There are a few things that the now-retired General Tukur Buratai would say that I would agree with. One of these came last week when during his ambassadorial confirmation hearing, he said it may take 20 years to end the Boko Haram insurgency.
Buratai was right when he acknowledged the problem large territories of ungoverned spaces pose in contributing to the terror dynamics, as well as its impediment on counter-terror operations. He forgot to mention, though, that the net is a lot wider than he presents it.
The scope of Buratai’s 20 years of terror goes beyond just the high-level insurgency in North-Eastern Nigeria. His focus on the northeast may have largely been borne out of the fact that his failure to bring the Boko Haram nightmare to a close having been the country’s longest-serving army chief, got him the ire of many Nigerians, including those who voted to confirm him in his new position.
The problem of Nigeria’s home-grown terrorism is that Boko Haram’s success has provided inspiration for similar armed groups making headway into the North West and the Middle Belt. Nigeria is currently fighting insurgencies in its three northern geopolitical zones. In the South, the South-South experienced its own insurgency that stretched from the mid-1990s to 2009 when the Yar’adua government offered the Niger Delta militants amnesty. The implementation of that strategy leaves much to be desired, especially if you consider the uneasy peace, propped up by a mutual interest in oil theft.
The problem of Nigeria’s home-grown terrorism is that Boko Haram’s success has provided inspiration for similar armed groups making headway into the North West and the Middle Belt
Burratai’s position is backed by research. About ten years ago, one of America’s foremost think tanks, the Rand Corporation published a report about insurgencies, in which they studied 89 different insurgencies. In the study, they concluded that the typical insurgency has a 10-year shelf life unless of course certain conditions were not met.
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The first condition stated that pseudo democracies (Nigeria is one) had the least chance of beating an insurgency. Secondly, frequent policy changes helped insurgencies last longer. The study also found that the more splinter groups there are in an insurgency, the longer it was likely to last. We have seen this case with Boko Haram in 2016 when they split into three factions (JAS, ISWAP and Ansaru). It is also important to add that it said that there are no shortcuts to counterintelligence operations.
There’s one country that has met all these conditions for a long-lasting insurgency, and that is Colombia.
As with the Niger Delta insurgency, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and other guerrilla movements such as the Popular Liberation Army and National Liberation Army claim to be fighting for the rights of the poor in Colombia to protect them from government violence and to provide social justice through communism. The Colombian government claims to be fighting for order and stability, and to protect the rights and interests of its citizens. The paramilitary groups claim to be reacting to perceived threats by guerrilla movements. This is quite like the casus belli of the Niger Delta since the mid-1990s, which have turned Rivers and other states in the region into a madhouse of competing gang interests in the name of economic (oil) self-determination.
It is important to note how much guerrilla and armed militias morphed into Colombia’s shadow economy as the conflict de-escalated into a low-intensity conflict. FARC rejected any involvement in the emerging phenomenon of drug growing and trafficking, but during the 1980s, the group gradually came to accept it as it became a burgeoning business. Taxes on drug producers and traffickers were introduced as a source of funding in the form of the compulsory so-called “gramaje” tax on growers and through the enforcement of other regulations affecting different stages of the production process.
This is one of the very key things that have sustained the insurgencies in both Northern Nigeria. In Shiroro LGA of Niger state a few weeks back, terrorists killed at least 25 villagers for not turning up to agree on a new formula that would allow them to be extorted in order to access their farms. The same thing plays out in the North East, given how much the refilling of Lake Chad has led to the resumption of the dying fish trade which both some rogue elements of the Nigerian army and the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) have sought to control.
The reality is that we are not just in a madhouse with terrorism on multiple fronts enough to last us another 20 years. Given that the Maitatsine riots of the 1980s were the forerunner of jihadism in modern Nigeria, it leaves us the burning question: if things get on like this, would our internalisation of terrorism be elastic enough to accommodate the rise of more violent, organised non-state actors, enough to keep us together for another 20 years?
Nwanze is a partner at SBM Intelligence
