Written by Olawale Rasheed, Abuja Sunday, 08 April 2012
The fight against the Boko Haram insurgency may have taken a new dimension as the United States government has finally accepted the narration of Northern elders that the violence is a consequence of poverty and unequal distribution of national resources.
This is coming as Northern lobby groups in the United States are reportedly succeeding in their mandate to stop the United States from designating the Boko Haram sect as a terrorist organisation as was done to similar groups, such as al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and Al-Sabab in Somalia.
Prominent Northern leaders such as the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Mallam Lamido Sanusi and the Niger State governor, Babangida Aliyu, had recently argued that the insurgency might be directly linked to gross inequality, widespread poverty and unjust national revenue sharing formula. These, thaye said, could lead to agitation for a change in the revenue sharing formula.
Findings from American foreign policy circles showed that the American government may have yielded to the Arewa narration of the crisis.
Sunday Tribune learnt that the United States had long standing relationship with key military and intelligence experts from the area.
Testifying before House of Representatives Sub-Committee hearings, Johnnie Carson, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, affirmed that Boko Haram was not an organised, ideologically-driven movement like al-Qaeda and that the violence attributed to Boko Haram was the result of natural social dynamics driven by poverty, social inequality and police and government brutality as well as corruption.
Carson was quoted as dismissing the idea of designating Boko Haram a terrorist organisation and claimed that this conflict was driven not by religion, but by “social inequities,” urging the United States to step up development assistance to “Nigeria's restive Muslim-majority North”
Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Wendy Sherman, reiterated this policy when after her recent visit to Nigeria, she affirmed that the insurgency had economic, rather than religious undertone.
She said: “In Northern Nigeria, it is critical that the government address the social and economic disparities that have contributed to the Boko Haram crisis. Many of the challenges facing the continent know no borders. Despite our best efforts through Feed the Future and other programmes, food insecurity remains widespread across the continent and the effects of climate change risk undercutting the tremendous progress we have made on this front.”
The Chicago Tribune proceeded further to note as follows in support of the policy: “A sense of alienation permeates the North, which is the poorest part of Nigeria. The anger is deepened by a federal-state deal that provides Southern oil-producing states a generous share of oil revenue to compensate for past neglect, a formula that could be a recipe for greater Northern poverty, alienation and extremism.”
The position tallied with the arguments of Northern elders as well those of pro-North lobbysits in Washington who had reportedly argued that a designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation would be used to witch-hunt Northern politicians ahead of 2015 general elections.
Findings had shown that while lobbysits working for the Nigerian government had secured the backing of many American lawmakers for the designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation, the American intelligence community is not supportive of such moves, leading to the current position of the American government.
It would be recalled that two American congressmen, Patrick Meehan and Jackie Speier, chairman and ranking member of the Sub-Committee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, had released a bipartisan report, entitled; “Boko Haram: Emerging Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” which called for the designation of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation.
The findings of the committee include highlight of Boko Haram evolution as an emerging threats to American interest, the sect’s growing romance with al-Qaeda in the Maghreb and increasing advance in the sect’s attacks with a key recommendation that the sect be tagged a terrorist organisation.
Two Republican lawmakers followed up the report with a letter to the American State Department to designate Nigeria’s Boko Haram as a terrorist group, alleging that it was evolving in a similar way as the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen.
A terrorist designation would have put American government resources to work against Boko Haram, including the freezing of any assets and prosecution of its members.
via Tribune
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