Terror can wait, By Hakeem Baba-Ahmed
‘Do not stand in a place of danger trusting in miracles’.Nigerian proverb.
It would appear that terrorist activities across the land is on the resurgence.Certainly that is the opinion in much of the media whose major staple had briefly been replaced by the intensity of electoral activities.The terrorist himself may have paused for a while to let the country go through a ritual that had everyone excited.Some terrorists, whose particular trade depended on availability of massive amounts of cash may have felt a pinch from the crippled attempt to create a cashless economy, but there were options to cash which they fell back on with little discomfort.Other terrorists with political colours paused to see if the elections will make a difference in their dispositions towards the Nigerian state and their fortunes.Others saw a vacuum created by the desperate clamour for the next set of leadership of the same country they treated with contempt, because it was neither a protector of the population, nor an adversary to be feared.New or mutated terrorists and causes may be in the making, but much depends on the type of political leadership which emerges after 29th May, and its attitude and plans on engaging pervasive terror.
The terrorism that started as Boko Haram insurgence has lost much ground on two fronts.Its stranglehold on a huge chunk of the North-East has been successfully challenged by Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA),and it has lost territory, fighting capacity and pride.It bleeds fighters by the week, and is exposed to improved effectiveness of forays from Nigerian air assets.Large numbers of ‘defectors’, whose real status is difficult to establish, suggest that a combination of low morale and weakened control over local populations and territories is limiting its potency.It is, nonetheless, conversant with a terrain that allows it to merely exist as a low-level threat, and it can exist in that state for as long as the situation does not change radically against it.
ISWA appears to have plans of making fringes of Nigeria and neighbours its base for a long-term stay.Replacing Boko Haram, or assuming the role of the dominant regional terror group will require it to adopt a different approach regarding the entire Sahel, and will be influenced by effects of global developments in the complex relationships between regional, faith and strategic considerations.It will be a major challenge for the next administration in Nigeria to understand the current strengths of terror in NE and the Sahel, as well as its motivation.Higher quality of thinking, strategic engagements with major interests in the entire Sahel, disposition of world powers towards the region and quality of local leadership are all important.The Sahel represents the world’s most dangerous ungoverned territory, and while the terror it harbors can wait, beleaguered populations and a world threatened by human failures and environmental threats will not.Nigeria must lead in inviting the world’s attention to its gaping sore which is the Sahel.
The last decade had exposed the fragile balance between governance and security in Northern Nigeria in particular.Weakening state structures and collapsed values that tied the citizens to the state have been made worse by poor governance.The Nigerian state-particularly in the North- had no capacity for mitigating the vulnerability of the weak and poor which is the vast majority in the tens of millions of its growing population. The scale and spread of banditry and industry-scale kidnapping can only be explained by state failure.The state retreated as much because it lacked the capacity to reverse decay it had allowed to grow, as due to the deep-seated corruption and impunity that had made it impossible to nip Boko Haram in its infancy.
Terror saw a weak state and exposed populations.Citizens ran or submitted.Terror fed and grew.A few populist politicians attempted to erect straw fences, locking out some profiled citizens and locking-in others, or locking both in spaces that had had no boundaries for centuries.A few leaders wrapped cloth around home-made muscles and sent them after imagined enemies.Others struck deals with terror, and went through elaborate charades of fighting it.Communities learnt self defence, and virtually every one of them became a victor today and vanquished the next day.Distances grew between communities that had nowhere to run except into each other.Governors designed outfits and created the impression that citizens will sleep in peace.Now that strategies and politicians have failed to make any citizen more secure, the real consequences of designer security measures are evident in all places where hate, profiling and false hope have created higher levels of hostility in Kaduna, Kogi, Nassarawa, Benue, Taraba and virtually in all places where former neighbours had become permanent enemies.And the state has no answer to the new bloodletting, some triggered by recent political campaigns in which God and Hate became interchangeable currencies.Kidnapping has resumed its pride of place all over the country, and no one is safe.
Add hate speech and intense disputes at the outcome of the last elections and dire threats over all judicial outcomes, and you have a country that will absorb all the energies of its leaders in limiting the expanding scope of organized crime and terror.A well- founded doomsday scenario is already unfolding.Inter-community relations have been badly fractured all over the country, but most significantly between Igbo and Yoruba communities who are locked into messy arguments some of which will shame our entire history.Relationships between faiths and neighbours have been badly polluted, and they will feed insecurity.Latent irredentism will get a boost unless the judiciary says Perter Obi should be sworn-in on the 29th of May.Without a strong, united elite which will pull many Igbo away from the thinking that Nigeria has no room for an Igbo president, now or ever, the South East will become even more restive.There will be many parts of the country that will be indignant that Igbo’s cries are undeservedly shriller, and the potential that Igbo as identity could be resented in many quarters exists, and should be avoided.More than six million Nigerian voters voted in favour of an Igbo president.Millions of others chose other candidates.There are strong grounds to be made for Igbo remaining in the Nigerian political mainstream.What it needs is the leadership to actualize it.
Dealing with terror and winning the fight against many forms of insecurity will the most important task of the next administration. Terror has eaten deeply into the nation’s fabric, but it is still strong enough to fight it and win.The next president has to be strong and be supported by a strong circle that believes that Nigeria has no easy choices, and there will be no region that will left out of the battles that need to be fought against poor governance, corruption and injustice.These breed terror.Terror can wait and feed on weak nations.Miracles do not defeat terror.
Article first published by Vanguard
