The Muhammadu Buhari administration has been unable to draw a line of distinction between politics and governance in the business of government since its coming to power in 2015. Round the clock, the Buhari administration appears to be distracted by partisan politics away from its critical function of state management. Its pre-occupation with politics to the detriment of governance has resulted in the politicization of national security to such an extent that the precarious situation it inherited in 2015 has become worse four years after in 2019.
Almost always in a hurry to give the impression of having succeeded where its predecessors failed, the Buhari administration inadvertently made the failures of the past its bench mark for measuring its own success. By often resorting to measuring its success against the failures of the past rather than against a bench mark of overall good governance indices in line with acceptable international standards of best practices, the Buhari administration has reduced the barometer of comparative governance to a competition between two sets of incompetence.
By viewing the problem of insecurity, pretty much like other fundamental issues of economy and corruption, through the narrow prism of exclusivist partisanship, President Buhari under estimated the Boko Haram insurgency by considering his predecessors inability to rein in the group as entirely their individual fault. President Buhari’s simplistic reduction of the Boko Haram insurgency to corruption and indiscipline of past administrations was responsible for the faulty diagnosis of a problem that is far beyond the physical but rooted in a radical ideology of global Islamist revivalism.
The Buhari administration gleefully took credit for the appreciably scaled down of lethal attacks on mostly soft targets in vulnerable places such as markets, schools, mosques and churches in wide range of areas outside the North East including Abuja by triumphantly declaring ‘’Boko Haram technically defeated’’. This premature declaration of victory over the Boko Haram insurgents was not only disingenuous but was a wilful display of ignorance about the true nature of the enemy in what became the greatest undoing of government’s war on terror effort.
The scaled down of attacks on soft targets, which reduced the civilian casualties while the Boko Haram insurgency appears to have been restricted to the northeast, wasn’t so much the effort of the Buhari administration but a deliberate change of tactical strategy by the terror group. In March 2015, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Boko Haram insurgent group pledged allegiance to the ISIL and was acknowledged by a top official of the international Islamist terror group Abu Mohammad Al-Adnani. This singular act will henceforth internationalize an otherwise local insurgent group that was at the time under immense pressure from a renewed offensive by Nigeria’s security forces, which pressed them to fringes of the Sambisa forest in the process liberating several communities they had occupied.
Following their effective internationalization, Boko Haram was directed by ISIL to henceforth abide by Islamic rules of war engagements, which forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslim targets. In effect, this means a cessation of indiscriminate suicide bombings and attacks on mosques, markets, schools as well as other soft targets where any unarmed and non-hostile Muslim collateral damage. This was also a strategic move to regain the lost religious legitimacy among the local Muslim population following the carnage visited upon them and their communities which pressed them towards the government side. Abubakar Shekau who is clearly innately imbued with the Takfiri doctrine, which equates disobedience to disbelief, will have none of this. As far as he was concerned any Muslim who is not heeding the global call for Jihad by joining the ranks of his Boko Haram group is not a Muslim in the first place.
Following Abubakar Shekau’s refusal to abide the Islamic rules of war engagements, a split in the ranks of the Boko Haram insurgents will occur in 2016. A powerful column of fighters and commanders broke the ranks of the original Boko Haram group forming a splinter under the banner of Islamic State of West Africa Province, ISWAP, under the ISIL appointed leadership of Abu Musab al-Barnawi. This split left the Abubakar Shekau group sufficiently weakened and unable to carry on its hitherto indiscriminate killing spree across the country, which gave the false impression of a technically defeated Boko Haram.
ISWAP otherwise known as the Albarnawi group, in complete obedience of the Islamic rules of war engagements by meticulously avoiding Muslim targets and backed by ISIL logistics as well as training will emerge a ferocious fighting force. Between 2016 and 2019, ISWAP will swoop on several hard targets of military installations inflicting the heaviest casualty on Nigeria’s security on a scale never seen since the civil war. While the political leadership of the Nigerian was basking in the euphoria of a false sense of triumphalism, the dynamics in the theatre of war has changed from civilian terrorism to a full blown insurgency, which has seen ISWAP take head on, ground forces of mainly the Nigerian army leaving many dead and carting away caches of arms.
The ferocious resurgence of the Boko Haram insurgent terrorists is an indication that contrary to official claims, the deadly sect is far from being degraded. To sustain the impression in the public space about its self-assessed successes in the war against terror, the Muhammadu Buhari administration has deployed more energy to either suppress or obscure and in some cases filter information about the true state of things out of the epic centre of the theatre of the insurgency war than in the real task of energizing boots on the ground to decisively defeat one the world’s deadliest insurgent group.
While the government is pre-occupied with well-choreographed cameo freak shows of its successes in degrading Boko Haram insurgents, the deadly activities of the group has not only become widespread like an untreated cancerous cell in the human body, but has actually stretched Nigeria’s security forces to breaking limits. Whereas, the Boko Haram insurgents has mutated into a well-armed professional fighting force, the Nigerian Army was left without adequate men, equipments and motivation. In the past week alone, ISWAP has attacked about military bases in in Damasak, Monguno, Mobbar and Nganzai local governments of Borno state. These attacks also coincided with a suicide attack by the Abubakar Shekau led Boko Haram group, which left several people dead or injured in Konduga town, some 36 kilometres from Maiduguri the state capital.
Frustrated by lack of progress at the frontlines of the war on terror, Nigeria’s army chief, Gen Yusuf Buratai made a startling revelation. The revelation by the Army Chief to the effect that ‘’it is unfortunate, but the truth is that almost every setback the Nigerian Army has had in our operations in recent times can be traced to insufficient willingness to perform assigned tasks or simply insufficient commitment to a common national and military course by those at the frontlines’’ is a clear indication that Boko Haram has technically defeated Buratai’s Army.
An insurgency that is primarily driven by a radical ideology cannot be defeated by force of arms alone. Similarly, the leadership of Nigeria’s security force that is heavily skewed in favour of a section of the country is not likely to command national loyalty. That ISWAP abides faithfully with ISIL decreed Islamic rules of war engagements that forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslims is of strategic disadvantage to Buratai’s Army as the insurgents now enjoy enormous legitimacy as the predominantly Muslim population in the main theatre of the war on terror no longer consider them as lethal adversaries. The implication of this is far reaching to the extent that there is near freeze in cooperation between the local population and government forces particularly in the area of native intelligence sharing making it easily possible for ISWAP to occupy larger swaths of land today than ever before through the hearts and minds of the native Muslim population.
Considering the reality that the seeds of radicalization were sown in the main stream Muslim theology guarantees a steady flow of radicalized individuals that are daily swelling the ranks of the insurgent at a rate that out paces both its own loss of men with capabilities to overwhelm an already over stretched Buratai Army. It is seeming intractability of the war on terror arising from an incompetent political leadership of the Nigerian state that has made officers and men of the Nigerian Army war weary. Unfortunately, concerted efforts to tame the scourge of radical Islamic ideology, which propels global Jihadi movements such as ISWAP has not been activated as the conservative political leadership of northern Nigeria appears to make useful tool out of this situation for election protectionism against non-Muslim Nigeria in the power struggle over the control of state resources for elite benefit. The long term strategy of ISWAP is to effectively decimate substantially Nigeria’s entire security forces in terms of men and equipment by narrowing the insurgency to a single theatre of war in the north east corner of Nigeria.
Dahiru, a public affairs analyst, writes from Abuja
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Sky Daily
