By Palladium
In his book, ‘Scars: Nigeria’s journey and the Boko Haram conundrum’, former Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) Lucky Irabor calls for the declaration of a state of emergency to marshal all elements of national power towards ending the insurgency in the Northeast. Undoubtedly, that declaration would also deal with the insurgency cum banditry in the Northwest and North Central.
Months ago, this writer called on the federal government to put Nigeria on a war footing by mobilising about 30,000 to 50,000 troops to deal with banditry and Boko Haram once and for all. In the words of Gen. Irabor, “The understanding of Boko Haram as purveyors of anguish and torment under the cloak of religious puritanism should serve as a lesson for all in our future socio-cultural and socio-political interactions.” The former CDS also argued that the actions of the insurgents were disconnected from religion which they, however, use to mask their predatory and nihilistic goals.
At the rate misleading inferences are distorting the terrorism narrative in Nigeria, especially with allegations of intentional genocide ascribed to government connivance, if not collusion, it is no longer realistic to continue to waffle about labels and definitions or which measures are sensible and adequate to combat terrorism in the North. For years the Nigerian government had deployed sterile paradigms to fight terror and experimented with a mixture of kinetic and non-kinetic measures based on their understanding of the multifarious roots and manifestations of the crisis. This is sheer sophistry. While much progress has been made in battling banditry and Boko Haram, it is nevertheless time to mobilise once and for all to defeat the spreading cancer.
It is only after victory that it may be time to embark on non-kinetic measures to deal with the root causes of the crisis. To rehabilitate insurgents midway in the war is, for instance, to open the government to allegations of official connivance, another way of saying, as Gen. Irabor argued, that the country lacked the political will to defeat insurgency. It is not certain that insurgents are deliberately dispersing their forces into autonomous cells to saturate all parts of the country with terror and stretch the military thin and run them ragged; but whatever the causes of the dispersal, the government must urgently stop the haemorrhaging before more states are ensnared.
