Wednesday, 01 February 2012 00:00 Phillip Eyam-Ozung

Nigerians first heard the name ‘Boko Haram’ sometime in year 2009 when the group reportedly attacked a number of Churches and schools in Bauchi on the grounds that Western education is sin! After security forces somehow flushed the group from Bauchi, it relocated to Maiduguri where it unleashed an orgy of violence that took Nigeria’s military the better part of a week to quell after so many lives had been needlessly lost.

Since then, Boko Haram has continued to insist both that ‘Western education is sin’ and that ‘Nigeria must be totally Islamized’ and to underscore its seriousness, the sect has rapidly grown more sophisticated and audacious in its terrorist attacks which reached their climax with the attack on the UN House in Abuja in August 2011 which claimed the lives of many innocent Nigerians as well as foreign nationals who were UN staffers!

While Boko Haram has not relented in its terrorist acts despite the global outcry that greeted its attack on the UN house in Abuja, its all-out war against the ancient city of Kano which claimed as many as 200 lives a fortnight ago left no one in doubt that it portends greater danger to Nigeria’s security and stability than many had hitherto imagined! Shortly before it launched its Kano mayhem, Boko Haram upped its game by uploading a video on Youtube in which its new leader, Imam Abubakar Shekau, sat between two AK 47 rifles in an Osama Bin Ladin-type posture. In the said video posted on Youtube, the leader of Boko Haram reaffirmed their religious agenda which seeks the creation of an Islamic Nigeria in which Sharia education will replace Western education with absolute finality! As if to leave no one in any doubt about its religious agenda in pursuit of which it’s waging a religious war on parts of the nation, when President Jonathan challenged Boko Haram to identify itself and define its demands so as to give the government a basis of engaging its members, the group posted a new video on Youtube in which its leader called President Jonathan a coward and insisted that dialogue could only take place if the president repented and became a Muslim!

Thus, while we can still speculate about who the real brains behind Boko Haram may be, the group has repeatedly made it abundantly clear that it’s mission is 100 percent religious and not economic as the CBN Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi claimed in his recent Financial Times interview in which he expressly linked the emergence of Boko Haram to stark imbalances in the distribution of national resources. saying ‘There is clearly a direct link between the very uneven nature of distribution of resources and the rising level of violence…when you look at the figures and look at the size of the population in the north, you can see that there is a structural imbalance of enormous proportions. Those states simply do not enough resources to meet basic resources while some states have too much money…This imbalance is compounded when the cost of an amnesty program for militants in the delta is included together with an additional 1% for a special development body for the Niger Delta! Why was Sanusi more concerned about rationalizing Boko Haram’s emergence (which he completely blames on the uneven distribution of national resources)than condemning its terrorist acts? This question is especially pertinent given that Sanusi’s linking of the emergence of Boko Haram to the so-called skewed allocation of resources to the Niger Delta region flies in the face because in the 80s when oil-producing states didn’t receive special derivation and there was neither a special budgetary allocation for the development of the Niger Delta nor militants requiring an amnesty budget, the Islamic Matasine Sect terrorised many parts of the North to the point where the then military government had to dispatch combined military/police teams to battle them especially in Maiduguri, Kano and Jos!

It’s most unsettling that rather than seize the opportunity presented by his Financial Times interview to denounce the Boko Haram terrorist group’s misguided cause and the extreme violence and international embarrassment that it’s visiting on Nigeria, Sanusi chose to rationalise its emergence which he blamed on the uneven distribution of Nigeria’s oil revenues which he considers to be disproportionately in favor of Niger Delta states! Sanusi even demonstrated that he was both fully-prepared for his Financial Times interview and intent on publicising a carefully- articulated pro-Boko Haram position by backing everything he said about the uneven distribution of resources between the oil-producing states of the Niger Delta and the states of the North-east region with official statistics!

The question is, why did Sanusi spend so much time and energy attacking the economic fortunes of the oil-producing states of the Niger Delta region while saying little or nothing about the atrocities of Boko Haram? Why should Sanusi plead the 13 percent derivation accruing to the oil-producing states of the Niger Delta region, the expenditure on the amnesty programme for former Niger Delta militants and the budget of the Niger Delta Development Commission as the prima facie reasons for the emergence of the Boko Haram group when the group itself has never pretended that its mission is economic?

In view of the unmistakable clarity with which Boko Haram terrorists have repeatedly proclaimed their religious agenda, why was Sanusi desperately attempting to re-engineer the Boko Haram agenda from a purely religious cause to an economic cause as a means of mischievously equating the Boko Haram terrorists with Niger Delta militants whose cause was 100 percent economic/environmental? Truth is, no matter how many press statements Sanusi issues in his feeble attempt to force a harmless interpretation of the position he canvassed in his Financial Times interview on a bewildered Nigerian public, it’s self-evident that he’s both insinuating that ‘what’s good for the Niger Delta militants is good for Boko Haram terrorists’ and giving voice to the predominant mindset of most Northern elites and leaders who have all along refused to openly condemn the terrorist exploits of Boko Haram prior to its attack on Kano! This is the kernel of Sanusi’s patently-flawed Boko-Haram economics!

Finally, Sanusi’s Boko-Haram economics is historically-flawed because it’s all too well-known that the stark economic differences between Nigeria’s North and South predate both the amalgamation of the Northern and Southern protectorates in 1914 and Nigeria’s discovery of oil in 1957. As a matter of fact, it’s this North-South economic imbalance that Sanusi is rationalising in year 2012 as the reason for the emergence of Boko Haram that started in 2009 that influenced Lugard’s amalgamation decision way back in 1914 as it’s reported that ‘The amalgamation was done for economic reasons rather than political-Northern Nigeria had a budget deficit and Frederick Lugard sought to use the budget surpluses in Southern Nigeria to offset this deficit and also believed that administration of the whole area would be easier if united, especially since Northern Nigeria had no access to the sea. At the time, neither Lugard nor other British administrators, nor Africans, considered Nigeria to constitute a potential national unit-in fact, the North and South were considered culturally radically different-and the merger was an economic and administrative convenience. Under an umbrella administration for all Nigeria, the North and South continued to have their own separate administrations, and each had its own Lieutenant-Governor answering to Lugard and his successors.’ Whether as an economist or as a scholar, Sanusi cannot claim ignorance of this well-known fact of Nigeria’s history!