The Great Unravelling

The metaphor of the boiling frog, which describes the behaviour of a frog being slowly boiled alive, is apt. According to this axiom, if a frog is suddenly thrust into boiling water, it will jump out. But if the frog is put in water, which is then slowly boiled, it will not perceive the danger and will end up being boiled to death. The scientific basis for this claim is tenuous but it works perfectly as a metaphor for how the gradual escalation of danger can elude our notice until it is too late. It is about how institutions perceive and interpret risk.

As with the frog that is suddenly thrust into boiling water, governmental reflexes are conditioned to instantly respond to rapid changes in the national security threat environment; to risks that could quickly “heat up the polity” in Nigerian parlance. Governmental reflexes, however, are far less astute at assessing the slow inflammation of the body politic. Since 1970, Nigeria’s national security architecture has been primed to respond to two specific threats—civil war and coup d’état. For security institutions still largely shaped by military dictatorship, the paramount consideration is the protection of the elite in power rather than the society at large. The prevalent operational paradigm is not, in fact, national security, but regime security. All other threats exist in a huge official blind spot.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration has won accolades for “defeating” Boko Haram and its supporters have been quick to highlight its adroit management of national security. The reality, however, is different. According to the 2017 Global Terrorism Index, deaths attributed to Boko Haram reduced by 80 per cent—an improvement on the carnage of previous years. But for the second year running, Nigeria was ranked the world’s third most terrorized country. Boko Haram, which was the world’s deadliest terror group in 2014 with 6, 700 deaths dropped to third in 2016 with 1,079 attributable killings. Only one of its attacks made the top 20 most fatal terror attacks in the world in 2016 compared to 9 such attacks in 2014. While the administration has, indeed, amped up the military counterinsurgency effort and degraded the terror organization in the North East, Nigeria is a long way from being able to claim that Boko Haram has been defeated. Its numbers, bolstered by abductions of girls and boys from North East communities and relentless indoctrination, remain significant.

Since December 2016 when the military seized the group’s Sambisa Forest base, Boko Haram has carried out a spate of suicide bomb attacks in Maiduguri. The group has continued its reign of terror in outlying communities in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe where it has carried out abductions, raids, and ambushes of military and humanitarian convoys. Of concern is a discernible pattern in the terror group’s strategy. It prefers to use girls and women as suicide bombers while using boys and men for guerrilla attacks. According to a report authored by Jason Warner and Hilary Matfess for the U.S. Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point, 56 per cent of the group’s 238 suicide-bombing attacks between April 2011 and June 2017 were carried out by females. Indeed, the group has deployed more female suicide bombers than any other terrorist group in history.

The Buhari administration has rightly pointed out that Boko Haram no longer holds any Nigerian territory. This was the case in 2014 when, at the apparent height of its powers, the group declared its caliphate in Gwoza. However, the insurgents do not need to hold territory; their current campaign of guerrilla attacks, ambushes, suicide bombings, and abductions is more than sufficient to render vast swathes of the North East ungovernable. Boko Haram’s strategic priority has shifted from control to disruption. Moreover, the ready claim that Boko Haram no longer controls any territory is true but is, in a sense, also misdirection. The real issue is that the Nigerian state itself has no effective control over many areas in the region and these ungoverned spaces provide room either for the group’s hibernation or for the gestation of new criminal enterprises.

The chances of a quick return to normalcy for the beleaguered region are remote. Indeed, given all the extant indices—the sheer vastness of the terrain, the unguarded borders with three neighbouring countries, the enduring vulnerability of sparsely populated communities scattered across the state with the second largest landmass in Nigeria, the manpower deficits that make policing the region so challenging, the basic difficulty of a conventional fighting force facing off against a nimble guerrilla group and tens of thousands of orphans embroiled in an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe becoming a lost generation—the more likely scenario is that of a protracted counterinsurgency campaign that could persist for at least another decade.