And when a commander is serially losing battles, what does a competent Commander-in-Chief do? President Goodluck Jonathan must act swiftly and decisively to “degrade and destroy this new brand of evil”.
We cannot continue to live in denial; some of our military and intelligence forces have lost their groove; their repeated folding before the fanatical Boko Haram fighters has humiliated all Nigerians, disgusted our international partners, cost thousands of human lives and destruction of colossal property. In war, it is said that when success goes unrewarded and the most extreme failure goes unpunished, it creates a perverse incentive system that drives leaders towards a risk-averse middle, where they are more likely to find stalemate than victory.
This is where we are today. About one-third of Borno State has been captured by insurgents as well as towns and territories in Yobe and Adamawa states. Aping the murderous salafist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the vicious Boko Haram has hoisted its flag in Gwoza and declared the establishment of a “caliphate”. Like the crazed, but well-funded, well-organised and well-armed ISIS, beheadings, massacres, rape of minors, destruction of churches, forced conversions and marriages, arson and imposition of a twisted version of sharia law have come upon hundreds of thousands of defenceless Nigerians in the North-East.
As if angered by claims of a ceasefire by the government, Boko Haram has stepped up attacks in the past two weeks, leading to the capture of new towns, including Mubi, the second largest town in Adamawa State. Other towns overrun by the terrorists are Bazza, Michika, Gulak and Madagali. An eyewitness said Mubi, Adamawa’s commercial centre, was captured like “a dead chicken”. Then, the terrorists turned up in Gombe, detonating explosives that killed at least 10 innocent people.
The sect’s psychopathic leader, Abubakar Shekau, has just declared, “We have not made ceasefire with anyone…We did not negotiate with anyone… It’s a lie. It’s a lie. We will not negotiate. What is our business with negotiation? Allah said we should not.”
When a war is going awry, the Commander-in-Chief takes charge. When a territory is being lost and ruin stares a country in the face, failure on the battlefield is not tolerated. No serious government throughout history tolerates serial battlefield and intelligence failures. The United States’ military history says Abraham Lincoln’s main contribution to the Union’s victory in the American civil war was to find the right general. According to this view, Lincoln had to wade through a mass of incompetents until he found Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union armies to triumph.
America’s President Franklin Roosevelt replaced defeated generals and admirals during World War ll just as Winston Churchill, Britain’s Prime Minister, took personal charge of the war effort. President Harry Truman sacked one of America’s most revered generals, Douglas MacArthur, during the Korean War. In Nigeria, Yakubu Gowon replaced his initially three highly successful war commanders when the Nigerian civil war appeared stalemated, including the popular Muhammed Shuwa and the celebrated Benjamin Adekunle.
On Jonathan’s watch, several military commanders have failed; woefully too. The intelligence services have been disastrous, making no major breakthrough in five years of this increasing insurgency. Commanders not only lost Damboa, Gwoza and Gamboru Ngala, Mubi, among others, their counter-offensives were pushed back. In March this year, insurgents infiltrated and attacked Giwa Barracks in Maiduguri, the Borno capital, before they were repulsed. Such crass incompetence and subversive intelligence failures were also in evidence when terrorists successfully attacked the Nigerian Air Force station in Maiduguri where at least two helicopters were reportedly destroyed and over 20 servicemen killed.
How does the military explain the fall of Gwoza and now Mubi to the bestial group, in the first instance, and their inability to re-take them ever since? Or, how they allowed Boko Haram to overrun the Bama garrison or seize Banki, the main border port in the North-East with Cameroon? It is appallingly real that our campaign remains bogged down, veering close to capitulation.
We have budgeted about N3trillion on security between 2012 and now with little tangible results. Sambo Dasuki has made no progress since he replaced Owoye Azazi as the National Security Adviser in June 2012. On assuming office, he signposted his own failure when he opted for “dialogue” with Boko Haram that turned out to be a futile gesture. Boko Haram, like salafist jihadists everywhere, wants nothing save the destruction of the existing order and its replacement with its own vision of the ideal Islamic caliphate. Since his forlorn dialogue enterprise collapsed, he has been clueless while terrorists have grown more ambitious.
Aliyu Gusau, as Minister of Defence, has not been able to bring verve into the war against terror and, unlike his counterparts in the US, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, India and Syria, has remained in the shadows. In a war situation, every strategic appointment counts. Barack Obama, the US Democratic President, appointed Robert Gates and, later, the incumbent, Chuck Hagel, who are both of the opposition Republican Party, as his defence secretaries in the realisation that a nation at war not only needs bipartisan consensus, but also the most suitable persons.
Only Jonathan can explain why he recently awarded another four years in office to Ita Ekpenyong as the Director-General of the Department of State Service, an agency that has lately been associated more with partisan controversies than for infiltrating and neutralising terror plots. On assuming office as the Chief of Defence Staff in January, Alex Badeh had declared; “The security situation in the North-East must be brought to a complete stop before April 2014.” He later claimed to have been misquoted. Kenneth Minimah, the Chief of Army Staff, has admitted the cowardice of some of his troops, but has so far punished only the cowardly and mutinous of the rank and file. The public has yet to see the inept commanders and those who have shown treasonous sympathy for Jihadist terrorists punished and flushed out. This should not be done in secret; at a time like this, overwhelming public support is essential for a nation at war and the military must earn it by laying its cards on the table.
The entire world will not forget how our military not only failed to rescue the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls immediately after their abduction, but also failed to mount any serious rescue efforts since then. Across the border, Cameroon’s less fancied gendarmes rescued the wife of a deputy prime minister and others within 48 hours of their capture by terrorists. As President Obama warned about ISIS, “No God condones this terror. No grievance justifies these actions. There can be no reasoning – no negotiation – with this brand of evil. The only language understood by killers like this is the language of force.” We agree.
Therefore, Nigeria’s security apparatus is in a deep crisis and in urgent need of restructuring, beginning with a surgical operation targeted at its leadership. Only an effective fighting force can guarantee a country’s territorial integrity. For a top-to-bottom reform, Jonathan needs to replace several commanders and intelligence chiefs to make way for more capable commanders. The Federal Government’s strategy should not be based on token military engagement with the terrorists. Nor on the forlorn hope that negotiating with the murderous Jihadists could lead to reclaiming the lost territories; it will not be.
It is not about personal loyalty to the President or to his re-election; this is about national survival. It is not even a vote on their professional abilities; it is simply that they have not been efficient in destroying Boko Haram thereby leaving the nation in mortal danger.
President Jonathan has got many things wrong in this troubled war with Boko Haram terrorists. If he is to turn the tide against this murderous group, recover Nigeria’s lost territories, he will have to sack the ineffective service chiefs, shake up the security system to flush out fifth columnists and reenergise our fighting machine. He must make amends by rebuilding our vanquished security system now. The destruction of Islamist terrorism must be the sole objective of this war. The key to victory is a strategy that focuses on the simultaneous application of military force at multiple points, making it difficult for the militarised fundamentalists to have a hiding place.
He should reach deep into the armed forces and intelligence services and pick new, formidable, resourceful helmsmen with a definite charge to reform the system. Those security chiefs that have shown combat ineffectiveness should be eased out to make way for fresh thinking.
