ALIYU HAYATU looks at the effort of the military in curbing insurgency, advising that efforts be placed on intelligence gathering to stop further attacks on soft targets
In his message to the 2015 annual conference of Nigerian Army top brass, read by Chief of Defence Staff, General Abayomi Gabriel Olonisakin, President Muhammadu Buhari, raised the possibility of extending the December, 2015 deadline he gave to the military to defeat the Boko Haram terrorists.
In its outing of Monday, 7 December, 2015, when this five-day event started in Dutse, the Jigawa state capital, BBC Hausa Service, carried an interview with the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Tukur Yusuf Buratai, during which he did not rule out the possibility of the army requesting for such an extension.
Could all this be an attempt by the national and military leadership to prepare the minds of Nigerians for an eventual extension, thus vindicating those commentators and critics who had voiced the view, right from the start, that the deadline was ill advised, unrealistic and unattainable?
Whatever may be the case, a deeper reflection on issues should leave no one in doubt that the military operation, since the coming of Buhari, has been a huge success and that the mission assigned by Buhari had been accomplished well before the December, 2015 deadline. To appreciate this position, it should be noted that the most serious and humiliating dimension of Boko Haram activity entails those instances when the terrorists would storm locations, with blatant, defiant impunity, attack such locations, killing many, destroying property, stealing lots and lots of items of food stuff and abducting men, women and children.
There were instances such as in Baga, when the military failed to intervene, while the terrorists engaged in their campaign of murder and destruction. There were similar instances when the soldiers fled in the face of Boko Haram attacks – flight of disgrace and humiliation, which saw the soldiers even fleeing into the neighbouring countries of Niger, Chad and Cameroon.
With the coming of Buhari and his changing of the leadership of the military, all this disgrace and humiliation came to a stop. The gallant soldiers were no longer chased away from their positions by Boko Haram terrorists. Indeed, the military is now on the offensive, going deep into the, hitherto, forbidden Sambisa forest. Appraising the situation recently, an analyst, speaking on German Radio (Hausa), observed that the increasing attacks by Boko Haram terrorists in Chad, Cameroun and Niger Republic were because of the flight of the terrorists from Nigeria, arising from the relentless onslaught on them by the Nigerian troop.
The routine seizure of Nigerian territory by the terrorists has been effectively checked; and indeed, as was confirmed by Brigadier General Nicholas Rogers of Defence Headquarters, on Nagarta Radio, who disclosed that all areas seized by the terrorists have been recovered by the Nigerian military. This is about all that can be expected to be accomplished within the President Buhari deadline. In other words, the defeat of the terrorists was accomplished even long before the December deadline.
Of course in any war situation, the defeat of an enemy does not mean the immediate cessation of all hostilities. Remnants of the enemies, who had escaped capture and liquidation, may launch pocket of attacks here and there. The challenge before the Nigerian military is to put in place an effective and efficient communication system through which alert on such attacks can be issued and received; and a well equipped and highly mobile rapid response force that can rise up to any such challenge.
The question may, of course be asked as to how it can be claimed that the December, 2015 deadline had been met when deadly suicide bombings are still being perpetrated.
The simple answer is that dealing with suicide bombings is not the primary and immediate responsibility of the military, (infantry and armoured brigades and the Air force), because the faceless perpetrators of these crimes are almost, always, one or two persons, constituting a sleeper cell, that has successfully merged into the wider national society and therefore, not easy to identify.
The responsibility in this regard falls upon the Directorate of State Security Service (DSS) and other intelligence agencies to sharpen their snooping capabilities to uncover these cells, the individuals operating therein, their activators and sponsors.
Upon this unmasking and identification, the intelligence agencies may then, effect an arrest, or call upon the mobile police or even the military, to deal with an emerging situation. Dealing with faceless suicide bombers is not, therefore, a task to which a deadline can be set. It may be accomplished within days or may take months or even years.
Unmasking and identification of those behind suicide bombings would amount to about the same thing as exposing Boko Haram chieftains. Therefore, the intelligence agencies should attach the greatest seriousness and urgency to the snooping assignment at hand.
In undertaking this assignment, the agencies may wish to go deep into the reported findings of an Australian secret investigator – Stephens Davis- to the effect that Lieutenant General Ihejirika, an erstwhile Chief of Army Staff, was allegedly funding Boko Haram. Credence would appear to have been lent to such complicity by numerous incidents of the mysterious withdrawal of soldiers from check points, only moments before targets near such check points were attacked by Boko Haram terrorists; and indeed the outright failure of soldiers, within a vicinity, to intervene, in the course of attacks by the terrorists, within such locations.
Terrorist attacks at Buniyadi, Chibok, Bama, Gamboru Ngala and even at Wusasa in Zaria, should serve to illustrate this point. If General Ihejerika, at the time he was heading the Nigerian Army, was supporting terrorism, it should not be unreasonable to conclude that President Goodluck Jonathan, who appointed him, was also involved. In the eyes of many, this allegation may have been confirmed with the impoundment of a private Nigerian plane, stuffed with foreign currency by the South Africa authorities.
And when the scandal blew into the open, Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor, President, Christian Association of Nigeria, admitted ownership of the aircraft while the Jonathan administration also owned up owning the smuggled dollars found on board. When added up, one might want to conclude that there were certain forces in the immediate past administration fuelling this insurgency. Well, one may be wrong.
Nigerian security chiefs may also do well to reflect on the disclosure that in the said aircraft, there was an Israeli. Could it be that there is an Israeli connection to the terrorism afflicting Nigeria? In its edition of 10th October, 2014, the Nigerian Tribune Newspaper had reported the American Ambassador to Nigeria,
Mr. James Entwistle saying, “an open question we have to look at carefully is where the military expertise, (for Boko Haram) is coming from; how in the last one year they became more effective?”
Could this discovery of an Israeli in a plane allegedly dispatched on the orders of (then) President Jonathan on a mission to clandestinely, to illegally procure arms, be a pointer, not just to where this expertise was coming from, but to a secret coalition between Jonathan and the Netanyahu government of Israel, in the nurturing, fostering and escalation of Boko Haram terrorism? The task ahead of Buhari now is to ensure the nation’s intelligence agencies go deep, very deep, into these issues with a view to unmasking the linchpins of murder and violence so that a final, mortal blow can be dealt to terrorists and terrorism in all their ramifications.
Hayatu wrote from Zaria, e-mail: [email protected]
