GOVERNMENTS and newspapers around the world attributed the horrific Christmas Day bombings of churches in Nigeria to "Boko Haram" - a shadowy group that is routinely described as an extremist Islamist organization based in the northeast corner of Nigeria. Indeed, since the May inauguration of President Goodluck Jonathan, a Christian from the Niger Delta in the country's south, Boko Haram has been blamed for virtually every outbreak of violence in Nigeria.

But the news media and American policy makers are chasing an elusive and ill-defined threat; there is no proof that a well-organized, ideologically coherent terrorist group called Boko Haram even exists today. Evidence suggests instead that, while the original core of the group remains active, criminal gangs have adopted the name Boko Haram to claim responsibility for attacks when it suits them.

The United States must not be drawn into a Nigerian "war on terror" - rhetorical or real - that would make us appear biased toward a Christian president. Getting involved in an escalating sectarian conflict that threatens the country's unity could turn Nigerian Muslims against America without addressing any of the underlying problems that are fueling instability and sectarian strife in Nigeria.

Since August, when Gen. Carter F. Ham, the commander of the United States Africa Command, warned that Boko Haram had links to Al Qaeda affiliates, the perceived threat has grown. Shortly after General Ham's warning, the United Nations' headquarters in Abuja was bombed, and simplistic explanations blaming Boko Haram for Nigeria's mounting security crisis became routine. Someone who claims to be a spokesman for Boko Haram - with a name no one recognizes and whom no one has been able to identify or meet with - has issued threats and statements claiming responsibility for attacks. Remarkably, the Nigerian government and the international news media have simply accepted what he says.

In late November, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Homeland Security issued a report with the provocative title: "Boko Haram: Emerging Threat to the U.S. Homeland." The report makes no such case, but nevertheless proposes that the organization be added to America's list of foreign terrorist organizations. The State Department's Africa bureau disagrees, but pressure from Congress and several government agencies is mounting.

Boko Haram began in 2002 as a peaceful Islamic splinter group. Then politicians began exploiting it for electoral purposes. But it was not until 2009 that Boko Haram turned to violence, especially after its leader, a young Muslim cleric named Mohammed Yusuf, was killed while in police custody. Video footage of Mr. Yusuf's interrogation soon went viral, but no one was tried and punished for the crime. Seeking revenge, Boko Haram targeted the police, the military and local politicians - all of them Muslims.

It was clear in 2009, as it is now, that the root cause of violence and anger in both the north and south of Nigeria is endemic poverty and hopelessness. Influential Nigerians from Maiduguri, where Boko Haram is centered, pleaded with Mr. Jonathan's government in June and July not to respond to Boko Haram with force alone. Likewise, the American ambassador, Terence P. McCulley, has emphasized, both privately and publicly, that the government must address socio-economic deprivation, which is most severe in the north. No one seems to be listening.

Instead, approximately 25 percent of Nigeria's budget for 2012 is allocated for security, even though the military and police routinely respond to attacks with indiscriminate force and killing. Indeed, according to many Nigerians I've talked to from the northeast, the army is more feared than Boko Haram.

Meanwhile, Boko Haram has evolved into a franchise that includes criminal groups claiming its identity. Revealingly, Nigeria's State Security Services issued a statement on Nov. 30, identifying members of four "criminal syndicates" that send threatening text messages in the name of Boko Haram. Southern Nigerians - not northern Muslims - ran three of these four syndicates, including the one that led the American Embassy and other foreign missions to issue warnings that emptied Abuja's high-end hotels. And last week, the security services arrested a Christian southerner wearing northern Muslim garb as he set fire to a church in the Niger Delta. In Nigeria, religious terrorism is not always what it seems.

None of this excuses Boko Haram's killing of innocents. But it does raise questions about a rush to judgment that obscures Nigeria's complex reality.

Many Nigerians already believe that the United States unconditionally supports Mr. Jonathan's government, despite its failings. They believe this because Washington praised the April elections that international observers found credible, but that many Nigerians, especially in the north, did not. Likewise, Washington's financial support for Nigeria's security forces, despite their documented human rights abuses, further inflames Muslim Nigerians in the north.

Mr. Jonathan's recent actions have not helped matters. He told Nigerians last week, "The issue of bombing is one of the burdens we must live with." On New Year's Eve, he declared a state of emergency in parts of four northern states, leading to increased military activity there. And on New Year's Day, he removed a subsidy on petroleum products, more than doubling the price of fuel. In a country where 90 percent of the population lives on $2 or less a day, anger is rising nationwide as the costs of transport and food increase dramatically.

Since Nigeria's return to civilian rule in 1999, many politicians have used ethnic and regional differences and, most disastrously, religion for their own purposes. Northern Muslims - indeed, all Nigerians - are desperate for a government that responds to their most basic needs: personal security and hope for improvement in their lives. They are outraged over government policies and expenditures that undermine both.

The United States should not allow itself to be drawn into this quicksand by focusing on Boko Haram alone. Washington is already seen by many northern Muslims - including a large number of longtime admirers of America - as biased toward a Christian president from the south. The United States must work to avoid a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes us into their enemy. Placing Boko Haram on the foreign terrorist list would cement such views and make more Nigerians fear and distrust America.

Jean Herskovits, a professor of history at the State University of New York, Purchase, has written on Nigerian politics since 1970.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/article;jsessionid=4F1B33DD3B707EC836C65E86FE6429C2.w6?a=888812&single=1&f=28&sub=Sunday

"This article which liberally regurgitates apologist cliches and reels off like a Boko Haram propaganda effort simply boggles the mind.

Standing where I am and knowing how all of these foreign commentators apply the same one-size-fits-all approach that is to call up the “respected northern civil rights activisit in Kaduna” and sound him out on issues, this is just laughable and a very poorly disguised PR exercise which shows how simplistic Madame Professor and the Kaduna-based activist imagine the rest of us to be. Does telling us that she has been writing about Nigeria since1970 prove anything when her treatise is transparently lacking in depth?

The “respected civil rights activist in Kaduna” is a Boko Haram apologist who holds up his contacts with the group at every twist and turn.

I stopped reading at this point:

Quote:
“Seeking revenge, Boko Haram targeted the police, the military and local politicians – all of them Muslims.” End of Quote.

Unknown to her, by accident of history rather than any deliberate design, there are many more christians in the Nigerian Army than there are muslims. Is there an exclusively christian or an exclusively muslim regiment in the Nigerian Army? How come all the soldiers who have fallen in battle are in her opinion “all muslims?”

The truth is that from the get-go, the parts of the North which have historically provided the bulk of rank-and-file soldiers of northern extraction, have always been the ethnic minority christian areas of Northern Nigeria, chiefly the so-called Middle Belt. This stemmed both from the fact of a comparative dearth of economic opportunities in those deprived areas and because the Hausa-Fulani, Shuwa Arab and Kanuri elite have always preferred careers in commerce and administration.

That is why, even as each state of the federation provides a similar number of recruits and officer cadets for enlistment into the Nigerian Army every year, the majority of the candidates taking up these opportunities within the northern states, in the absence of LGA quotas, have traditionally come from the markedly christian Middle Belt and even the southern districts of the Far North.

Checklist

southern Kaduna(so called Old Southern Zaria)
Bauchi South – Tafawa Balewa, Toro
Kebbi South – Zuru axis
Gombe South – Biliri-Kaltungo-Tula Highlands axis
Borno South – Askira, Uba, Kwajafa,Gwoza,Biu axis

Add to that Benue(Idoma-Tiv-Igede),Plateau(Langtang-Shendam-Jos), Kogi, Nasarawa,Taraba(Takum-Wukari) and Adamawa (Numan-Mandara Mts-Hong) states and check to see how that coheres with the reality in the barracks.

When you include the nominally 90% christian states of the Southeast and Niger Delta(11 states) plus Ondo and Ekiti states to the tally, you would understand why the Army has a CLEAR majority of christians under arms. That pattern held true as of 1959 and through the Civil War years as well.

Was that blatantly false statement uttered with a view to balancing out the criminal slaughter of christians on Christmas Day? Was she telling us about a one-off episode of a christian who she claims was “dressed up like a muslim while attempting to burn a church” with a view to advancing the false hypothesis that the Xmas bombings were carried out by christians? So the cold-blooded claims of responsibility made by Abul Qaqa ever so often are an aside and that one-off episode is characteristic of the violence?

So unlike the myth which Prof Jean and Malam Shehu are seeking to foist on the psyche of Nigerians, there is no empirical basis beyond irredentist drivel to suggest that the bulk of soldiers who have been killed or maimed in the war on terror have been muslims.

So poverty is the problem – poverty which began with or was deepened by President Jonathan’s election? Unknown to the Professor, violence has always been ingrained in the inter-ethnic and inter-faith relations in Northern Nigeria.

During the course of her 51-year post-independence history, leaders of northern extraction have held the mantle of leadership for a cumulative period of 33 years. Who impoverished the North? Where were Boko Haram when the Babangida regime frittered away the $12.8 billion Gulf War oil windfall in 1990-91? Where were they when the Abacha regime looted $3 billion? Why did they not throw tantrums when the Shagari regime got mired in the £6 billion rice importation scandal masterminded by the cassock-wearing fugitive Alhaji who narrowly missed being brought back to Nigeria in a crate? By the law of averages, has the North or the South been more responsible for the impoverishment which we see in the North? Sorry Professor, the economic cassus belli of your treatise is untenable, null and void.

How about the mindless violence which has historically been visited on christians in the North? Madame Jean needs to recognise religious zealotry and intolerance which has been conveniently ensconced in false causes for what it is.

During my lifetime, a certain Sheikh Gumi of blessed memory told Nigerians in 1988 that it is impossible for a muslim to subject himself to the sovereignty of a christian-led regime. Gumi was the Ayatollah of the extremist Izala movement which is only a tad less radicalised than Boko Haram.

Shortly before the 12 June 1993 elections, a certain Alhaji Saleh Michika, who at the time was the elected Governor of Adamawa State, stated categorically and in a fit of hegemonic overkill, that “no Northerner should vote for a Southerner”

* Was it poverty or characteristically debilitating intolerance which led to the 1987 episode which was triggered off by the antics of muslim extremists who disrupted a christian religious crusade in christian-dominated Kafanchan and triggered off massive riots across NW Nigeria – Kankara,Ikara,Kaduna,Katsina,Funtua,Malumfashi,Kano and elsewhere, which were so disruptive that General Babangida described the SinParties of rioting as “the civilian equivalent of an attempted coup d’etat”

* Was it poverty or intolerance which led to the savage 1991 Kano riots triggered off by hostility to the idea of a religious crusade organised by Reinhard Bonnke?

*Was it poverty or intolerance which led to the decapitation of Gideon Akaluka in 1994 by a Kano street mob?

* Was it poverty or a convenient gang-up against an unlikely “christian” regime of President Obasanjo which led to the fratricidal Sharia riots of 2000 AD and the deaths of over 2,000 persons? Has the clamour and brouhaha over Sharia law, as was predicted by President Obasanjo, not now largely abated since his “christian regime” came to an end?

* Was it poverty or intolerance which led to the mass murder of National Youth Service Corps members,christians and southerners which followed in the wake of the April 2011 polls in Yola,Bauchi,Kaduna,Kano and Maiduguri?

* Was the Maitatsine uprising which was foisted on the nation in the 1980s during the oil boom years also rooted in poverty? How come she does not see a tradition of jihadism?

Why is it that Kano and Borno have always received larger allocations from the Federation Account than Anambra and Abia yet the citizens of the latter pair of states are infinitely more prosperous? Do some of our compatriots in some Nigerian states rely too much on government patronage?

Any so called ‘expert’ who claims to have been observing Nigerian affairs even before I had been born can afford to write something more balanced and in-depth."


http://beegeagle./2012/01/03/in-nigeria-boko-haram-is-not-the-problem/

Nigeria is a funny colonial contraption consisting of idiotic southern region and deceptive northern region. While the northern region is guided by Islamic fundamentalist in majority, the southern region is overflowing with moronic leadership.

The people of northern region of Nigeria had continued to take advantage of the geophysical nature of the country guaranteed by idiotic mannerism of southern regional crowd. The northern border of Nigeria is as porous as sandy soil which enabled political leaders from the northern region and groups such as Boko Haram to import loads of weapons and mercenaries into the country unabated. If the reverse was the case, concrete walls would have been erected between Nigeria and Chad or Niger Republic.

In the southern region, the issue of border watch is serious national interest. The seaports are clogged with latest and best scanners today’s technology can produce and capable of penetrating three inches of thick metal case. The sea lanes are patrolled by heavily armed sailors commanded by a flag officer named Abdullahi or Mohammadu. The creeks are filled with so-called JTF (Joint Task Force) of course commanded by Bello or Farouk with orders to shot at sight.

Today, southern region of Nigeria looks like an occupied zone with all forms of militias patrolling the streets. Yet the bombings and threats of mayhem are from the northern region of Nigeria with a group such as Boko Haram spearheading the northern political agenda. No wonder groups such OPC, MOSOP and MASSOB are all barks and no bites. The southern region of Nigeria is punk. 

For the sake of the argument, if war should break out today between the northern and southern regions, the south would have its back at the Atlantic Ocean gasping for air before mounting concerted effort to repel the north. Northern region of Nigeria is a cache of military weapons ranging from Tanks to AK-47.

I have never believed in the cesspit called Nigeria or the goofy stuff such as One-Nigeria anyway. Whether it is military, civilian, democratic or monarchical rule, Nigeria is doomed.