Former President Olusegun Obasanjo has warned that the Boko Haram insurgency may continue beyond the next 30 years, if the fundamental issues that led to the formation of the terror group are not addressed.
The ex-President noted that unless the menace of out-of-school children is tackled, the country would only be training potential Boko Haram fighters who would continue the bloodletting.
He also said until the nation’s leadership begins to treat the “actual disease instead of the symptoms”, there would be no headway for the country.
Obasanjo, who spoke during the virtual 2022 Murtala Muhammed Foundation Annual Lecture, stressed that some powerful Nigerians have turned the Boko Haram sect into a huge industry through which they syphon the nation’s resources.
The ex-President linked Boko Haram to the inability of government to meet the legitimate demands of the people.
He said: “In 2011 when Boko Haram was just showing its ugly head, I went to Maiduguri (Borno State) to find out a little bit more about the sect and to also find out what their objective was. I found out that apart from being interested in Sharia, they also complained that their followers had no jobs and were fighting to get something legitimate for their followers.
“In the process, the government started chasing them and gunning them down. What I feared at that time seems to have been happening. At that time, Boko Haram did not have much external connections; the ones they had would be Nigerians who had resources abroad, who were helping them.
“My fear was how we could be able to keep them away from Al-Qa’ida and other international terrorist organisations. We seem not to have been able to do that, which has made the situation worse.
“There is poverty, unemployment and social disparity. But I believe that emphasis should be placed on education. The population of Nigeria today is about 215 million and 15 million children are not in school. It doesn’t matter how we deal with insecurity. They are the potential Boko Haram members.
“If we don’t do anything about these out-of-school children, we are already nurturing the Boko Haram of tomorrow.”
In his lecture, titled: Beyond Boko Haram: Addressing Insurgency, Banditry and Kidnapping Across Nigeria, keynote speaker and Ekiti State Governor Kayode Fayemi noted that despite the warning signs, “not much prepared most Nigerians for the new phase of insecurity that was signaled by the emergence of the radical extremist group, popularly known as Boko Haram, and the devastating campaign of terror it has waged for over a decade now”.
He added: “The Boko Haram movement proclaimed itself from the outset as a radical extremist built on a peculiar doctrine of religion that aimed to supplant the secular nation-state project with a parochialist theocratic version.”