Boko Haram: It’s About Human Lives, Not Territories -By Ahmad Salkida

Nigeria has been known with a rather disturbing attitude of placing a deplorable value on the lives of her citizens. It seems to run in the veins of successive administrations. And none has been more disturbing than the inclination to celebrate the much hyped technical defeat of Boko Haram over and above the continual massacre of defenceless citizens in the war ravaged North-East Nigeria, as well as in camps holding numerous distressed internally displaced persons, IDPs.

Yes, ‘Boko Haram’ or the ‘Islamic’ State West Africa Provence (ISWAP) as they preffered to be called, may no longer lash out and hold territories as it used to do in the recent past, but this should not be the imaginary straw Nigerian officials should proudly hold unto to make public celebrations of having “technically defeated” the group. For sure, the group still operates, and kills at will almost as freely as it can get into areas in North-East Nigeria. Is it the priority of the government to protect deserted territories from being re-occupied by Boko Haram or to end the further massacres and sufferings visited on civilian populations in the region? If the two are one and the same, then Nigeria and the rest of the West African countries confronted with the Boko Haram conundrum are years from celebrating any victory.

Apparently, Boko Haram’s priority is not to spare the lives of the people in the communities they overrun in the Lake Chad area. They have come to realise the hard way that it is rather implausible to enforce their model of ‘Sharia’ as against those of the ‘kaffirs’, which is what they allege has become the scene of the larger Nigerian society, so why are government officials focusing on the diminished expanse of territories under the group as an indication of a war won and settled?

Anyone that says Boko Haram is holding any territory or having a field day in Borno state, like the now ruffled Senator Baba Kaka Garbai, suddenly becomes the enemy of the ‘all is well’ Buhari’s government. What is more tolerable to say nowadays in Nigeria is that, “Boko Haram is on the run and can only attack soft targets” (as if the hapless Nigerians in those so called soft targets could never attract the pre-emptive security cover of their government). This official line seems more acceptable because the value Nigeria place on the lives of citizens is one of the lowest in the world. One can imagine how citizens waiting for help to come from government in besieged communities feel when they hear from their president on radio saying, “there is NOT a single territory occupied by Boko Haram.”

Yet, what is most worrying in several parts of the region plagued by war, as much as the brutal massacres of Boko Haram, is the escalating cases of starvation. Entire communities have been exposed to the lack of essential medicine, food and water, and are therefore dying in scores. We have alarming cases of gross human tragedies right before our very eyes in the North-East. For many, there are no livelihoods, there is a complete blockade of the area by military authorities – an area that was very poor even before the advent of war. Many, in these besieged communities, especially those that can’t escape to the internally displaced persons’ camps either depend on Boko Haram for food or do the unimaginable just to survive. Women and girls, sadly, are driven to prostitution merely to be able to bring a meal to their dependants or selves.

In the recent past, we dwelt on a one-sided analyses of bombings and gun attacks in a multiple-sided tragedy. We are not paying attention to increasing cases of starvation, even in areas fully under government control. Sadly, some are still celebrating Boko Haram’s inability to control large territories and have started talking about rebuilding the region. My take in respect of rebuilding the North-East is that we cannot rebuild if we are unable to save those whose lives are hanging on the precipice.

The debate over Boko Haram’s vanishing territories, instead of a focus on saving lives, seems to have forgotten that the group only declared its first territorial control in the sixth year of its terroristic onslaught. In those five years before its territorial control, the violence and bloodletting activities were no less revolting. So why are many Nigerians using Boko Haram’s failure to hold large territories in their eight year as the yardstick to measure their end? A nation that values the lives of her citizens will only celebrate or go to sleep only when none of its citizens is under the daily threat of an enemy’s invasion by any group, be it Boko Haram, cattle rustlers or any other violent group.

Even the international community has become untroubled when bomb after bomb blasts kill and maim hundreds in Nigeria because never was there a time that Nigeria’s president cancelled his trip or that the officials of government cancelled their meetings with diplomats to attend to emergencies or disasters on the domestic front. Apparently life is so cheap, where Boko Haram operates.

The army has also done very little to improve its relationship with the civilian population, with continuing cases of high-handedness by the military. Independent voices are continually being stifled or bullied into silence. Security forces also play down the level of human sufferings and, worse of all, cover up the deaths of soldiers that have sacrificed their lives for their country.

Many informed observers were however delighted when the Nigerian government saw reason and made a U-turn from relocating hundreds of thousands of people to their communities from IDP camps across the country. The ill-informed initial plan was for no other reason other than to prove that it had defeated Boko Haram. In fact, Boko Haram is as deadly today as it can ever be. This time around, thousands of them are not in their caliphate that is known to all, they have dispersed to the most unlikely places, developing cells and creating new platforms to launch surprise attacks, whether on soft targets or not. It remains the responsibility of government to ensure that the lives of every Nigerian deserves protection at the best.

Ahmad Salkida is a freelance journalist and conflict analyst.