Embattled President Muhammadu Buhari has arrived the northern city of Maiduguri as he seeks to encourage troops and their officers who lost a large number of their colleagues in a daring ambush by Boko Haram insurgents more than a week ago.
The killings of scores of Nigerian soldiers by Boko Haram insurgents during the first week of Nigeria’s presidential election campaign has put the administration of President Buhari under fire for its failure to deal with the insurgency.
Boko Haram fighters killed about 100 soldiers last week at a base in northern Borno State, the heart of the jihadist insurgency, according to Reuters.
Mr Buhari first acknowledged the deaths on Saturday night in a press release expressing “deep shock over the killing of military personnel” without confirming the number of casualties.
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On Friday, before the government or army had acknowledged the deaths, a video purporting to be from an Isis-backed faction of Boko Haram, known as the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP), claimed credit for the massacre at Metele military base near the border with Niger.
In a subsequent statement on Friday, the army did not provide a figure for the number of casualties, but noted that “the location is under control”. Mr Buhari, a former general and military ruler who briefly held power in the 1980s, was elected in 2015 on a promise to destroy Boko Haram.
The jihadi group no longer controls a territory the size of Belgium, as it did when he came to power, but it continues to terrorise north-east Nigeria at will long after the government claimed to have decapitated the group.
The conflict has lasted nine years, killed more than 27,000 people and displaced more than 2m. The army has struggled to control the crisis.
This month it named its fifth commander in two years to lead the fight, replacing a commander who took over in July.
Mr Buhari said on Saturday that the government was ready to give the military “all the needed support in terms of equipment and manpower to succeed in ending the renewed threat”.
“No responsible commander-in-chief would rest on his oars or fold his hands to allow terrorists to endanger the lives of its military personnel and other citizens,” Mr Buhari said.
Last week Mr Buhari’s chief rival for the presidency, former vice-president Atiku Abubakar, called for increased funding for the military and said he would fund scholarships for the children of the soldiers killed.
“It is unacceptable that terrorists and criminals are frequently better equipped than members of our armed forces,” Mr Abubakar said after reports of the soldiers’ deaths emerged. “It is the duty of the political elite to put aside any political differences and take a united stand to put an end to this.”
Idayat Hassan, director for the Abuja-based Centre for Democracy and Development, said their deaths were becoming “highly politicised”. “It is something that is believed can win or lose the election for either political party,” said Ms Hassan.
“This [attack] is countering the so-long-held assertion by the administration . . . that they have been able to defeat the Boko Haram insurgency.” The jihadis would probably escalate their attacks as February’s elections approached, said Cheta Nwanze, of SBM Intelligence in Lagos.
“From a strategic, tactical viewpoint, it makes a lot of sense for them to mount a big offensive in [early 2019] because everyone will be looking at the elections — the military will be distracted, all the security services will be distracted,” he said.
