The danger of Shekau’s death mythology

“Were my days of living over,” said the Book Haram leader in a new video, “you wouldn’t have seen me here.” And this put an end to another official statement of his killing by the Nigerian troops. Shekau may not be the live-wire of the terrorist cult, but as its current spiritual overlord, his death may be symbolic in the nation’s quest to get rid of the disasters the insurgents have been incubating since their first major strike in 2009.
In war, propaganda is a lethal weapon. But when it’s misapplied in a situation, it yields a reverse of the impact it was designed to achieve. This is what Shekau’s “resurrections” portend, creating an impression of a desperate government forces and a romantic perception of one of the vilest characters ever in the history of this country.
Shekau has never ever presented an illusion of his invincibility. He’s owned up to his mortality and possibility of his killing in a 2014 video, where he even boasted that if he’s killed by the troops, a successor worse than him would emerge. This is so, from a logical perspective, because what the terrorists revolve around isn’t a personality. It’s a disturbing lot hollow ideology, a doctrine based on their polluted concepts of the islamic faith.

This is why the rush to declare Shekau dead by our security forces without any credible evidence, isn’t necessary.  Perhaps reports of the terror chief’s death were an image-laundering ploy during those darks of “tactical manoeuvring”, but Nigerians no longer need such “oversights” to see the impressive progress made so far by our troops.
If anything, Shekau’s resurrections only embarrass the agencies and give those morally empty insurgents an air of phantom victory. We can’t deny the terror group has been weakened, and their structure terribly crushed. But it’ll be a mistake to declare them already defeated, even in a way the government calls tactical – whatever that is. For even the United States knew that the death of Osama Bin Laden did not signify the end of terror building against it.
Guerrilla warfare is tricky, and more so when the cause of what instigated the conflict is still effective. We’re going to deal with the insidious ideology that resulted in the formation of Boko Haram for perhaps the next 20 years. Unless a decision is taken to checkmate it.

These faith-polluting terror groups are neither a creation of poverty nor insufficient education as painted by some analysts, but a corrupting doctrine allowed to germinate amongst us, consuming the most vulnerable of us. In fact, Boko Haram will not be entirely defeated in the field, our society has to be re-assessed to kill the existence and potentials of religious extremism that not only influences a man to kill another, but grants him an unprotected field to establish an army of destruction.
I was against vilifications of the journalist Ahmad Salkida by partisans accusing him of being sympathetic to the Boko haram, simply to sustain balanced reporting of the Boko Haram. As a journalist, I thought it was cruel to have him bullied into silence, conspiring against the people. We shouldn’t build our understandings of the dangers around us on falsehoods and half-truths. For falsehoods – as claims that a group has already been “pushed to the fringes” as propagated by the past government – only subject believing citizens to more harms.

Shekau’s “resurrections” create a dangerous myth, for it gives the cult and its covert followers and sympathisers a new inspiration to operate – that the Boko Haram leader’s survival of these “deaths” is a proof he’s chosen by God. Everything is possible in the mind of a fanatic.
The best way to avoid this mystification of an ordinary psychopath is presenting him as he really he, an elusive coward afraid of one-on-one confrontations with the military. This truth of his tactics demystifies him more than unconfirmed reports of his death.
Nigeria is a fertile ground for religious extremism and such fanatic thinking shouldn’t be given a chance to germinate. We should avoid making Shekau an African Osama, for the latter inspired a generation of zealots who are still operational even years after his death.  May God save us from us.