chrisngwodo.blogspot.co.uk: A kingdom can endure with unbelief, but it cannot endure with injustice.                                                                             Uthman Dan Fodio

Three weeks ago, Boko Haram, the ultraviolent Islamic militant group rose like a phoenix from hell from the ashes of its defeat last year by the Nigerian military. In Maiduguri, Borno State, they carried out motorcycle-borne ride-by shootings targeted at police officers and other law enforcement agents. In Bauchi, they stormed a federal prison and set free hundreds of their members as well as other inmates and threatened reprisals against those they accused of persecuting their members. Obviously, the military did not defeat Boko Haram last year when a five-day long clash ended with the extrajudicial execution in police custody of Mohammed Yusuf, the group’s leader. Although scores of the militants were killed or rounded up, several also escaped, simply melting into surrounding environs. According to the State Security Service, Boko Haram has 540,000 members. A group with that numerical strength cannot be wiped out by the strategy of decapitation traditionally used by states to cripple dissident groups. Decapitation as a strategy is simply targeting dissident leaders for elimination as a means of exterminating their rebellion from the very top. The resurgence of Boko Haram makes clear that the military operation against it was only moderately successful.

The emergence of Boko Haram signifies the maturation of long festering extremist impulses that run deep in the social reality of Northern Nigeria. But the group itself is an effect and not a cause; it is a symptom of decades of failed government and elite delinquency finally ripening into social chaos. Think of Boko Haram and other extremist groups of its kind as bacterial cultures. We must understand the Petri dish in which they have been cultivated. In order to appreciate the peculiar resilience of such groups, we must grasp the socio-political and economic conditions of the north. Northern Nigeria is a seething mass of illiteracy, misery, poverty and beggary. While Nigeria generally scores very poorly on every index of human development, Northern Nigeria sinks below the abysmal national average to the extent that a child born in the northwest or in the northeast is likely to have a lower quality of life than a compatriot born in the southwest or southeast.

The news headlines in recent months portray only a part of the north’s mosaic of human suffering. Since the beginning of the year, lead poisoning has steadily decimated children in villages in Zamfara State, where they have been forced by poverty to engage in illegal mining. Cholera, a water-borne plague eradicated by the early 20^th century has reached epidemic proportions in the north where it has killed hundreds. The recent outbreak has been called the worst in twenty years and according to the Federal Ministry of Health now poses a threat to the rest of the country. Cholera is rife in the north because of the lack of potable water and flooding. In addition, the southward surge of the Sahara is claiming many natural water bodies forcing rural folk to resort increasingly to contaminated water sources.

In 2006, Borno State Governor Ali Modu Sheriff told broadcasters that he was not bothered by criticisms of his administration in the print media because 95 percent of the people in the state cannot read and write. In any case, he added, less than 2 percent of Borno residents have access to newspapers. The governor’s press people later clarified that what he had meant to say was that radio and television were the dominant media in the state. To discerning ears impervious to spin-doctoring, it sounded as if Governor Sheriff had been glorying in the illiteracy level of his people and boasting of its utility as a political weapon. Mahmud Shinkafi, the current governor of Zamfara achieved infamy in 2002 when as Deputy Governor he pronounced a fatwa urging Muslims to kill Isioma Daniel, a Thisday reporter, for alleged blasphemy. Despite the acute humanitarian crisis of the north, its leading politicians have been preoccupied in recent months with how to clinch presidential power in 2011 and how to negotiate favourable niches in a post-2011 political reality.  Clearly the priorities of the so-called northern political elites are not in consonance with the realities of their people.

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