Boko-Haram has been soft-targeting and now softer. It was churches, then schools, now football stadia and soon, open market places will join the killing spree. Until you properly define something, you can’t rightly forge a fitting response. Boko-Haram is evil and evil has no ethnicity, no religion, no nationality. It is against humanity and seeks to destroy it. If Boko is understood in this light, humanity will come together to delete it.
I have read opinions on how to clip it. Some say, form a committee of Islamic scholars and all that. It’s difficult to downplay such suggestions, especially coming from people on ground who know the heartbeat. This is why it should be given its rightful place amid others. Question is: do the Islamic scholars know Boko-Haram, is Boko-Haram about Islam? Many would say as I do, not quite or no; they’re as dangerous to Moslems as they’re to Christians and indeed any other faith. Some argue that lack of youth employment and widespread poverty form part of it. Perhaps. This line of reasoning aims to lay the blame on government whose duty it is to create jobs or enablement for them and subsequently, alleviate poverty. If government fails or is failing, Boko is validated. That’s a dangerous argument that takes sense from reasoning. By killing fellow youths in a stadium, how’s employment created or poverty alleviated? If you see it as a message, what’s the message of the bombed United Nations Building, to people taking their cares and worries to the Divine in solemn fellowship? What wealth is created by eliminating a worshipper or school girls in school premises? Bringing these other factors definitely mix things up and detract from the main issue: EVIL AGAINST HUMANITY. I’m not sure the backers of Boko knew what they were signing into. It’s just a breadth before they themselves become targets for destruction. When Cameroon decides to provide shelter to evil for inexplicable reasons, it is advertently getting ready for its own insurgency and it’ll come because, evil knows no nationality.
What’s creeping into the north is anarchy of horrendous proportion. Former Vice President, Atiku Abubaka has seen it and it’s good he has. Of all the suggestions, his, is one that captures the contour of the conflict. This is an asymmetric conflict in which the enemy destroys and returns to live and dine with us as one of us. In that situation, what can a well trained and fortified military do? The enemy is us and with us.
According to Atiku, there’s an urgent need for a government-backed civilian militia action if the activities of members of Boko Haram must be brought to a halt. He called for a stop to handwringing and trading of blames, none of which is able to save lives or change the status quo. Indeed, he attributed recent government successes at pushing the evil sect to the fringes of the northeast to the role of the militia which he rightly called the civilian JTF, ‘it immediately occurred to me that some of the credit for that should go to the ‘civilian JTF’ – the band of youth in and around Maiduguri who have taken it upon themselves to act as a vigilante force to fight Boko-Haram’.
Why is Atiku right? The youths know themselves and their tracks. If one kills and returns to mix, it’s they who know and who can reveal or not. Where the arms are hidden, how they come into the country, they know. It is they who farm in the remotest areas, herd cattle, fetch water, drink, smoke and womanize together. To leave them out is to leave operational intelligence out. More so, now that they’re the target, no other time is more apt to bring them in . This column has been advocating for the involvement of the people in the fight against Boko. It’s not just the civilian JTF, but equally important is a massive public sensitization. Until you make the people know that it is their war, they’d continue to call it ‘government versus Boko’. Now that the government has called it WAR, it must treat it as such. When the people understand the war as theirs and its victory as theirs too, would they shelter and cover up the enemy? Definitely, not.
Yes, arming youths to fight Boko has its darkend. Arms in the hands of unemployed youths and skill to use them could be a problem after Boko is routed. But this problem being known beforehand makes its solution foreseeable. These are youths who have fought for light to their fatherland, not Boko with darkness. The cooperation between them and the soldiers/government would make disarmament/re-orientation easier.
Precisely, Military JTF + Civilian JTF + Masses Involvement – Hidden Sponsors/supporters = Death to Boko-Haram.
Onyebuchi Onyegbule
