The veil is fast falling off the face of Boko Haram; the villains behind the murderous group are gradually showing up in public. We also now know that it is not true that the government does not know who Boko Haram operatives are. At least as high up as a former President and Commander-in-Chief of the country has had discussions with some leaders of the group; ditto a committee set up by the Federal Government to advice on the scourge. What we had suspected all along has now been confirmed i.e. that the tardiness of government in combating Boko Haram is simply because the problem is seen as internal squabbles within the ruling class, which the members are intent to settle like another “family affair”. Everyone of those advising dialogue with Boko Haram for sure know who they are, for no one conducts dialogue with spirits. Virtually every who-is-who in the North counsels dialogue with the killer-gang; none has come out frontally to condemn the group and call for a tough stance against it. At best, they have only expressed “regrets” at the loss of lives and what they perceive as the “general insecurity” in the country.

Reports have it that powerful interests in the North are even shielding the rascals from the law. Carefully analysed, Boko Haram has provided another opportunity to advance the fight against Jonathan Goodluck after consensus candidacy and all such other nonsense had failed to fly. In other words, Boko Haram is war over zoning continued by other means. What elections could not yield, perhaps, violence would.

In this, the people behind Boko Haram have a lorry load of excuses, in fact, precedents to point at. The South-west fought the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential elections and grounded the entire country. Even though they were confronted by the vilest and meanest military dictators ever, the June 12 army were resolute in their demand and although hundreds of lives were lost, they refused to budge. The death of the winner of the election did nothing to assuage their feelings. In the end, they won: The military returned to their barracks defeated and the ruling class considered it imperative to placate the South-west by offering it the country’s leadership. It was not a show of magnanimity or political sagacity; on the contrary, it was an admission of defeat and the face-saving antics of a retreating army. Power shift, as it later came to be known, was the evidence that the June 12 army won the war. It is debatable if it was not this epochal event that encouraged and energised the Niger Delta to fight their own “war” of liberation, which the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) spearheaded.

Unlike the South-west, the Niger Delta militants actually took up arms and were near crippling the entire country before the late President Umaru Yar’Adua managed to negotiate a dignified surrender, which later came to be known as national amnesty program.

It is debatable if an Ijaw person would ever have become the president of this country if not for the military struggle waged by the MEND militants against the State.

That struggle was an eye-opener on many fronts. Suddenly, the Ijaw saw itself realising what Adaka Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa had failed to achieve. No longer were they faceless, powerless minorities needed only to make up the number. For the first time ever, the Ijaw became very powerful; they began to speak of themselves as the country’s “fourth largest ethnic group” and no longer as a minority ethnic group. By force of arms they changed status from being a minority ethnic group to a majority ethnic group. This was to prove – and will forever remain – fundamental to the ethnic configuration of the country. Everyone had always known that the Niger Delta provides the bulk of the money which the ruling class share amongst themselves, leaving crumbs for the citizenry while criminally neglecting the region that produces the crude oil and gas but no one ever imagined that the age-old arrangement of robbing Peter to pay Paul could ever be so successfully threatened.

The meteoric rise of Jonathan, an Ijaw, first as Vice President and later as President, certainly was made possible on the strength of MEND’s advocacy. Just as the South-west was placated over June 12, it had become imperative to also placate the Niger Delta so it can forgo its strident agitation for resource control.

Olusegun Obasanjo, the beneficiary of the accommodation of the South-west by the power brokers, reportedly was to rule for only four years but through guile, he earned eight years and even eyed a third term, after which power returned to the North. The thinking of the power brokers must have been that the No 2 position was enough compensation for the Ijaw for the efforts of MEND but, then, Yar’Adua’s death in office changed the whole equation. As they say, the rest is now history but it is debatable whether Jonathan would have been able to pluck the courage to go for No 1 if not for the tremendous show of power that the MEND had put up in its resource-control agitation.

The PDP’s zoning, which stood in Jonathan’s path, had to give way. Having “won” the April 2011 elections, will Jonathan be satisfied with the additional four years he received? There are many who say he will not and the arithmetic is simple: If the Niger Delta must have eight years just like the South-west, an additional four years plus the two years as acting president and president will not add up. Additional two terms of four years each will dangerously overshoot the threshold but the Jonathan pet project of a seven-year single tenure, if it sails through and Jonathan manages to convert his four-year tenure to the new seven-year tenure, in addition to the one year of Yar’Adua’s that he spent as full-fledged president, would most appropriately balance out the equation. Will Jonathan risk going for this even at the expense of heating up the polity? There are many who will vouch that he will. And their evidence is simply the way he negotiated the PDP’s zoning formula, not minding whose ox is gored. Pledges and promises that he would quit in 2015, they say, will also be similarly negotiated when the time comes to cross the Rubicon. If Jonathan continues to push his single tenure project, it will be difficult to convince this group of pessimists to trust the President.

Therefore, Boko haram in its present vilest form would appear a political weapon targeted at Jonathan. Firstly, it is to punish him for disrupting the ruling party’s zoning formula, thereby preventing power from remaining in the North after the death of Yar’Adua. An important angle to this punishment is to make the country ungovernable for him, just as the June 12 vanguard organisation, NADECO, made the country ungovernable for military dictators from the North. MEND was to re-enact the same spectacle before it voluntarily disarmed after amnesty. Second is that Boko Haram could be a potent weapon to keep Jonathan in check; the PDP having demonstrated its impotency in the face of a rampaging power-that-be, it becomes imperative to find another avenue to match force with force. Any wonder, then, that everyone is suggesting dialogue with the sect? What will the dialogue entail? It is certain that Jonathan not exceeding 2015 in office will rank high on the list. For decades the North dominated the country’s political landscape but in the aftermath of the June 12, 1993 elections, it lost the initiative, which was seized, first by the South-west and later by the Niger Delta. The Boko Haram enterprise is trying to restore the initiative. At the least, it is to demonstrate to Nigerians that the South-west and Niger Delta are not the only one who can hold the government to ransom. What the Ijaw militants could do, Boko Haram can do even better.

Another amnesty program is needed, this time for Northern militants to corner resources! All those who will arrange and or participate in the envisaged dialogue will not do it for free. Has anyone told us how much the amnesty program in the Niger Delta cost the nation? A whole industry developed around the MEND struggle – illegal bunkering, kidnapping, proliferation of arms, bank robberies, name it. Boko Haram’s insurgency is likely to flow along the same line. Long after we might have seen the end of the sect’s declaration of war on the State, either through superior fire power or dialogue, the North, indeed the entire country, is not likely to remain the same again. Witness the Niger Delta: Long after MEND had renounced violence, kidnapping, which it pioneered, remains a scourge all over the country, even though the evidence is that Ijaw militants are generally no longer the kidnappers.  It is only in the South-west that the “fighters” of the State carried no weapons and did not monetize the process. A pattern is emerging – if it has not emerged already – that unless you fought for your political rights, you would not get it. The Igbo must be growing grey hair pondering how they would actualize their dream of occupying the Presidency without a fight having already fought and lost a civil war.

Ideologues and partisans have tried to mesmerise us with the socio-economic reasons for Boko Haram: They speak blatant lies at the worst and half truths at the best. The South has more numbers of jobless graduates than the North; it also has more numbers of school leavers unable to gain admission to institutions of higher learning. To make matters worse, Southerners do not bond or assist their “brothers” and “sisters” as much as Northerners do unto theirs. So, if socio-economic problems are the causes of bomb-throwing, the South should have been on fire long time ago. Neither is religion the cause of Boko Haram going ga-ga, for I am persuaded that no member of the ruling class can implement Sharia, even in the States where the Islamic law has been declared with fanfare. Our ruling elite are too corrupt to implement Sharia. If Boko Haram leaders themselves are to form the government today, the likelihood is that they, too, will not be different. Take it or leave it, Boko Haram in its present form is political. If Jonathan leaves today and a Northerner assumes office, it will fizzle out.

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