The Muhammadu Buhari administration has been unable to draw a line of distinction between politics and governance in the business of government since its coming to power in 2015. Round the clock, the administration appears to be distracted by partisan politics, away from its critical function of state management. Its pre-occupation with politics to the detriment of governance has resulted in the politicisation of national security to such an extent that the precarious situation it inherited in 2015 has become worse four years after in 2019.

Almost always in a hurry to give the impression of having succeeded where its predecessors failed, the Buhari administration inadvertently made the failures of the past its benchmark for measuring its own success. By often resorting to measuring its success against the failures of the past rather than against a benchmark of overall good governance indices in line with acceptable international standards of best practices, the administration has reduced the barometer of comparative governance to a competition between two sets of incompetence.

By viewing the problem of insecurity, pretty much like other fundamental issues of economy and corruption, through the narrow prism of exclusivist partisanship, Buhari underestimated the Boko Haram insurgency by considering his predecessors inability to rein in the group as entirely their individual fault. Buhari’s simplistic reduction of the Boko Haram insurgency to corruption and indiscipline of past administrations was responsible for the faulty diagnosis of a problem that is far beyond the physical but rooted in a radical ideology of global Islamist revivalism.

The Buhari administration gleefully took credit for the appreciably scaling down of lethal attacks on mostly soft targets in vulnerable places such as markets, schools, mosques and churches in a wide range of areas outside the North East, including Abuja, by triumphantly declaring Boko Haram “technically defeated.” This premature declaration of victory over the Boko Haram terrorists was not only disingenuous but also a wilful display of ignorance about the true nature of the enemy in what became the greatest undoing of government’s war on terror.

The scaled down attacks on soft targets, which reduced the civilian casualties while the Boko Haram insurgency appeared to have been restricted to the North East, wasn’t so much the effort of the Buhari administration but a deliberate change of tactical strategy by the terror group. In March 2015, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Boko Haram terrorist group, pledged allegiance to the ISIL and was acknowledged by a top official of the international Islamist terror group Abu Mohammad Al-Adnani. That singular act would internationalise an otherwise local insurgent group that was at the time under immense pressure from a renewed offensive by Nigeria’s security forces, which pushed them to the fringes of Sambisa forest in the process of liberating several communities they had occupied.

Following their effective internationalisation, Boko Haram was directed by ISIL to henceforth abide by Islamic rules of war engagement, which forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslim targets. In effect, it meant a cessation of indiscriminate suicide bombings and attacks on mosques, markets, schools as well as other soft targets where there could be any unarmed and non-hostile Muslim collateral damage. It was also a strategic move to regain the lost religious legitimacy among the local Muslim population following the carnage visited upon them and their communities that pressed them towards the government side. Shekau, who is clearly innately imbued with the Takfiri doctrine, which equates disobedience to disbelief, would have none of this. As far as he was concerned, any Muslim not heeding the global call for jihad by joining the ranks of his Boko Haram group was not a Muslim in the first place.

Following Shekau’s refusal to abide by the Islamic rules of war engagement, a split in the ranks of the Boko Haram insurgents occurred in 2016. A powerful column of fighters and commanders broke the ranks of the original Boko Haram group, forming a splinter under the banner of Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), under the ISIL appointed leadership of Abu Musab al-Barnawi. This split left the Shekau group sufficiently weakened and unable to carry on its hitherto indiscriminate killing spree across the country, which gave the false impression of a “technically defeated” Boko Haram.

ISWAP, otherwise known as the Albarnawi Group, in complete obedience of the Islamic rules of war by meticulously avoiding Muslim targets and backed by ISIL logistics as well as training, would emerge a ferocious fighting force. Between 2016 and 2019, ISWAP swooped on several hard targets of military installations, inflicting the heaviest casualty on Nigeria’s security on a scale never seen since the civil war. While the political leadership of Nigeria was basking in the euphoria of false triumphalism, the dynamics in the theatre of war changed from civilian terrorism to a full-blown insurgency, which has seen ISWAP take, head-on, ground forces of mainly the Nigerian Army, leaving many dead and carting away caches of arms.

The ferocious resurgence of the Boko Haram insurgents is an indication that, contrary to official claims, the deadly sect is far from being degraded. To sustain the impression in the public space about its self-assessed successes in the war against terror, the Buhari administration has deployed more energy to either suppress or obscure and, in some cases filter, information about the true state of things out of the epicentre of the insurgency than in the real task of energising boots on the ground to decisively defeat one the world’s deadliest insurgent groups.

While the government is pre-occupied with well-choreographed cameo freak shows of its successes in degrading Boko Haram, the deadly activities of the group have not only become widespread like an untreated cancerous cell in the human body, but has actually stretched Nigeria’s security forces to breaking limit. Whereas, the Boko Haram group has mutated into a well-armed professional fighting force, the Nigerian Army was left without adequate men, equipment and motivation. In the past week alone, ISWAP has attacked military bases in Damasak, Monguno, Mobbar and Nganzai local government areas of Borno State. These attacks also coincided with a suicide attack by the Shekau-led group, which left several people dead or injured in Konduga town, some 36 kilometres from Maiduguri, the state capital.

Frustrated by lack of progress at the frontlines of the war on terror, Nigeria’s army chief, Gen. Yusuf Buratai, made a startling revelation, to the effect that “it is unfortunate, but the truth is that almost every setback the Nigerian Army has had in our operations in recent times can be traced to insufficient willingness to perform assigned tasks or simply insufficient commitment to a common national and military cause by those at the frontlines,’’ is a clear indication that Boko Haram has technically defeated Buratai’s army.

An insurgency that is primarily driven by a radical ideology cannot be defeated by force of arms alone. Similarly, the leadership of Nigeria’s security force that is heavily skewed in favour of a section of the country is not likely to command national loyalty. That ISWAP abides faithfully with ISIL-decreed Islamic rules of war that forbids the killing of unarmed and non-hostile Muslims is of strategic disadvantage to Buratai’s army as the insurgents now enjoy enormous legitimacy as the predominantly Muslim population in the main theatre of the war on terror no longer considers them lethal adversaries.

https://www.sunnewsonline.com/lamentation-as-boko-haram-bares-fangs/

Buhari is in power to further the fulani agenda

true....

apc care too much to beat fee dee fee,but fee dee fee performance was miserable....

whats the sense of a bit better than miserable....??

it's unfortunate that the government of the day failed to differentiate between governance and politics

The PMB administration is practically rudderless.

Even it's acclaimed successes are cosmestic & designed to decieve rather than make a positive impact.

Boko Haram has technically defeated Buratai’s army.

Word!

The author of this OP-ED knows his onions

ivandragon:
The PMB administration is practically rudderless.

Even it's acclaimed successes are cosmestic & designed to decieve rather than make a positive impact.

Buhari and the APC are merely interested in projecting an image of success that's why they keep virtue signalling and wanking their flaccid diks.