ibibio, Igbo and Ijaws of the Delta were getting very rich on the production of oil which had reached over USD$135 a barrel on world markets.

The Northern elites decided that they would have to insist that there be no Third Term for Obasanjo; that they would put a Northerner (Yar’Adua) in power as the President and head of the PDP party; and that they would send many Fulani and Kanuri children from the Northern madrassas to Libya and the Middle East for training. Under the pretext of sponsoring youngsters to study in the Middle East, they sent them to terrorist training camps. That was the birth of Boko Haram.

The newly-trained jihadists claim to have been trained in eight different countries namely Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Egypt and the Niger Republic. They travelled as a group and received basic and advanced training. As proof of the success of their training they sport a mark (tattoo) showing their proficiency. The mark is in the form of a sword held in a hand. That is regarded by those who went through the training as the “license to kill for Allah”. These included Ali Baba Nur, Asari Dokubo, Jasper Akinbo, Mohammed Yusuf, Salisu Maigari, Danlami Abubakar, Cletus Okar, Ali Qaqa, Maigari Haliru and Asabe Dantala.

The militancy of Boko Haram was muted under the short Presidency of Yar’Adua, a scion of one of the most powerful Northern families. He kept Northern political hegemony in power and most of his close associates were from the Northern elites. They kept Boko Haram in check. However, Yar’dua was far more ill than anyone knew and died during his first term after a protracted stay in a Saudi hospital. His Vice-President, Jonathan Goodluck, became the accidental president; much as he had become the accidental Governor of Bayelsa when his mentor. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the Governor was forced from office in 2005. In 2007 he was Vice-President and in 2010, at the death of Yar’Adua, he became President. In the meteoric rise to the top he had very little chance to pick up the skills and abilities needed for the job, especially in dealing with political sophisticates like Babangida, Obasanjo, Aliyu Gusau and David Mark; all of whom had years of plotting, coup-making and intrigue. Those who could have helped him, like General T.Y. Danjuma, were ignored and isolated. Jonathan has bungled his way in the Presidency ever since. His cardinal sin, in the eyes of the North, was to run for President on his own instead of allowing a Northerner in to finish the ‘Northern turn’ cut short by the death of Yar’Adua.

With the accession of Goodluck Jonathan to the Presidency the violence of Boko Haram was escalated and murder and mayhem have become the rule in many Northern communities. This has sparked a reaction from the Christian communities there. They have now begun to retaliate against their Muslim neighbours and, in the words of General Danjuma, “Nigeria is in total anarchy today. In the case of North, the danger is very real…we are in the middle of a civil war in northern Nigeria. There is no defined front in this particular war, and worse still, the enemy is faceless and unknown. There is no immunity for anyone. Moreover, this war is highly contagious. Needless to say, the social and economic cost is incalculable.”

In the last few weeks the amnesty granted to MEND seems to have fallen apart as well. The earliest groups to form were MEND and the Delta militants. They were funded by the South-South governors of Rivers, Delta and Bayelsa states and their political allies to make it difficult for the forces of law and order (the ‘Kill and Go’ police and the Task Force) to interfere with the stealing of oil in the region; known in Nigeria as ‘bunkering’. Every day the Nigerian economy loses between 150,000 and 320,000 barrels of oil. These are stolen by 'bunkerers', who have small tanker vessels which load the oil in the Delta and tranship this stolen oil to offshore tankers which deliver this stolen oil to other West African states. In addition to the theft of crude oil, other inland illegal tanker trucks load the imported refined products and drive these into neighbouring countries for black market sale. At $100 a barrel that amounts to around US$30 million a day for crude oil and around US$8 million per day for gasoline (PMS) and diesel. In short the bunkering of oil and refined products in the South-South brings in an illegal $42 million a day or over US$12 billion a year.

This illegal trade was pioneered under President Abacha when Rear Admiral Mike Akhigbe and his naval colleagues Victor Ombu and Ibrahim Ogohi established the smuggling of petroleum products from Port Harcourt and Warri to neighbouring West African countries. This naval assistance was important as over fifty vessels were engaged in the bunkering. A few years ago an aerial surveillance of Lagos coastal waters revealed no fewer than fifty vessels and boats being used for oil theft. The Navy is still involved in bunkering although land-based attacks on pipelines are still common. In the last few weeks Shell has closed its Nembe main pipeline for repairs to all the holes made in the pipeline by bunkerers as did ENI of its pipeline in Bayelsa.

The justification of this bunkering of oil in the Delta was that the local communities were not benefitting from the extraction and sale of ’their’ oil. The pollution and spillages were in their areas and creeks but the money generated by the sale of the oil went to all of Nigerian states, under the Derivation Formula (13% to each state) which rewarded those states which didn’t have oil and took money away from those states that did have oil. The oil wealth did not result in jobs for the local communities and the monies paid to the state and local governments never reached the people as cash, welfare or infrastructural investments. So, with the encouragement of the governors and state officials this quasi-official band of bunkerers went to work stealing the oil and used some of the income to fund the Delta militants. Unfortunately this led to clashes with the Federal Government and the international oil companies.

The conflict with these groups between the military and the ‘terrorists’ took over the news and the public attention. The issues of losing USD$12 billion a year to theft receded in the public (and international) consciousness as the battles with MEND and the others took their attention. The international oil companies in the Delta, other than for the periodic inconvenience of the occasional kidnapping and ransom of staffs, were not terribly concerned, largely because most of the terrorist activities were concentrated on-shore and in the creeks. The international oil companies have production-sharing agreements with the NNPC which delivers the major part of the oil revenues for onshore production to the NNPC. For oil garnered from deep water production the oil companies receive around 60% of the revenue. They are financially better off delivering crude from their deep water wells so were not terribly concerned by the shutdowns of onshore production by MEND or anyone else.

However, the international outrage this battle with MEND and the emulators produced mad it imperative that there be a solution. Goodluck and his colleagues Dipreye Alamieyeseigha and Timi Alaibe entered into discussions with the militants and a formula was worked out which paid substantial sums of money to the militants to stop their activities. In Nigerian terms, they were “settled”. This system worked until about a month ago when the militants began to reorganise and threaten to resume their activities if certain actions weren’t taken by the Federal Government. Ostensibly that included the release of Henry Okah, a MEND arms supplier working in Angola and South Africa who had been sentenced to 24 years in jail in South Africa. The real reason was that those who had been “settled” had stopped or reduced payment to their followers and kept the money for themselves. The deal had to be renegotiated so it was very important that the chief architect of the MEND agreement, ex-governor of Bayelsa, Alamieyeseigha be freed from his Nigerian incarceration to work with Timi Alaibe to restore the smooth working of the MEND settlement. There was a great deal of unpleasant reaction in the Nigerian press against the amnesty for Alamieyeseigha but it was necessary for the resumption of talks with MEND. This is underway.

At the same time Jonathan Goodluck, who had recognised the role of the Northern elites behind Boko Haram has begun a move to declare an amnesty for Boko Haram. His firm intention is to “settle” Boko Haram militants along the lines of the MEND arrangements. This will not work. While the MEND protests were about money (with a cosmetic overlay of environmentalism) it is very different for the Boko Haram situation. The Boko Haram situation arose from the realisation that the power of the North was diminishing. The Nigerian Army, which had always been the backbone for Northern political influence, had been changing to an army dominated by the Middle Belt officers (mainly Tiv) as the Northern Fulani military caste was ageing, retiring and withdrawing from military activities. The Army was becoming less Muslim and more Christian or Animist, particularly the junior officers. The traditional Northern (mainly Fulani-Hausa and Kanuri) elites were Muslims and represented mainly sedentary farmers, operating under a system of feudal Emirs or Sardaunas.

Their ethnic groups extend far beyond Nigeria’s borders. The Fulani (Peul) are the remnants of the old Fulani Empire which dominated much of West Africa, and can be found in Guinea, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Burkina Faso, Benin, Niger, The Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Chad, Mauritania, Sudan, Egypt, Ghana, Togo and Côte d'Ivoire. They are a minority tribe in all but Guinea. The Kanuri (of Bornu State) ware the descendants of the Bornu Empire (1380-1893) which was a continuation of the great Kanem Empire founded centuries earlier by the Sayfawa Dynasty. In time it would become even larger than Kanem, incorporating areas that are today parts of Chad, Niger and Cameroon. These two Muslim ethnic groups make up the large majority of the members of Boko Haram.

Now these same ethnic groups are being challenged across West Africa, including Nigeria. The wars in Chad, Mali, Mauretania and the Central African Republic have generated Salafist Islamic terrorist groups linked to Al Qaida, including AQIM. These now share training, funds and leaders. Many of their fighters move around West Africa fighting alongside their counterparts. There have been many Boko Haram fighters in Mali and the CAR. Many of these Islamists from there have joined up to assist Boko Haram in Nigeria. There are now growing ties between Boko Haram and the international drug trade in the region. The Nigerian Northern elites cannot control Boko Haram anymore and that makes any sort of a settlement out of the question.

This has meant that the rest of the world, especially the U.S. and its allies are not just disappointed in the role of the Nigerian government in confronting terrorists; they are tempted to act on their own to help suppress Boko Haram. They have offered assistance to the Nigerian military authorities; they have supplied a mass of equipment; they have sent trainers and specialists; and they provide a regular feed of intelligence. The Army is willing to assist but the government is weak and vacillating. This is a recipe for conflict within Nigeria between the military and the civilian powers for control of the country and its future. The time is growing shorter before there will likely by a resolution of this dilemma.

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