For me and for many Nigerians, the emergence of General Muhammadu Buhari as president may not be a silver bullet capable of dispelling almost all real and imaginable wrongs of Nigeria, but then again, his presidency, we pray, may at least be better than Goodluck Jonathan’s, especially in the areas of combating the Boko Haram (BH) tragedy, which disturbs us the most.
But how Buhari will fight BH is what hasn’t been answered yet, both by Buhari himself as well as his supporters, while Buhari’s supporters often liken BH to Maitatsine of years past, where we were told as an assurance that “the moment the General flew into Yola that was the last time a thing was heard about group”. To the Buhari supporters, because BH and Maitatsine are the same (although Moses Ochonu of Vanderbilt University has shown no likeness between the two groups), the same way the General flew into Yola in the 80s to dispel Maitatsine is the same way he will fly into BH troubled zones today—an easy, simple, and singular act that will then make BH history.
On the part of General Buhari, however, each time he is asked about his proposed methodology of handling BH, his response is that he will find out what went wrong today with that gallant Nigerian Army he used to know—of Burma, DR Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Darfur, etc—as opposed to the army of today. But this is at best a lame response to a momentous and thought-provoking question, especially coming from an army General and former military head of state.
Contrary to Buhari’s suppositious approach, counterinsurgency (courtesy of United States Government Counterinsurgency Guide, 2009) defines as both a “comprehensive CIVILIAN (my emphasis) and military efforts taken to simultaneously defeat and contain insurgency and address its root causes”.
Thus, from the definition above, how does Buhari think that BH could be tackled by addressing the problems of the military only, without applying CIVILIAN counterinsurgency operations such as political, economic, psychological, and civic actions, too?
How about approaching the menace by looking at counterinsurgency theories that have been tested and proven to be effective, such as ones proposed by Marcenado, Liddell Hart, Galula, Thompson, Kilcullen, Zamberbardi, and van Creveld? How about using other soft influences such as population control and public diplomacy to win the war against insurgency?
At the end of it all, the war against insurgency, it seems, is one that can only be won after coming up with shrewd, hard-nosed decisions that seek to continually counter the changing aspects of the lived realities upon which these insurgents and their activities spawn. Counterinsurgency cannot be achieved by subjecting us to accept either a “flew-into-Yola” blackmail, or even the wherewithal to find out what actually went wrong with our army.
Mohammed D. Aminu
