Boko Haram: Not Looking For Amnesty But Martyrdom

Few will argue with the conclusion that most of the challenges being faced by the Nigeria Police are self-inflicted. The officers and men of the force equate the vested interests of the government in power to those of the state. This is why state governors belonging to the ruling party can willy-nilly instruct state police commissioners and the inspector-general of police (IGP) to harass and intimidate political adversaries on trumped-up charges. The shoddy treatment and brutality Nigerians continue to suffer in the hands of policemen and women have created a no-love-lost relationship between the organisation and the citizenry.

The bombing of the symbol of the nation’s security is a tragedy for us all, not the police alone. It simply exposes us as living a big lie. If a handful of fanatics could easily penetrate police headquarters and cause so much damage, what guarantee is there that the country can withstand a military aggression by the smallest of our neighbours? We must help the police recover from what easily passes as its nadir by forging a well trained, properly equipped and adequately remunerated modern professional organisation. Above all, we must rid the police of the vestiges of a colonial master/servant, us-versus-them mentality through the introduction of an appropriate orientation course in police academies.

There have been strident calls by politicians, political party aficionados and Muslim and Christian clerics for the federal government to dialogue with the Boko Haram. One can understand where the politicians are coming from. Groups like Boko Haram and Niger Delta militants were originally sponsored by top politicians with the sole aim of enforcing their electoral victories. Now they want to prevent their Frankenstein monsters from being placed to spill the beans by pleading with the government to take it easy with their former hirelings. Opposition political parties may just be simply trying to gain maximum political capital from the government’s discomfiture by playing the blame game. But there should be a limit to politicking.

In other democratic climes, politicians and political parties temporarily forego their differences to rally round their president in order to battle the destructive forces of terror with one voice.

Those comparing the Boko Haram menace and the Niger Delta insurgency miss one very important difference. The militant youths in the Niger Delta were fighting against material deprivation, oppression and injustice, and as soon as late President Umaru Yar’Adua underscored his commitment to right the wrongs by establishing the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, the militants gave up their fight and embraced peace. Can the same be said of Boko Haram? Its members are filled with moral outrage at the decadence of their society, which they readily attribute to the tragedy of modern capitalism associated with Western education. And they believe they owe nobody any apologies for subjecting parts of the North and Abuja to their brand of murderous protest with almost metronomic regularity.

The philosophy of Boko Haram is essentially embedded in Darwinism: “All life is an eternal struggle and the world is a jungle where only the fittest survive and the strongest rule.” Sentimentalism is excluded from the vocabulary of such a world because only born weaklings see the desire by the stronger to dominate as cruel and mad! Expressed in another form, members of Boko Haram see themselves as being in the service of Allah, hence they believe their actions are divinely sanctioned and mandated by Him. Truth be told, the Boko Haram zealots are not looking for amnesty but martyrdom. How then can you negotiate or dialogue with a people with such a mindset? “A man’s behaviour,” posited 4th Caliph of the Muslims Ali ibn-abi-Talib, “is the index of the man, and his discourse is the index of his understanding.”

The great irony, as has been saliently noted by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, co-authors of “The Age of Sacred Terror,” is that ‘armies of Allah/God’ like Boko Haram “tend to have extremist viewpoints that do not reflect the traditional teachings and values of the religion with which they are associated.” The Boko Haram is, therefore, as much as a Muslim versus Muslim standoff as it is a Muslim versus Christian phenomenon. It is an untamed tiger on the loose, and those who are wont to ride it for pedestrian hegemonic considerations should remember that they are most likely to end up in its stomach on the day of reckoning. Let us not forget the exhortation of wartime US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, at a time an equally feared Adolf Hitler was violently imposing his crackpot ideas on the world: “No man can tame a tiger into a kitten by stroking (dialoguing with) it. There can be no appeasement with ruthlessness. There can be no reasoning with an incendiary bomb.”

Members of Boko Haram are guaranteed freedoms of association and religious beliefs as well as free speech under the constitution, but it is totally wrong and unacceptable for them to want to violently foist their opinions on the rest of the society. It was 28th U.S President Woodrow Wilson who averred that “No man can sit down and withhold his hands from warfare against wrong and get peace from his acquiescence.” Individuals like Otto von Bismarck and Hitler, as well as organisations like Boko Haram and al-Qaeda believe that, “The great questions of the day will not be settled by resolutions (dialogue) and majority votes (democracy)…but by blood and iron,” consider suggestions about amnesty and dialogue as symptoms of internal weakness.

President Goodluck Jonathan and the governors of affected states in the North must stop shilly-shallying and quickly make up their minds to put an end to what appears to be an open season on political and religious gangsterism. Failing to do so would completely wipe out enormous advances that have been made in crystallising an integrated and acceptable national curriculum for Almajiri education for all Quranic, Islamiyyah and Maahad schools, not to talk of the grave implications for security of life and property, and creating an investment-friendly environment.

Okoye contributed this piece from Lagos.
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