IT was a display of infantile defensiveness, a mix of aggression and snivelling self-exculpation. The office of the National Security Adviser, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the State Security Service (SSS) jointly addressed a news conference in Abuja on Monday and said that Boko Haram’s capability to launch murderous attacks had been mischievously magnified by some unnamed Nigerians and the press. They said Boko Haram was a mere itch and not a serious and spreading disease.

They spoke only four days after Boko Haram killed about 150 people and caused massive destruction in Damaturu, the capital of Yobe State. Boko Haram, whose deadly proof of insane earnestness is usually felt and seen in Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, began the distribution of terror with two suicide bomb attacks in Abuja which targeted the police headquarters and the United Nations building. There were dozens of fatalities and many more suffered grievous injuries.

The National Security Adviser, General Owoye Azazi, was at the news conference, as was the SSS director in charge of public affairs, Marilyn Ogar. They claimed in their statement, which was read by a very senior official of the Foreign Affairs Ministry, that there was calm in the land. Ms Ogar dismissed the slaughter in Damaturu and the killings in Maiduguri as mere ‘pockets of crisis.’ She said: ‘We [Nigerians] have had a wonderful sallah.’

It seems some of those who head the security agencies inhabit a never-never land. Everything is fine in spite of horrific evidence to the contrary. The security agencies are stumped and have no coherent response to Boko Haram’s campaign of savage terror. The thing to do in such a situation is to take refuge in soul-searching silence.

The Boko Haram problem is certainly not an easy fix. Members of the bloodthirsty Islamic group do not stand and fight. They strike and vanish like conquered fright. They are not an army and may not have many members. They are not insurgents and do not try to capture territory, unlike what recently happened in Libya when those opposed to Muammar Gaddafi conquered city after city and forced him to flee to Sirte, his hometown, where he made his last stand .

Boko Haram is a terrorist group. It spreads fear and does not want a firefight. It knows it will be soundly defeated in battle even by troops of company strength.

Boko Haram is like some of the European anarchists of the late 19th century. They saw violence as entertainment. They were perhaps unhinged. One anarchist fatally stabbed a harmless, compassionate woman. Empress Elisabeth of Austria, a woman whose beauty had the singularity of combining rustic innocence with smouldering sophistication, was separated from her husband at the time she was attacked. She was 60 years old when she was killed in 1898.

Babakura Fugu was also the victim of a senseless killing. Fugu was murdered by Boko Haram for receiving former President Olusegun Obasanjo in his home in Maiduguri. Chief Obasanjo had gone to Maiduguri on a peace mission. Fugu was related to Mohammed Yusuf, the late Boko Haram leader, by marriage.

Boko Haram enjoys killing. It does not seek justice. It does not want dialogue. Its desires and demands do not make sense; they give offence. It wants a return to the dead, forgotten world of the hunter-gatherer. It wants the death of polished, comfortable civilisation. This is not normal behaviour.

James Joll could have been writing about the leaders of Boko Haram in this paragraph from The Anarchists: ‘It is by their ruthless and extreme assertion of an uncompromising set of beliefs the anarchists have given an example and issued a challenge.’

How did France and Italy, among other countries, deal with the anarchists’ challenge? The police succeeded in arresting many of the anarchists by infiltrating their groups. In France, the police published a newspaper which was indistinguishable from those published by anarchists. It was said that some people in the interim national government of Chief Ernest Shonekan produced a fake newspaper that some people confused with the real newspaper. The fake newspaper reportedly published salacious stories about some of the opponents of the interim government. There was no suggestion that Chief Shonekan, a man of quiet inoffensiveness, knew about the forgery.

The French police also established their own groups and unsuspecting anarchists became members. The anarchists wanted a violent end to the old ways of life, but they were not above a bit of decadence. They engaged in acts that would have shocked orgy-loving Romans. Even the Boko Haram leader may not be able to resist a beautiful woman of his ethnic group and faith. Using a beautiful woman to gather intelligence or to catch a dangerous criminal is an old trick, but it still works and it may lead to the downfall of Boko Haram.

President Lyndon Johnson set up the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence following the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. The commission submitted a report which was published in book form under the title Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. The book has 822 pages
In his paper, Professor Edward W. Gude identifies the tactics of terrorists. Terrorists, like insurgents, he writes, ‘attempt through violence to demonstrate that the government cannot provide public safety.’ Boko Haram demonstrates this almost every day in Maiduguri. Suicide bombers’ brand of terror particularly conveys an impression of government’s helplessness. It is extremely difficult to stop terrorists who are prepared to die.

Professor Gude warns against arousing the hostility of the people in trying to defeat insurgents or terrorists: ‘A more important objective involves the attempt [by insurgents or terrorists] to induce the regime to commit acts against the uncommitted so that they will withdraw their support from the government.’

The military task force in Maiduguri has been accused of using indiscriminate and disproportionate force after every Boko Haram outrage. But Boko Haram killers do not wait to admire their bloody work and those that feel the hot anger of the soldiers are usually innocent civilians, or so it has been reported.

It does not seem that the military task force is getting much help from the people of Maiduguri. This may be because of the alleged oppression of the people by soldiers or because the residents live in mortal fear of the terrorists, as many Nigerians now apparently do.

But the swift and severe retribution of groups like Hamas has not stopped some Palestinians from spying for Israel. These spies are not responsible for the stunning omnipresence and omniscience of the Israeli air force which enables it to target Palestinian militants about to launch rockets into Israel. It looks like magic of the primitive kind, but it is the wizardry of advanced technology that gathers precise intelligence.

Good intelligence more than overwhelming force is needed to defeat Boko Haram whose clear aim is to cause religious and ethnic strife in the country. It has been killing Christians and burning churches. A suicide bomb attack in the South may lead to wild reprisals.

The sources of funding of Boko Haram should be traced and cut off. It is likely it has influential backers, people who are seen as respectable citizens. Dr Thabit was a West Bank dentist, but he was killed by the Israelis who said he was a Fatah commander.

Ms Ogar of the SSS said state and local governments were not doing enough to meet the needs of the people and appeared to suggest that this was partly responsible for the murderous violence of groups like Boko Haram. This is not an original ‘analysis’ and Ms Ogar’s desperate grab for it shows sterile complacency.

The Federal Government must take the lead, as it has already done, but more systematically, in defeating Boko Haram. Nigeria is not in the situation America was in, in 1787 when it needed the intervention of a state militia to crush Shays’ rebellion. Christopher Collier and James Lincoln Collier write in Decision in Philadelphia: ‘It seemed to them (the people) bizarre that the national government had stood helplessly by, lacking the legal authority to put the rebellion down.’

President Goodluck Jonathan has the legal authority and he may find Professor Gude’s advice—‘The task of the government is enormously delicate and requires political leadership of tremendous sophistication to avoid falling into the traps set by (terrorist) violence’—useful in ending the murderous menace of Boko Haram.

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Your view

Oga Nosa, it is Peter Abelard and not Abeland as you put it, unless there was another man with that name in 12th century Church in France.
Akangbe

You are correct. There was only one theologian called Peter Abelard in 12th century France. In ‘White mischief’, published on May 26, 2005, I wrote: ‘Peter Abelard (1079-1142) who was castrated by the uncle of his lover...’

My copy of Abelard’s The Story of my Misfortunes looks almost as old as the Frenchman’s bones. It was actually published by Macmillan in 1972 and the blurb says: ‘The immortal story of Peter Abelard, the twelfth century adventurer scholastic, and his student, Heloise, a young girl...’

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