Missing girls will determine Nigeria’s fate

For too long, the country has slept through its horrors. But Boko Haram’s vicious abductions must force the nation on to a different road.

This may be the most critical moment in Nigeria for a generation. The threat of Boko Haram has been a fuse burning away in the powder keg of Nigerian political life for the last seven years and has been largely
unconfronted. The political class, with a few distinguished exceptions, has long been in a state of smugness, complacency and collusion. A kind of informal high-grade corruption has become part of national life.

When Boko Haram began its campaign of cultural, religious and educational separatism — decrying western education and trying to bring Nigeria under Sharia — it was seen as a ragtag band of fundamentalists, not to be taken seriously. At the time the nation was distracted by the fallout from the Niger delta protests in the south-east, the sabotage of oil pipelines, and the rash of kidnappings that made the area particularly dangerous. The protests were due to the extreme environmental pollution by oil companies that had devastated farmlands, rivers, whole villages and towns. The execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995 was the last outrage during the long Nigerian sleep. The abduction of 276 girls by Boko Haram has rightly drawn international condemnation of the government’s slow reaction to this outrage. But the political elite has for a long time been desensitised to the plight of all its people.

This is one of the long unexamined consequences of the trauma of the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s, whose horrors have never been allowed to heal. The nation passed from a war in which more than a million people died into normality with no intervening act of healing the wounded national psyche. The political class does not recognise what other nations would immediately take to be gross outrages. You can almost hear a politician say: “What is all the fuss about? We see worse in our streets every day.” It is seeing worse, living with worse, as though it were normal, that has given rise to the somnolent response to the girls’ abduction. There is also the history. The problem of Boko Haram has its causes in the very foundation of the nation itself. The faultline was there when the British government created the northern and southern protectorate before combining them into a single nation called Nigeria in 1914. The north-south divide, at the heart of the Nigerian polity, is the elephant in the room. There are those who hint at forces behind Boko Haram trying to bring about, through terror, a return to the hegemony of the north. It is not wise to dwell on such toxic rumours. But it is well to note that Boko Haram’s roots lie firmly in the north.

One of its roots could also be said to lie in the endemic poverty, the politics of inequality, the politics of corruption, that have been eating away at the nation’s heart. In a country rich with oil revenues, where billions of pounds vanish with no one held to account, where going into politics is synonymous with acquiring vast and sudden wealth, where slums breed in larger numbers every day, where national revenue does not improve people’s lives, it is not surprising that violent sects grow. But none of these factors explains the abduction and the suicide bombings and the terrorism. There has been much talk of sinister forces at work. However, one thing remains abundantly clear: there should have been an immediate and powerful government response from the beginning. Never before has such criminal viciousness been perpetrated on Nigerian womanhood. It strikes at the very heart of the Nigerian dilemma. What kind of nation does it want to be? A nation of intolerable lawlessness, or a nation of justice, courage, and fairness?