Boko Haram Crisis:Nigerians return home to inspect damages

Scores of the residents of Gamboru in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State have returned to the newly-liberated city to inspect damages and decide whether they can permanently return. People who had fled the town last year, crossed the border with Cameroon on Friday under military escort to inspect the devastation caused by the Takfiri Boko Haram group. Gamboru was recaptured from Boko Haram earlier this month by Chadian troops, who have joined the recently-formed multinational force to fight against the militants. Boko Haram had seized Gamboru in August last year, forcing thousands of its residents to flee across the border to the Cameroonian town of Fotokol, on the other bank of a river on the border between Cameroon and Nigeria. “We met a ghost town strewn with burnt vehicles, destroyed buildings and emptied homes,” said Kachalla Moduye, a former resident of Gamboru who had left the town after the Boko Haram attack, adding, “Many homes were burnt in the Boko Haram invasion and in the fighting to reclaim it by Chadian soldiers. Those that were spared were looted by Boko Haram in the five months they stayed in the town.” Gamboru has been under frequent attacks from the militants since 2009. The recapturing of the town came during the first operation of the 8,700-strong force that Nigeria and its immediate neighbors, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Benin, had pledged to create in early February in a bid to fight the Boko Haram militants. 

Separately, as Chadian forces were conducting sweeping aerial and ground operations, the Boko Haram militants prevented hundreds of residents from leaving a dozen villages in the nearby Marte district who were heading west from Gamboru. “They will not allow everyone to leave and threaten to kill anyone that attempts to flee,” said Maji Zaram, a villager who made it to Fotokol. Chad’s army pushed deep inside the Nigerian territory for the first time this week and bombarded the town of Dikwa near Boko Haram’s Sambisa Forest stronghold. The Nigerian army also announced on Thursday that its fighter jets had bombarded Sambisa Forest and the nearby Gwoza. Boko Haram militants took control of Gwoza in June 2014 and set up their base in the town. Nigeria’s military also regained the control of the nearby town of Monguno earlier this week. The violence fueled by Boko Haram militants, which started in 2009, has killed at least 13,000 people and rendered more than a million others homeless.

Boko Haram in Nigeria is a child of Nigerian history and the impunity of Northern Nigeria’s Military establishment. Armed conflict is part of Nigeria history. It is also a business which has enriched many.  People including generations unborn learn from history. The savaged brutality meted on civilians and civilian objects in Nigeria pre-exist Boko Haram. These acts of impunity were some of the methods deployed by successive military regimes, most of them from Northern Generals to accede and sustain power. The ongoing slaughter by Boko Haram follows the same pattern which in 1966 led to the Nigeria/Biafra War. The underlying cause of the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Southerners, mainly of the Ibo ethnic groups in the North was never comprehensively investigated, if at all.  There is no gainsaying that had the crimes been investigated, the result would have pointed to some powerful individuals within the Nigerian Military structure of Northern origin. For these, political power and control of the economy could only be attained through scapegoating communities whom they perceived as serious competitors.

The Nigerian/Biafra War was a curse on the conscience of the nation but a blessing to the Northern Military establishment. Many of these Generals made fortunes from the war and took the opportunity to entrench themselves in power. Olusegun Obasanjo like Good luck Jonathan came to power during that period as a beneficiary of the sad spoils of death. They were considered outsiders or trespassers to their god ordained power. For this reason, the country had to be made ungovernable to prove them and any person outside the North unfit to defend the constitutional order, national cohesion and republican values.  Under these dire circumstances, the Northern Military establishment, their feudal and religious confederacy would step in and take back power through democratic or other means. This is the rationale of the unfolding drama in the up coming election.

The culture of impunity and unchecked state supervised criminality against civilians during military rule under the Northern Military establishment in Nigeria was unprecedented.  This is the culture of impunity that gave birth to claims for Sharia States in some Northern states and coordinated attacks against Christians in Northern Nigeria.  The sharia claims emerged only when Olusegun Obasanjo a Christian from the West was elected as the first democratic President of Nigeria after Military rule. The political motivation for this move using religion a lethal weapon was not lost on keen observers of Nigerian politics nor to the Southern Military establishment and politicians or even Obasanjo. The hidden hand of his military peers from the North behind these acts of destabilization was obvious. This did not happen during the military rule dominated by the Northern Military establishment so also the so-called Fulani herdsmen slaughter of Christians and burning of Christian Churches in the North and the Middle Belt.