Monday 22 October 2012

Matter Arising From The Arrest Of Shu'Aibu Muhammed Bama, A Boko Haram Commander In Maiduguri, By A M Bashir Shuwa


The Premium Times reports that Security forces in Maiduguri said they have made a huge haul in their campaign against the Boko Haram sect, arresting a top sect leader, Shuaibu Mohammed Bama, and linking him to “a serving senator’s house along Damboa Road, GRA Maiduguri.” According to the report, The Joint Task Force, JTF, in the Borno capital said Mr. Bama was arrested on Thursday at about 11a.m, describing him as “a high profile Boko Haram Commander who has been on the list of wanted terrorists operating between Bama and Maiduguri.”

Also there has been a widely held belief that the Boko Haram problem has been hijacked by politicians to harass and eliminate their opponents. This view was supported by a claim made by the Adamawa State Governor Rtd. Admiral Murtala Nyako published in This Day Newspaper, 12 August 2012, when he accused corrupt politicians and political opportunists of infiltrating, hijacking and criminalizing, the Islamic fundamentalists sect – Boko Haram, in order to perpetuate violence and instability in the country as means of settling political scores with their perceived opponents.

He stated that the aim of the unscrupulous politicians is to create an impression that there was a religious war in the country, and general instability, and thereby setting one section of the country against the other. Nyako said the current insecurity could be traced to corrupt politicians using the sect members and dumping them after achieving their aims.

Nyako reiterated that, ‘‘the madness in the last one year or so must be stopped. We must all work assiduously to restore sanity back to the county. We have century-long history of peaceful co-existence, never has the issue of one’s faith being questioned, we have existed as communities, inter-married, and lived together as one."

He observed that the Boko Haram fundamentalists' tendencies was not a new phenomenon in the Muslim part of the country and that it has always been accommodated and managed by Islamic religious leaders and blamed the current violent phase, on politicians and criminals who have hijacked the group.

The tactics of these politicians is to pitch the people against the government by encouraging the perpetuation of violence so that the government would be forced to commit enormous resources to the maintenance of security, which otherwise ought to be devoted to development of infrastructure, and by so doing they intend to make the government lose the support of the citizens.

These rogue politicians are doing great economic damage by grounding economic activities and other vital services that have ceased because frightened civil servants and businessmen can no longer turn up for work. Their aim is to make the state ungovernable so as to force a state of emergency that would remove those they are against from continuing in government. Writing on the issue, Obinna Akukwe is of the view that "it is common knowledge within the opposition parties that the ruling party is using the Boko  Haram to get at each other. The problem is that it gets far deeper than meets the eye. The PDP cannot afford to expose their Boko Haram members for fear of political recession. The entire nation is fed with lies while the bloodletting continues."

In a similar vein Dimeji Daniels wrote in Sahara Reporters on 21 April 2012, an insightful comment on political Boko Haram when he said, "This Boko Haram has membership in all families in the country, both mine and yours. Some of us even have them as friends. They are the greedy politicians and the conniving civil servants who have dirtied the landscape of this country since independence. Don't get me wrong! I am not saying all politicians fall into this category, but more than ninety percent of them are members of the political Boko Haram. Until we find a solution to their attacks, we may not solve the problem of the Islamic sect because their actions gave rise to some of the underlying factors responsible for the birth of the Islamic sect you and I know as Boko Haram."

Dimeji Daniels posited,  "to stay away from the political process is to leave our destiny in the hands of the political Boko Haram. For how long would we complain? Let us stop talking and start acting! Too much talk does nothing! Haven’t we been talking since 1960? He went on to raise a valid question by asking,  "Where has it gotten us? Has the political Boko Haram stopped stealing our commonwealth since then?"

And finally he summed up by stating that  "It is the masses that can provide solutions to their own predicament; not the political Boko Haram. Their “solution” is to plunder. Ours must be to restore. And let us remember when we achieve our aim that nothing would be deadlier to our survival as a people than to repeat the pattern of those we presently criticise. When all this is done, then we can be sure of victory over the other Boko Haram, the Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad" a view which this author also strongly shares.

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