President Goodluck Jonathan and former President Olusegun Obasanjo have been embroiled in some controversy over the appropriate strategy to tame the scourge of terrorism in this country. Obasanjo believes Jonathan’s response to the Boko Haram menace has been rather slow. For him, Boko Haram would have been nipped in the bud if the government had been fast, as according to him, he did in Odi in 1999 when he deployed troops there. But Jonathan disagreed, contending that the deployment of troops in Odi did not solve the problem of militancy in the Niger Delta region. Rather, that exercise resulted in the premature termination of the lives of mainly old men, women and children. He was also very emphatic that none of those militants was killed in that invasion even as it did not succeed in stopping militancy. To him therefore, that exercise did not achieve the desired objective and to that extent was a failure.
Apparently piqued by these assertions, Obasanjo, through his former spokesman Femi Fani-Kayode has come out strongly to justify his invasion of Odi in Bayelsa and Zaki Biam in Benue states arguing that the objective of both operations was to uproot terrorists and discourage their resort to the killing of law enforcement agents. For him, after both exercises, the killing of soldiers and police men diminished in those areas.
But Obasanjo seemed to have contradicted himself when he sought to argue that he never recommended the “Odi treatment” to be adopted to quell the Boko Haram onslaught. He claimed that what he meant was that “a solution ought to have been found or some sort of action ought to have been taken sooner rather than allow the problem fester overtime like a bad wound and get worse”
If that is the new argument, what was the purpose in drawing parallels between his handling of the Odi killings and Jonathan’s handling of the security challenge posed by the Boko Haram insurgency? Why did he not go ahead to say what he had in mind rather than engage in comparisons that have tended to convey the impression that he is recommending the Odi approach to the festering Boko Haram challenge? It would appear to any discerning mind that the latest attempt by Obasanjo to clarify what he had in mind by comparing his approach to the Odi affair with the current handling of the Boko Haram insurgency cannot tie up. It looks more like an attempt to revise himself apparently having realized the incongruity in any attempt to equate one to the other.
The truth of the matter is that the security challenge posed by the killing of policemen and soldiers by the militants is substantially different from the current terrorism levied on the nation by the Boko Haram menace. While the militants were demanding greater share in the resources which nature benevolently bestowed at their backyards and compensation from years of exploitation through pollution, the propelling imperative of Boko Haram is substantially different. Its grouse is with western education even as it intends to impose an Islamic state in this country. In terms of venting their grievances, the approaches of the two are also very different. The militants largely targeted oil installations, facilities and their personnel especially foreigners whom they kidnapped, extracted ransom from and subsequently released. Some of their captives were unlucky as they did not come out alive.
But Boko Haram is a different thing altogether. It is a classic case of a well organized terrorist and fundamentalist religious group pursuing some weird ideology. Its original claim to be pursuing an anti- western agenda has been contradicted by the senseless killing of innocent people through its suicide bomb attacks targeted at churches. Apart from its initial attack on the United Nations building in Abuja which wreaked immense havoc on lives and property, the churches and their worshippers have been the greatest victims of these senseless attacks. This gives the impression that the ultimate agenda of the sect is to impose Islamic religion in this multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious country.
Besides, militancy was largely limited to the creeks in some areas of the Niger Delta region but Boko Haram has its operational base in the northern part of the country even as its activities are more felt in some states than others. I am not well groomed either in military science or military theories. So what can be considered eclectic in handling the challenges posed by the Odi matter and the Boko Haram onslaught is better left to military experts.
But one thing that seems to stand out very distinctly is that the two cannot be handled in a similar fashion as Obsanjo’s comparison would lead us to believe.
Before now, we have been told that one of the factors that fuelled the Boko Haram insurgency was the brutal manner their leader Muhammed Yusuf and his followers were killed in Maiduguri some years back. It was for the same reason that the same Obasanjo had to meet with some leaders of the Yusuf group in a peace deal brokered by the leader of the northern civil society coalition, Mallam Shehu Sani. If the Maiduguri operation which can in some way be compared to the Odi invasion became the leitmotif for the upsurge of the sect’s insurgency, it stands to reason that that strategy proved counterproductive in the circumstance. Instead of stopping the group, it rather reinforced their determination to wage an all out war against the government. It is doubtful given its spread and operational mode, Boko Haram can be wiped out through the type of operation Obasanjo conducted in Odi. But then, that operation as we have been told by Jonathan did not even succeed in uprooting militancy.
Even then, some northern leaders have been crying out against the activities of the Joint Military Taskforce JTF in areas suspected of harboring the insurgents. There have been allegations that each time there is a bomb explosion or an attack on the JTF in an area, their response will be to cordon off that area and raze it down. In such operations, innocent souls suffer immeasurably, they seem to be arguing. The point being canvassed here is that the Odi approach is in a way also playing out in the handling of the Boko Haram sect. The whole idea of razing down hamlets where some insurgents are suspected to be residing is guilty of punishing the innocent for crimes they know nothing about. So if this is the approach Obasanjo had in mind, it is in some sense being applied in the war against Boko Haram. But as events have shown, it has proved unsuccessful in taming the monster.
Moreover, we have also been told that Boko Haram has serious foreign backing as our porous northern boarders have been exploited to their devious benefit. It is therefore very unlikely that given the spread in its activities; agenda, lethal sophistication and doctrinaire motivation, Boko Haram can lend itself to the Odi handle. It possibly cannot.
Again, the fight against terrorism is now a global affair. It may be an exercise in wishful thinking to suggest that an all out war can be a solution to it. And since ours is a very recent development, we need to get at those political, social and developmental issues that are at the root of this insurgency. We also need to get at the root of those sponsoring it for us to overcome the menace. Rather than military action, what has failed us most in this matter has been either the dearth of intelligence information or lack of the political will to confront the little information at our disposal.
