By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. This column was written on Tuesday April 9 before Boko Haram rejected the amnesty offer of the Nigerian gover...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
This column was written on Tuesday April 9 before Boko Haram rejected the amnesty offer of the Nigerian government.
This column was written on Tuesday April 9 before Boko Haram rejected the amnesty offer of the Nigerian government.
No issue has confounded me more deeply in recent
times than “northern elders’” intensely sustained advocacy for “amnesty” for
Boko Haram mass murderers—and the Goodluck Jonathan administration’s apparent willingness
to be railroaded into rewarding mass murder. Is there not even the vaguest
pretense to decency in Nigeria anymore?
What moral code can possibly justify the granting of
pardon to shadowy, nihilistic, and unrepentant merchants of deaths who traffic
in the cold-blooded mass murders of innocent men, women, and children; who have
rendered thousands of people orphans and widows and widowers; and who have made
life a living hell for millions more? What, in the name of justice and all that
is decent, can justify the mollycoddling of obdurate, demented, bloody-thirty
cowards who delight in inflicting death, destruction, and misery on innocents?
I am aware that there are many well-meaning people
who advocate “amnesty” for Boko Haram out of a genuine frustration with the
persistent violence in northern Nigeria and the apparent inability of security
agencies to contain this violence. For such people, anything at all that would
bring an end to Boko Haram’s sanguinary fury that has seen vast swaths of
northern Nigeria drenched with the blood of innocents is welcome.
But there are others for whom amnesty for Boko Haram
represents little more than narcissistic self-preservation. When Boko Haram
murdered ordinary folks—irrespective of their religious affiliations and ethnic
identities—no “northern elder” cared. As a matter of fact, People’s Democratic
Party chairman Bamanga Tukur said
on May 16, 2011 that Boko Haram was not only fighting
for justice; it is “another name for justice.” (But he described the group as “evil” after
they attacked his hometown a few weeks ago!)
“Northern elders” began to sing the chorus of amnesty
for Boko Haram only when the group started targeting high-profile elites of the
region with uncanny regularity.
There are yet others for whom amnesty is just good
old business. Elaborate but redundant bureaucracies will be created in the
service of the “amnesty,” and billions, perhaps trillions, of naira will be
shared between the as yet unidentified leaders of Boko Haram and the “northern
elders” who would act as mediators between government and Boko Haram. The
Jonathan administration’s interest in all this, of course, begins and ends with
solid guarantees for "northern elders’" support for his 2015 reelection bid.
So this has
nothing to do with the north or the south (or, for that matter, with Muslims or Christians) and everything to do with the nakedly mercenary self-interests
of a privileged, rapacious, self-selected few. That is why talks of “amnesty” often
preclude compensation for the thousands of victims of Boko Haram violence.
This is all so short-sighted and self-destructive
for so many obvious reasons. Boko Haram members have never admitted guilt for
their mass murders. You can’t give amnesty to an impenitent wrongdoer. What is
worse, we have no clear sense what Boko Haram’s actual grouse is. The little we
know isn’t even remotely a basis for negotiation. For instance, we learn from
Boko Haram leaders’ media interviews that they want President Goodluck Jonathan
to convert to Islam and for the entire country to be ruled by Sharia. Those are
impossible demands to grant.
The Islam that Boko Haram murderers claim to be
inspired by allows for religious freedom even within Islamic states. That fact
is so elementary in Islam as to be unworthy of any further elaboration. So why
grant amnesty to people whose demands you can never, ever meet? In any case,
how do we reconcile the nature and target of Boko Haram’s terror campaign—indiscriminate
murders of Christians and Muslims, children and adults, men and women, the rich
and the poor, southerners and northerners, Nigerians and foreigners, etc.—with
their so-called grouse?
The truth is
that Boko Haram is an anarchic, trigger-happy, self-abnegating group of mass
murderers that derive perverse joy in death and violence for the hell of it. No
amount of appeasement will mollify them.
In 2011, Governor Kashim Shetima of Borno State
extended amnesty to the same Boko Haram murderers some “northern elders” have
become passionate defenders of. They rejected it. In rejecting the amnesty
offer, the group’s spokesman told
the Hausa service of the BBC that Boko Haram neither recognizes democracy as a
form of government nor the Nigerian constitution as the foundation of Nigeria’s
nationhood. So what inspires the confidence of “northern
elders” that Boko Haram will accept the amnesty they are blackmailing President
Jonathan into giving them now?
Of course, when the amnesty is finally offered to
Boko Haram, they will reject it, and the violence in the north will only
escalate because Boko Haram members will be emboldened in more ways than they
had ever been. They will interpret the offer of amnesty as a signal of
government’s surrender and as evidence of their superiority.
Even if Boko Haram members accept the offer of
amnesty from the federal government (which they won’t), it would be unsustainable
in the long run. It would be a faint scratch on the surface of a deep-rooted
problem that is sure to recrudesce intermittently. As a Leadership Newspaper
editorial cartoon says in response to MEND’s resumption of violence in the
Niger Delta in spite of the billions spent on “amnesty” on them, “A nation that
buys its peace [will perpetually be] indebted to war.”
Amnesty may secure temporary reprieve for Boko
Haram’s elite victims in the north, but it would never eliminate the hate,
ignorance, and ideology of mass murder that gave birth to the group. Most
importantly, no nation can survive ignoring its poor and spending billions to
appease insatiably bloodthirsty terrorists.
What “northern elders” need to do, if they are
REALLY interested in solving the Boko Haram problem, is help mobilize
ideational resources to defeat the ideology that gives birth to and sustains
groups like Boko Haram. This is a long-term strategic initiative that will not
yield immediate results, but that is worthwhile nonetheless. In the short-run,
our security agencies need to be equipped with 21st century
intelligence-gathering capabilities to confront and defeat these primitive
monsters of depravity that have made life miserable for millions of innocent
people.
Boko Haram should never be given amnesty because
they neither deserve it nor desire it. Unfortunately, in Nigeria, mass murder
pays—literally.
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