My mum just returned from Jos a few days ago. She had been there for two weeks. The day after she returned Boko Haram struck with a vengeance. Nigerians in Jos, Maiduguri and Kaduna have become the latest victims in what is becoming a never ending circle of Boko Haram torment. It is become increasingly difficult to keep up with the attacks and the loss of lives even though it’s on the news and on blogs. To be very honest sometimes I try to fast forward or scroll down because it’s become very ridiculous and very painful.

When Abubakar Shekau’s Boko Haram started 2009, Christians became an endangered species and so Boko Haram became an ‘Islamic terrorist organization.’ When they started killing Muslims, we labelled them as a ‘political terrorist machinery’ trying to frustrate the efforts of the then government since they obviously couldn’t be Islamic. Today, that government is no longer in power and we have run out of categories to put them in so we just label Boko Haram as a terrorist organization.

We spent so much time asking the wrong questions and putting unnecessary labels on Boko Haram and since we asked the wrong questions Boko Haram kept thriving because we were getting wrong answers and taking wrong steps. When the government declared a state of emergency without asking themselves if the military was capable of handling the insurgency, the good men of the Nigerian military had their asses flogged in the early stages and everyone suddenly had a euphoria that all the massive security budgetary allocation was not getting to the people it was intended to get to. Of course you know what happened after we realized that, the South African arms fiasco and the United States refusal to help us.

Jonathan’s government however, succeeded in bandaging the injury as a desperate means to get re-elected. Unfortunately, Boko Haram has resulted to the guerrilla tactics of bombing and shooting up small and large clusters of people while they allow the military chase dispensable henchmen. They are dictating the tempo of this game and we appear to have no clue how to turn the tables.

I watched in disbelief as the Plateau state governor, Solomon Lalong asked the Federal government to reinstate road blocks because roadblocks had been our principal security machinery. Road blocks mind you are usually for criminal entities you can identify, needless to say its level of effectiveness against Boko Haram is very limited. A road block is unlikely to discover a man or girl with a bomb strapped around their skin, even if it did, people stuck in the traffic created by the road block would be killed because that bomb would still detonate. For all intents and purposes, the Nigerian military appears to be able to stop a Boko Haram army of foot soldiers but it’s yet to prove itself in handling guerrilla tactics.

The government must begin to tackle Boko Haram’s recruitment machinery, it must begin to understand the internal structure and the major players of the Boko Haram sect because Shekau alone cannot be calling all the shots and even if he was, how are the messages and personnel deployed? Our intelligence gathering must go way beyond analyzing topography, it must begin to discover and intercept key communications because for crying out loud the WiFi in Sambisa forest isn’t fast enough to upload all those YouTube videos. Our intelligence gathering is so non-existent that the military has killed Shekau so many times but he somehow manages to get sent back from hell every single time.

Attacking Boko Haram henchmen and killing them isn’t enough anymore, we need to capture people higher up the food chain who can spill the beans after a few hours with our very capable military interrogators. Honestly, all this is made complicated because these methods take time to develop and produce results even in a well-organized society and in Nigeria, time is the only thing we don’t have.

God help us all.

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