Boko Haram by Mike Smith

Author:Mike Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

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When a helicopter landed in Maiduguri in September 2011 carrying former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo, there would be a fleeting moment of hope. With the UN building blown up, hundreds killed across northern and central Nigeria, and the violence showing no signs of abating, it became obvious to many that some form of negotiation would be needed as part of any serious bid to end the insurgency. Obasanjo had flown to Maiduguri for that reason, and after meeting other organisers at the air force base in the city reeling from months of bombings and shoot-outs, he drove with them to the ruins of the mosque where Mohammed Yusuf once preached. A meeting had been arranged and it was to include an audience of about 60 people, a mat spread out under a tree at the site of the destroyed mosque for this purpose. According to an organiser of the meeting, northern-based rights activist Shehu Sani, those in attendance included relatives of the late Boko Haram leader and those identified as insurgents. The main speaker apart from Obasanjo would be Babakura Fugu, Yusuf’s brother-in-law and the son of Baba Fugu Mohammed, the elderly man killed by security forces at the conclusion of the 2009 uprising. Despite a court ruling awarding Mohammed’s family some $600,000 in damages over his death, the government still at that point had not paid.

‘We sat down and had a frank talk’, Sani told me one afternoon a couple years later at a cafe in the Hilton hotel in Abuja, where he had gone for meetings. ‘President Obasanjo told them that he is here on a peace mission [...] and he is passionate about peace and he wants an end to this violence, and he wants to hear their grievances. And now it was then that they came out with a list of their – the “crime”, in quotes, that was committed against them by the state.’

They showed him pictures of supposed Boko Haram members they said had been killed by the security agencies during the crackdown in 2009 as well as documents related to their case against the government.

‘They didn’t ask for court money, but they showed how even a secular order from a secular court could not even be obeyed by even the president himself, by the government’, Sani said. Other points they raised included ‘the need to release some members of the Boko Haram group and also to stop the raiding of houses and arresting of people, and then to look at the possibility of rebuilding the mosque, schools and homes that were [...] demolished by security agencies, and to end the harassment of their wives and children’.

The meeting lasted around four hours, according to Sani. He said he sought to have Obasanjo act as mediator for a few specific reasons, including the fact that he was a Christian from the south, making him less vulnerable to accusations of ‘sponsoring’ the violence, as some northern politicians had been accused of doing. Sani said

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