Gwynne Dyer
IT IS not known if the word “dysfunctional” was
invented specifically to describe the Nigerian state – several other candidates
also come to mind – but the word certainly fills the bill. The political
institutions of Africa’s biggest country are incapable of dealing with even the
smallest challenge. Indeed, they often make matters worse. Consider, for
example, the way that the Nigerian government has dealt with the Islamist
terrorists of Boko Haram.
Or rather, how it has failed to deal with them. Boko
Haram (the phrase means ‘Western education is sinful’) began as a loony but not
very dangerous group in the northern state of Bornu who rejected everything
that they perceived as “Western” science.
In a BBC interview in 2009 its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, claimed that the
concept of a spherical Earth is against Islamic teaching. He also denied that
rain came from water evaporated by the sun.
Bornu is a very poor state, however, and his
preaching gave him enough of a following among the poor and ignorant to make
him a political threat to the established order. So hundreds of his followers
were killed in a massive military and police attack on the movement in 2009,
and Mohammed Yusuf himself was murdered while in police custody. That was what
triggered Boko Haram’s terrorist campaign.
Its attacks grew rapidly: by early 2012 Boko Haram
had killed 700 people in dozens of attacks against military, police, government
and media organisations and against the Christian minorities living in northern
Nigeria. So last March Nigeria’s president, Goodluck Jonathan, promised that
the security forces would end the insurgency by June. But the death toll just
kept climbing.
In September, a senior official told The Guardian
newspaper that “There is no sense that the government has a real grip. The
situation is not remotely under control.” Last week alone saw six people dead
in an attack on a church on Christmas Day, seven killed in Maiduguri, the capital
of Bornu state, on 27 December, and the abduction and murder of fifteen
Christians, mostly by slitting their throats, in a town near Maiduguri on the
28th.
President Jonathan’s response was to visit a
Christian church on Sunday and congratulate the security forces on preventing
many more attacks during Christmas week: “Although we still recorded some
incidents, the extent of attacks which (Boko Haram) planned was not allowed to
be executed.” If this is what success looks like, Nigeria is in very deep trouble.
Part of the reason is the “security forces”, which
are corrupt, incompetent, and brutal. In the murderous rampages that are their
common response to Boko Haram’s attacks, they have probably killed more
innocent people than the terrorists themselves, and have certainly stolen more
property. Right across the country’s mainly Muslim north, they are Boko Haram’s
best recruiting sergeants.
But it is the government that raises, trains and
pays these security forces, and even in a continent where many countries have
problems with the professionalism of the army and police, Nigeria’s are in a
class by themselves. That is ultimately because its politicians are also in a
class by themselves. There are some honest and serious men and women among
them, but as a group they are spectacularly cynical and self-serving.
One reason is Nigeria’s oil: 100 million Nigerians,
two-thirds of the population, live on less than a dollar a day, but there is a
lot of oil money around to steal, and politics is the best way to steal it.
Another is the country’s tribal, regional and religious divisions, which are
extreme even by African standards. In the mainly Muslim north, 70 per cent of
the population lives below the poverty line; in the mostly Christian south,
only half do.
Now add a ruthless Islamist terrorist group to the
mix, and stir. Boko Haram’s support does not just come from a tiny minority of
religious fanatics and from grieving and angry people turned against the
government by the brutality of the security forces. It also comes from a huge
pool of unemployed and demoralised young men who have no hope of ever doing
anything meaningful with their lives.
Democracy has not transformed politics dramatically
for the better anywhere in Nigeria, but the deficit is worst in the north,
where the traditional rulers protected their power by making alliances with
politicians who appealed to the population’s Islamic sentiments. That’s why all
the northern states introduced sharia law around the turn of the century: to
stave off popular demands for more far-reaching reforms.
But that solution is now failing, for the cynical
politicians who became Islamist merely for tactical reasons are being
outflanked by genuine fanatics who reject not only science and religious
freedom but democracy itself.
Nigeria only has an Islamist terrorist problem at
the moment, mostly centred in the north and with sporadic attacks in the
Christian-majority parts of the country. But it may be heading down the road
recently taken by Mali, in which Islamist extremists actually seize control of
the north of the country and divide it in two. And frankly, lots of people in
the south wouldn’t mind a bit: just seal the new border, and forget about the
north.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist
whose articles are published in 45 countries.
