An Oputa panel on Boko Haram, please?

Nigeria and Nigerians have been battling with the Boko Haram insurgency in the North East since at least 2009. That’s 15 years of the most brutal armed conflict Nigeria has ever known, bar the Civil War, which, for all its intensity, lasted just three years from 1967 to 1970. It is almost impossible to quantify the human toll as well as the social, economic and environmental costs of the Boko Haram crisis for Nigeria during those 15 years, and we have not even tried to take any account ourselves.

According to the Nigeria Security Tracker (NST), a database of the US foreign policy think-tank Council on Foreign Relations, some 43,228 people were killed directly from the Boko Haram conflict in Nigeria between May 2011, when data collection started, and May 2023 when it closed. This figure does not include those killed before May 2011 or from May 2023 to date, in a conflict that still rages on. It also does not include those who died indirectly as a result disruption in the economy, infrastructure and public health, which tends to be higher than direct deaths.

This is too heavy a toll for Nigerian families to pay in a single conflict, even though this tally includes not just deaths caused by Boko Haram attacks on innocent Nigerian civilians and soldiers, but also the deaths of its own members when they clashed with our military forces. And that is not all. We must also include the individual traumas of the hundreds of thousands who were victims of rape, torture, abduction, displacement or injury, and the dreams forever quashed by the crisis.

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Beyond death, destruction and devastation, however, there has been another defining feature of the Boko Haram insurgency. Throughout those 15 years, there have been serious but muffled doubts about certain aspects of the Boko Haram; certain things that simply do not add up, certain unanswered questions. Those doubts and unanswered questions, however germane, were silenced, as if there was a pall over what one could or could not say about Boko Haram.

If you said Boko Haram was a calculated attempt by Nigerian Muslims to annihilate their Christian neighbours, you were given a pass, even though the reality remains that the vast majority of victims of Boko Haram are Muslims. But if you raised the baffling but still pertinent question of where the money and the arms and ammunition came from, you were roundly condemned to silence as a Boko Haram denier, sponsor or both.

That pall appeared to have been lifted last week by a viral video of a US congressman, Scott Perry, alleging that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had funded terrorist organisations during the Obama and Biden administrations. Perry specifically mentioned Boko Haram as one of the beneficiaries of USAID funding, alongside others such as the Taliban and ISIS.

Perry was probably playing to the gallery, as US legislators frequently do during public hearings. Also, that Perry is a congressman who spoke during a session of the US House of Representatives does not make his statements a fact. Nevertheless, his allegations cannot be dismissed flippantly and were widely reported and circulated in Nigeria, not just on social media but also in the mainstream press.

Thus, what was once a taboo subject—the very idea that certain aspects of Boko Haram do not add up—became suddenly admissible as a valid subject of report in Nigerian news media. Videos of the current Chief of Defence Staff (CDS), General Christopher Musa’s interview with Al Jazeera, as well as of former presidents Buhari and Jonathan raising questions about certain aspects of the Boko Haram tragic story, among many others, have now found renewed life on social and mainstream media in Nigeria.

People can now speak freely about those matters, but truth be told, many people, including ranking officials of the Nigerian government and the military, have all previously raised genuine concerns about how some aspects of the Boko Haram insurgency have unfolded in Nigeria these past 15 years. One such concern was about how a little-known religious sect with membership comprising mainly of the lowliest of the low in society metamorphosed into one of the world’s deadliest terrorist organisations in just about a year once its leader was eliminated. How did it happen? Why was the Boko Haram leader killed extra-judicially in circumstances that remain shrouded in mystery to date?

A second set of unanswered questions was always tied to the first: where did Boko Haram get funding, sophisticated weapons, training, and recruitment techniques to wage and sustain a war against the entirety of the Nigerian armed forces for 15 long years and still counting? No one has expressed this concern better than the CDS, General Musa himself. In the now-viral videos, the host of the “Talk to Al Jazeera” asked: “We have seen Boko Haram regroup, and regroup, and regroup. What is your answer to that? Do you have in some way fed the insurgents?”

The CDS’s answer spoke the minds of many, in government or outside of it. “The problem is that, I think, we’ve talked to the international community. Let’s find out the funding…. As we speak, we have over 120,000 [Boko Haram members] that have surrendered. Most of them, when you find them, they are coming with hard currencies; how did they get them? How are they funded? How did they get the training? How did they get the equipment?” he asked with the same baffled frustration many Nigerians have long held, but bottled.

The Al Jazeera journalist, sensing a crucial and newsworthy moment in the interview raised the stakes even higher: “What’s your suspicion?” he asked. “Well, maybe an international conspiracy you don’t know, who knows? How are they able to sustain themselves for 15 years? That is one question I think everybody should ask themselves,” the CDS replied. The interview then moved on to other issues.

We must accept that the CDS’s comments are also not facts, but suspicions, even though we must salute his courage for airing them. But we must also note that people as high as former presidents Buhari and Jonathan raised similar questions in the past about how Boko Haram has managed to remain resilient for so long. In fact, when then governor of Borno State, now Vice President Kashim Shettima, raised the concern about how come Boko Haram were better armed and motivated than Nigerian soldiers, he was raising much the same concern as the CDS and other leaders before him. Unfortunately, his statements were caught up in and twisted by the politics of the moment at the time, and so their actual meaning was lost in translation.

This is where we come to the crux of the matter. There is no doubt that Boko Haram held very extreme views about the world even before the whole thing turned violent. There is also no doubt that those extreme views were influenced by misinformed, ignorant and crude interpretations of Islam. Above all, there is no doubt that Boko Haram perpetrated acts of unspeakable violence against other Nigerians, Muslims and Christians alike. And as a terrorist organisation, Boko Haram is real. On these, we can all agree. But to turn the page on this tragedy, we must find answers to the troubling questions of how it has persisted for 15 long years and more. It is time we had an Oputa-style panel on Boko Haram. To heal, we must know.