This morning, I intend to join in the search for a meaning to the disastrous events in Kano ten days ago, and I hope to do so by adding to the existing confusion.

The attack on Kano was a human, security, economic, morale and public relations disaster for the country. Yet, in a perverse way, it reduced developing national tension because it demolished the earlier perception of a Muslim versus Christian war that was gaining currency after the Madallah church bombing and the Mubi attack on an Igbo community meeting.

Though Christians died in the Kano attack, an attack on Northern Nigeria’s largest and richest city was clearly an attack on the Muslim community. Why didn’t Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor ask Muslims to defend themselves? Instead, he called for calm!

Some Northern Muslim youth bloggers who had been saying in recent weeks that the government may be behind the attacks blamed on Boko Haram were shocked into silence. It could be that a government conspiracy could unleash armed attacks and bomb explosions, but where will government hire suicide bombers? Besides, Boko Haram had earlier published an open letter threatening to attack Kano because it said its members were arrested there.

That the Emir of Kano, who never shows emotions in public, shed tears when President Jonathan paid a visit suggests this was the most traumatic event in Kano since Lord Lugard demolished its walls with a Maxim gun and occupied it in 1903.

Yet, some people were still saying that the Northern Muslim Establishment was sponsoring Boko Haram in order to destabilise the Jonathan presidency. I saw Ambassador John Campbell saying as much on BBC television at the weekend. Asked what would be the solution to this problem, he said Jonathan should make overtures to assuage the feeling of marginalisation now felt by Northerners.

Even though no one regards me as an “expert” in these matters the way Campbell is “internationally” recognised, but as a man who was born and bred and who lives here, I will categorically state that Campbell is completely off the track on this one. No overtures by Jonathan to the Northern political establishment will in themselves contain the Boko Haram problem.

If, for example, Jonathan announces today that he will not run in 2015 and will support a Northern Muslim as his successor, which is the kind of overture that Campbell is talking about, I don’t think it will have the slightest effect on the Boko Haram sect. Even if Jonathan goes a crazy notch above that and, say, resigns and hands over to Vice President Namadi Sambo, such a Northern Muslim president will still find the Boko Haram problem top on his plate of problems.

Then there are many Northerners who are saying the Federal Government should dialogue with Boko Haram because it dialogued with OPC and Niger Delta militants. I concede to their good intentions, but the situations are dissimilar. Both OPC and the Niger Delta militants did a lot of havoc variously by staging inter-communal attacks, kidnapping oil workers and sabotaging oil installations. Yet, Boko Haram’s policy of targeted assassinations, bombings, bank robberies, wholesale attacks on cities and suicide bombings of a church, Police Headquarters and the UN Building have gone way beyond that.

And that’s not even the main problem. The OPC thugs were politically in tandem with the Yoruba Establishment, pursuing alongside it the feelings of political marginalisation in the wake of the June 12 election annulment. Niger Delta militants’ cry of resource deprivation and environmental spoilage tallied with their Establishment’s demand for resource control and derivation principle. Hence both problems were solvable. The stated Boko Haram agenda of wholesale Islamisation of the society through the rigorous adoption of all aspects of Shari’a is not at all shared by the Northern Muslim Establishment or, for the matter, most Northern Muslims. So how will appeasing the Establishment solve this problem?

Now, there are those who say that poverty in the North East caused the Boko Haram problem. Certainly, poverty has a lot to do with the size of the pool of unemployed youth that can be recruited to perpetrate mayhem. However, there are important qualifiers to this assertion. One is that the most poverty-stricken people in Nigeria, namely the rural peasantry, are also the most obedient and peace-loving, so long as you do not directly touch their farmlands, fish ponds or wives.

The nomadic cattle herders too, who enjoy almost nothing in Nigeria in terms of amenities, are very peace-loving so long as you do not directly threaten their cattle herds. In fact, I remember reading a tract written by a World Bank economist in the 1990s who said “poverty is actually very stabilising; it is the development process with its crisis of rising expectations that is destabilising.” It looks to me he is right, because the urban poor, which in many ways is better off than the rural peasantry, is more crisis-prone than the former. Remember also that we had the Maitatsine uprising at the height of the Oil Boom in 1980.

Let’s move on. Groping around for what to do in the circumstances, President Jonathan apparently decided to apportion all blame to the police, sacked the Inspector General and 6 DIGs and promoted an AIG to acting IG. Very good. I have had my own personal frustrations with the Nigeria Police, but I do not think they are the main culprits in the government’s failure to adequately respond to the Boko Haram threat.

Since May 1999, the police has had 7 IGs [Musliu Smith, Tafa Balogun, Sunday Ehindero, Mike Okiro, Ogbonna Onovo, Hafiz Ringim and MD Abubakar], or less than 2 years in office each. There are more than enough cases of theft, local disputes, armed robbery, communal clashes, local riots, fraud, traffic accidents, murder, assault and political crises in the country to keep the Nigeria Police well and truly occupied. I doubt if an IG can be blamed for not devoting a lot of thought to a problem such as domestic terrorism. What is the State Security Service and the National Security Adviser supposed to do?

Promoting an AIG to IG was clearly done for Federal Character reasons, because in this country, the Service Chiefs are shared among the geo-political blocs. In the Jonathan arrangement, the Muslim North was allocated Air Force Chief and Police IG, so the president had to look over the heads of all the DIGs to find a replacement for Ringim.

Let me add that he wasn’t the first to do so. In 2001, when President Obasanjo removed IG Musliu Smith, he had to go over the heads of all DIGs to find another Yoruba Muslim, then AIG Tafa Balogun, to replace Smith. Once you begin politicking with such a professional post, there is no end to it. Now some people are saying M.D. Abubakar shouldn’t be IG because he was indicted by a Plateau State government white paper in 2001 of being a partisan in the state’s inter-communal disputes.

The fact that police authorities ignored that “white paper” since 2001 I think says a lot. To be frank, a Plateau State Government indictment of a Federal official with respect to that state’s intractable inter-communal crises shouldn’t wash with the President for the simple reason that PLSG itself is a partisan in those crises. Over the years, it has tried to harass and discredit any Muslim security officer deployed to Plateau State either as GOC, Police Commissioner or Joint Task Force Commander. How can its “indictment” be taken seriously?

In the wake of these security challenges, some activists have revived the old cliché of a “sovereign national conference” to “discuss the basis of Nigeria’s unity.” At the height of India’s crisis with the Sikh militants culminating in the attack on the Golden Temple at Amritsar in 1984 and the subsequent killing of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, I didn’t hear calls for a “sovereign national conference” in New Delhi, Mumbai or Kolkata. I hope I added to your confusion this morning