by Mark Amaza

 One hopes that the Buhari administration will not declare a premature victory over Boko Haram when its psychopathic leader, Abubakar Shekau and his top lieutenants are captured or killed.

During the 2015 General Election season, one of the major issues that dominated campaigns was that of insecurity in Nigeria, specifically the insurgency being waged in the North-East by the terrorist group Boko Haram.
The insurgency was not a key talking point of the campaign without justification: the group has been directly responsible for the deaths of at least 13,000 Nigerians and at a point was in charge of territory the size of Belgium.
Although the Jonathan administration made massive gains against the terrorists after a lackluster response of many years and seized back almost all of the territory so far, there is still a clear and present danger from the terrorists, evident in the sporadic attacks in parts of Borno and Yobe States, repeated attempts to infiltrate Maiduguri and the numerous bombings within the city that is Nigeria’s 9th largest.

It is only fit and proper that President Muhammadu Buhari in the fortnight since he was sworn in has made it obvious that completely quashing the terrorist group is at the top of his security agenda, evident in his trips to regional partners Niger Republic, Chad and Cameroun and the reorganization of the Multi-National Joint Task Force, the regional force of the member countries of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC).

One hopes that the Buhari administration will not declare a premature victory over Boko Haram when its psychopathic leader, Abubakar Shekau and his top lieutenants are captured or killed. There will be need for security agencies to improve on its intelligence gathering to apprehend ‘lone-ranger’ terrorists capable of inflicting damage with the improvised explosive devices they put together and detonate, not to mention efforts by governments at all levels to reverse the conditions that made religious extremism to blossom in those areas.

However, I am of the opinion that Boko Haram will not be the defining security issue over the next four years for the Buhari administration – that position belongs to the recurring crises in the Middle Belt, specifically across Plateau, Benue, Taraba, Nassarawa and the southern part of Kaduna State.

While the world has been focused on the insurgency in the North-East, almost weekly, villages and town in this vast area which is also Nigeria’s food basket have come under repeated attacks, with the number of lives lost in the thousands and even much more displaced.

So far, there have been simplistic explanations for the conflict, in which the attackers are always described as Fulani herdsmen and the victims as hapless farmers. While there is an element of truth in this, the conflict is in reality far more complex – the history of these conflicts go as far back as two centuries ago to the expansionist wars of the Sokoto Caliphate and the Fulani Jihads, but in recent history, they have been further fuelled by economic issues (climate change which forces herdsmen into farmlands), politics (rumors of local politicians backing militias) and criminal networks (gang of cattle rustlers that keep stealing cattle). It is intellectual laziness that seeks a one-dimensional view of the conflict as one in which Fulani Muslims seek to exterminate predominantly Christian ethnic groups in the area.

But the biggest problem is the seeming inability of governments to propose deep and long-lasting solutions to complex issues, in addition to not acting promptly to stave off larger disasters. So far, we have failed to learn from history in the way we treat security problems in their infancy and we fail to ask until they start to threaten the existence of the country.

It is why we refuse to pay attention to grievances in the Niger Delta on poverty and environmental degradation despite it being the goose that lays the golden egg for the country, and turned a blind eye to the increasing militarization of the region by politicians for the purposes of winning elections until the militancy in the area caused our crude oil production to plunge by more than half in 2008.

It is why we never paid attention to the fact that the North-East with its extremely high rates of unemployment, poverty and illiteracy coupled with the porous borders across countries with high rebel activity had become a hotbed of Islamic extremist preachers until the Boko Haram sect became violent. Even at that, our security agencies went to sleep after the capture (and extra-judicial murder, it must be pointed out) of Boko Haram founder, Mohammed Yusuf rather than remain vigilant on his deputy, Shekau.

I am very optimistic that President Buhari will complete the war on Boko Haram very early into his tenure and will be able to reorganize the security agencies to strengthen intelligence gathering to stall future one-off attacks.
But as a matter of urgency, he must also pay attention to the Middle Belt crisis and together with his National Security Adviser and the state governments in the region work towards forestalling another major internal security issue.

There is no scarcity of ideas that attempt to define the problem, from this report two years ago by the Human Rights Watch to this newspaper editorial.

But one thing is for certain: President Buhari must do his best to prevent the conflict from taking more lives and avoid handing off the problem to his successor in four (or eight) years’ time as his predecessors did with the security issues that defined their tenures.

——————-

 Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.