On 20 September 2015 coordinated bomb attacks in the satellite towns of Nyanya and Kuje, near Abuja, claimed about 20 lives while over 40 others sustained various degrees of injuries. At about the same time another set of coordinated blasts rocked the town of Maiduguri, claiming about 80 lives with several others seriously injured. Just today (Wednesday, October 7 2015), 18 people were reportedly killed in Damaturu, Yobe state. The attacks by suspected Boko Haram terrorists have continued with regularity, despite the consensus that one of the areas President Muhammadu Buhari has shown great resolve so far has been in his determination to end the Boko Haram terrorism. Buhari in fact gave the military three months to defeat Boko Haram and end their insurgency and terrorism.

The continued resilience of Boko Haram under the Buhari regime – at a time when the soldiers battling them are believed to be well motivated and well-equipped – call for a re-thinking of some of our earlier notions about the sect:
One, the continued resilience of the terrorist sect negates some of the conspiracy theories that for long helped to undermine any concerted action against the group. For instance, among the prevailing conspiracy theories was that the group was being sponsored by eminent Northern politicians to make the country “ungovernable” for former President Jonathan because he is a Christian and from a minority ethnic group in the south. Buhari had been accused under this theory of being one of the sponsors of Boko Haram and the only evidence often adduced by the accusers was that he was ‘nominated’ by the sect as a negotiator when the Jonathan administration was exploring the option of dialogue with the group. If this ‘theory’ is correct, Buhari’s victory over Jonathan in the last election would have mellowed the group. But it hasn’t.

Another version of this conspiracy theory was that Boko Haram was being sponsored by former President Jonathan –either to depopulate the north ahead of the 2015 general elections or to make Islam look bad in order to enable the former president to use religion as a tool of mobilization for his candidacy. That Boko Haram has continued to cause mayhem despite the fact that Jonathan is no longer in power again negates any suggestion that he was sponsoring the group –or that he deliberately did not do enough to stop them because it was a “northern problem”. In fact, rather than Jonathan being the sponsor as the conspiracy theorists claimed, the army recently accused some elders in Bornu state of deliberately undermining their efforts to defeat Boko Haram because they were profiting from the situation.

The above two conspiracy theories were so strongly believed that it made many Nigerians indirectly complicit in the murderous activities of Boko Haram. For instance when a state of emergency was first declared against Boko Haram in May 2013, some eminent Northern elders declared that the measure amounted to a declaration of war against the north. In the same vein, when the Chibok girls were kidnapped, some key supporters of the Jonathan regime openly doubted the kidnap story and believed it was part of a grand design by the noth to bring down the former president’s government. The belief in this conspiracy theory prevented the Jonathan administration from moving quickly to locate the girls after they were kidnapped.

Two, the resilience of Boko Haram attacks in the face of increased onslaught by the Nigerian soldiers and increasing loss of their members would suggest that we have all along underestimated both the numerical strength of Boko Haram, the level of motivation and sophistication of its members as well as the members’ fighting spirit. I believe such underestimations largely account for what will appear to be exaggerations on the narratives of inadequate equipment for our soldiers and poor morale as explanations for why our ‘otherwise gallant soldiers’ were unable to finish off the supposedly rag-tag and ill-equipped snipers in a matter of days.

- See more at: http://www.speshsworld.com/re-thinking-boko-haram/#sthash.5gT93wAR.dpuf