Boko Haram – Where FG Got It Wrong – Senator Ndume

Abdul-Rahman Abubakar

17 July 2011

interview

Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume represents Borno South in the Senate. In this interview, he explains the Boko Haram crisis in Borno State and ways to bring the problem to an end.

You are agitating for the military to leave Maiduguri, what did you tell the President when you met with him?

Actually, the topic of discussion was to give the president the other side of the situation. He has the security chiefs. He is the commander in chief of the armed forces and he has all the para-military agencies on the field, but we are the representatives of the people. So we went to tell him what we know is actually on ground. That is to enable him compare what his security chiefs are telling him and what we the representatives of the people know is the actual situation on ground.

I must state that I was humbled by the concern of the President and his willingness to take any advice that will lead to solving this problem. I think we are getting to it because he said whatever will bring back peace and progress to that area; he is willing to do it. We now say the first stage in the process is to withdraw the military because they have not achieved the desired or expected result. When you have a problem and you apply a solution that is not solving the problem, then you have to pull back and look at the methodology and maybe apply another method.

We told the president just everybody is now suggesting that the use of force in the world history has never succeeded in any insurgence cases. In the United Kingdom, they had the issue of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), in Spain, you have the issue of ETA, in Russia there is the Chechen rebels and in several other places. Even in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies have been fighting the Talibans for over ten years without much success, now they have to go back to the negotiation table with the moderates in the Taliban. That is why we are saying that the federal government should engage in dialogue and intensify intelligence instead of using force. That cannot solve the problem especially when you have an enemy that is invinsible. The victims are the visible civilians. In this trouble now the visible civilians are the victims. They have been displaced and we have gotten to a level of a humanitarian crisis.

We went and spoke with Mr. President and he said he is going to do a lot of consultation to take a quick decision as to what is the way forward. We also called on government to manage the humanitarian crisis there by sending the appropriate agencies to provide relief to the victims.

Many people are saying that the leaders of Borno state are late in speaking out on this crisis.

Well, the military and the authority were taking action, any action we take outside that would have been in countenance to what they are doing. The government is responsible for security and welfare of the people. The government always says or claims that they are in charge and we as the citizens will have to give them the opportunity. But as the situation is getting out of hand now, we have to offer a solution. The solution we have offered is that they should withdraw this military and engage in dialogue. It is from the dialogue that we can get the necessary steps to be taken. I don’t think that we are coming late.

The previous government was responsible for the bad management of this situation that has now degenerated to where we find ourselves today. It is not that we have not been advising. We have been doing that at the lower level. It is now that we have to come out to the public and to the larger society. It is not that we have been sitting down. We tried our best in quelling this crisis long ago but the previous government was not even ready to listen.

As a then member of the ruling ANPP in Borno State, what will you say is the level of government’s involvement in establishing the Boko Haram sect?

Let me say that Boko Haram started eight years ago. It started in Yobe, spread to Kano, Gombe, Bauchi and Adamawa. Although they had their headquarter, that is what they call the Madras in Maiduguri, but it was as a result of bad management of the situation by the then governor of Borno state, Ali Modu Sheriff, that led to the crisis that we now have. I was a member of the ANPP, the governor was from our party but he was solely responsible as the chief security officer of the state. He is the problem or part of the problem.

He cannot exonerate himself from that to be part of the solution because he is part of the problem. Sheriff may not be the one who created Boko Haram but who created the Boko Haram problem? It is not the Boko Haram now but the crisis. We are not talking about the sect now because they have been in existence for the past eight years; they never attacked any civilian or engaged in violence.

It was just like every other religious sect. there are sects in all the religions. But there is no fight over that. That was how the Boko Haram was. But the security organizations thought that their ways of preaching borders on national security and instead of managing it, they tried to crush that sect and that created more problems than solution. It was the then governor who was at the center of the problem that we now face, so he cannot be part of the solution because he cannot exonerate himself from it.

How can government now negotiate with the sect because they don’t even know the sect members?

As I said, when you withdraw the military, initially they issued their demands before they launched attacks. Parts of their demands were that compensation be paid to the families of their members unlawfully killed and that those involved in the extra judicial killing of their members be prosecuted. That was not done.

The federal government set up a panel of inquiry, they requested that the report should be published, that was not done. Let me tell you that they have contact with the security especially the State Security Service (SSS). The SSS was even containing the Boko Haram. Not by force, but by conviction.

They interact and the SSS tried to de-radicalize some of them, they try to set them up. When the situation got out of hand, I thought that the SSS and the intelligence people should have been the agencies that government should use as vehicles to intensify reaching out to the sect to know what they want and if that is legally acceptable.

Instead, they just decided to use force. Now the soldiers, because they don’t know who their enemy is, have succeeded in killing so many innocent citizens. While the Boko Haram on the other hand know their enemy and are specific about that, have never except in few instances of stray bullets, they go for their targets. Borno citizens generally were not panicking at that time because they knew that the problem is between the Yusuffiyya and the authorities. Initially, when they issue their threats, they did not include army.

They say they are coming after the police and those informants that led to the arrest of some of them who ran away when their headquarter was crushed. They had a list and they even sent letter to their targets telling them why they were coming after them. There are several people today who know they wronged the Boko Haram sect and cannot venture into Maiduguri today including Ali Sheriff himself. He knows that. We were in the same party, but if you advice him, he won’t listen. The consequence now is that he cannot go to Maiduguri.

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