{UAH} Solution to Boko Haram is political, not military - Comment - www.theeastafrican.co.ke
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Solution to Boko Haram is political, not military - Comment
By L. Muthoni Wanyeki
Posted Saturday, May 24 2014 at 16:02
Overlay the Kanem-Bornu Empire we learnt about in history on the current-day Borno state of Nigeria, in which the Emirs' jurisdiction is now ostensibly limited to cultural matters.
The federal, secular state of Nigeria theoretically runs everything else — having declared a state of emergency in this and other northern Nigerian states in March last year.
Why? Not because Borno state, like other northern Nigerian states over the past decade or so, had declared itself and its inhabitants all subject to sharia law.
The federal, secular state merely sniffed at that — appeasement of the north being natural to it. What matter, it seemed to posit, if women have to cover their heads, dress "modestly," stand in separate lines in grocery stores? These are small inconveniences, easily accommodated...
It was not for this that the state of emergency was declared last year. No. It was the entirely predictable escalation of ostensibly jihadist attacks that finally provoked the declaration of the state of emergency.
In only a couple of years, Boko Haram moved from frequent but small-scale attacks based on an anti-modernisation and religious agenda, to larger-scale attacks based on an agenda less communal and more political — against perceived domination and subjugation of the north —fuelled by the influx of arms and foreign fighters post-Libya and post-Mali.
In response to the undisputed upscaling of Boko Haram attacks on civilians and public institutions, the Nigerian military has run amok in Borno state as it has in the rest of the north.
Allegations of gross and systemic violations in its treatment of Boko Haram suspects have been repeatedly made — by Nigeria's own human-rights organisations as well as by externals.
More cynical Nigerians, both northern and southern, also talk about how curiously convenient it is that the Nigerian federal government now being able to justify keeping the north under military occupation in the context of the upcoming elections. Given that the practice of rotation of the presidency between the north and south effectively ended with the current presidency.
This is the backstory to the now global "Bring Back Our Girls" campaign — responding to the abduction of about 240 schoolgirls from Chibok Government Secondary School in southern Borno state.
The campaign has been surprising in the way in which it took off, first in Nigeria and the Nigerian diaspora, then across Africa and the rest of the world.
Demonstrations and vigils have been held. Letters have been written and tweets have been tweeted. "Celebrities" have held up banners. America has sent drones and men, responding to the passionate prompting to "do something." Anything.
That "anything" means more running amok by the Nigerian military. Or more military surveillance and deployment by the American government. In short, the "anything" is military.
But, as Nigerian Nobel Laureate in literature and political activist Wole Soyinka pointed out in London a couple of weeks ago, that "anything" needs, in fact, to go right back to the beginning.
To the politics of appeasement. Yes, with the parents and their communities, the hope is for the campaign to "Bring the Girls Back." But that cannot be the end of the story.
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