Cite this article as: Sani G. (2024). Literature and (In)Security in Nigeria: The Thematic Context of Helon Habila’s the Chibok Girls. Proceedings of International Conference on Rethinking Security through the lens of Humanities for Sustainable National Development Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Pp. 164-172.
Literature
and (In)Security in Nigeria: The Thematic Context of Helon Habila’s The Chibok
Girls
Gambo
Sani
Department
of English and Literary Studies
Prince Abubakar Audu University, Anyigba, Kogi State, Nigeria
Abstract: This paper examines the representations of the
contemporary security situation in Nigerian literature, using Helon Habila’s
The Chibok Girls as a source of reference. In this connection, the paper argues
that Habila’s keen journalistic eyes enable him to paint a graphic portrait of
the mass abduction of the Chibok school girls by the dreaded insurgent group,
Boko Haram. Using the qualitative research methodology, the paper highlights
the thematic context of the narrative, showing how the violent activities of
Boko Haram affect the entire north-eastern region of Nigeria. Through a
realistic portrayal of the mass abduction and related activities of Boko Haram,
enhanced by direct interface with the victims and their relatives, as well as
other eye witnesses, Habila is able to construct a vivid narrative of violence,
loss, death, destruction, escape, and the lingering trauma in the northeast. He
also critiques the institutionalisation of corruption, the ineptitude, even
complicity of the Nigerian state in this tragic narrative of the nation. In
all, The Chibok Girls is the novelist’s attempt to document a tragic event and
a catastrophic moment in Nigerian history, showing the pitfalls that
facilitated the emergence of a monster the nation is desperately struggling to
deal with.
Keywords: Boko Haram, insecurity, violence, death, trauma,
corruption.
Introduction
With the
publication of his prize-winning debut novel Waiting for an Angel in 2002, followed by Measuring Time (2006), Oil on
Water (2010), Travellers (2019),
novels which have brought him additional recognition and fame, Helon Habila has
emerged as a leading figure in the generation of African writers which
blossomed in the early decades of the new millennium. Now widely regarded as
the third generation African writers, this generation has produced significant
novelistic voices which include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, Akachi
Adimora-Ezeigbo, E.E. Sule, Chika Unigwe, Abubakar Adam Ibrahim, Sefi Atta,
Okey Ndibe, and Helon Habila (from Nigeria); Zakes Mda, Zoe Wicomb, Damon
Galgut, Kopano Matlwa, Antjie Krog, and Sello K. Duiker (from South Africa);
NoViolet Bulawayo and Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe); Amma Darko and Yaa Gyasi (Ghana);
Calixthe Beyala (Cameroon); and Veronique Tadjo (Ivory Coast).
With reference to Nigerian literature which include additional
names like Akwaeke Emezi, Nnedi Okorafor, Helen Oyeyemi, Chibundu Onuzo,
Razinat T. Mohammed, and Teju Cole, the critics Allwell Abalogu Onukaogu and
Ezechi Onyerionwu (2009) have observed that these writers are highly “...
gifted and dedicated young practitioners who have all it takes to move the
Nigerian novel to frontiers never before reached, especially in the 21st
century.” This dedication, it seems, is however impinged on by what Onukaogu and
Onyerionwu would further describe as “... a certain attitude of detachment...,”
or some “... degree of authorial restraint...” observed in the works of these
writers, largely because “... our new novelists appear not to subscribe to the
fire and brimstone-spitting oeuvre of generations past.” Consequently, these
critics conclude that, “[f]or the new Nigerian novelist, therefore, emphasis
has shifted from the society to the individual.” Obviously, this conclusion may
have been hastily made for two reasons. First is the fact that it was made in
2009, barely a decade into the new century–the period of Nigerian literature
covered by the critics–which is not enough time to draw any reasonable
conclusion. The second reason why such conclusion cannot stand the test of time
is that a more perceptive critic of contemporary Nigerian fiction will not
discern as much authorial restraints and detachment in the works and attitudes
of most of these writers as Onukaogu and Onyerionwu claim to do. For this
reason, these critics could be charged with escalating what may not count as a
major drawback in the contemporary tradition of Nigerian writing.
As a writer who grew up in Gombe, located at the heart of the Boko
Haram conflict, Helon Habila feels a strong sense of attachment to the area,
and this arouses a deep sense of empathy in him which draws him from his base
in Virginia in the United States of America to north-eastern Nigeria to see
things for himself. In fact, his potentially hazardous trips to Chibok,
Maiduguri, and other parts of the northeast, to engage and interact directly
with escapee Boko Haram victims and their relatives, as well as other eye
witnesses, constitute the highest level of commitment any writer can
demonstrate. By going to this extent to document an important historical moment
and event in the existence of his people and nation, Habila clearly repudiates
the label of a detached, restrained, or disinterested writer as propagated by
the critics Allwell Abalogu Onukaogu and Ezechi Onyerionwu.
Apart from the
tortuous socio-political issues of their country which are largely irrigated by
the noxious socio-political and economic climate, the works of most of the
members of Habila’s generation of African writers aspire to break new grounds
and expand the horizons of African fiction by engaging with various thematic
issues, and recounting the transnational experiences of many of the writers
themselves, especially those living in diaspora, and by also delving into, or
anticipating the future through highly experimental forms of narrative fiction.
In a more specific context, some of the common thematic attractions for
Nigerian novelists in the twenty-first century include political leadership,
corruption, domestic violence, gender inequality, sexuality, religious
iniquities, migration, identity, war, environmental degradation, and various
shades of insecurity, from Niger Delta militancy to Boko Haram insurgency,
banditry, farmers and herders conflicts, and so on. The Nigerian critic, Ode
Ogede (2023), contends that
in
studying the third-generation literature one notices that it is a response to
crises in all the modes of existence during an exceptionally fated age, and one
will inevitably find its most dominant distinguishing stylistic feature to be
worry. The anxiety is sometimes cloaked as subdued outrage or exilic angst. At
all times the writers articulate this frustration by employing and breathing
new life into the conventional structures of literature: allegory, anecdote,
emblem, fable, folktale, parable, personal testimony, magical realism,
mock-epic, and other literary forms.
Based on Ogede’s comments above, it becomes clear that the
techniques these writers employ to weave their narratives are as varied as
their thematic interests. Apart from Ogede’s suggestion above, the techniques
range from realistic fiction to postmodern poetics, Afro-futurism, science and
speculative fiction, among others. As Ogede (2023), further articulates this
viewpoint:
...
to read this literature is not only to encounter some of the country's most
innovative writing but also to run into a variety of stories of a failed nation
state, all pointing to very awful realities. Some of the authors that are
discussed give attention to the devastating effects of economic
marginalization, immigration (or we might call it exile), oppression, and
exploitation of women through the institutions of prostitution and polygyny.
Quite a few enlist their narratives in a mission to paint pictures of the
nature of the terror of the Islamic insurgency, the new wave of Christian
fundamentalism, kidnappings, and the resurgent new mercantilism. Others, yet,
chronicle the spate of corruption, police brutality, armed robbery, ritual
murder, sectarian violence, and the culture of insecurity and mismanagement
that make living in Nigeria feel like being in hell for many people. The
looming shadow of the Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967–1970 that won’t go away is
incipiently at the background of the social turbulence of this era.
It is within this context of the literature of social consciousness
that Habila’s works can best be situated and read.
Helon Habila was a journalist who had worked for the Vanguard newspaper in Lagos, Nigeria,
before he ventured out of the country to the United States of America where he
is currently a professor of creative writing at the George Mason University,
Virginia. In 2002, his first novel Waiting
for an Angel was announced as the winner of the Caine Prize for Literature.
He has also won some other literary awards since then including the
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Windham Campbell Prize. Some of Habila’s other
important works of fiction include the acclaimed novel Measuring Time, as well as Oil
on Water, Travellers, and The Chibok Girls. At this point, it is
necessary to briefly highlight the history of violence in Nigeria to show that
the Boko Haram insurgency is not an isolated case, but the escalation of an
existing trend.
Nigeria’s History of Violence
Since independence in 1960, Nigeria has had her own share of
internal conflicts. These conflicts could be civil in nature, in which case
they do not require military interventions to be resolved basically because
they do not constitute significant threats to the corporate existence of the
nation. But, there are instances where internal conflicts would require partial
or full-scale military involvement as they threaten the survival of the nation.
The most significant of such cases in contemporary Nigerian history is the
secession attempt by the eastern region to form the Republic of Biafra in 1967.
This move orchestrated the civil war which lasted for thirty months, from 1967
to 1970, with more than one million people reportedly killed and properties
worth billions of naira destroyed. Apart from this moment of momentous tragic
experiences, there have also been pockets of other crises with political,
ethnic, and religious undertones in various parts of the country ever since
including the Maitatsine uprising in the north in the early 1980s, and, in more
recent years, the Niger Delta upheavals in the south, and the Ooduwa Poeple’s
Congress (OPC) conundrum in the west, as well as the current IPOB agitation in
the east. But the worst of these pockets of crises is the Boko Haram insurgency
that has taken Nigeria by storm for the past fifteen years. In the next
section, this paper examines, in the context of Habila’s The Chibok Girls, the factors that influenced Boko Haram in their
formative stages and stimulated their ideology of violence.
Boko Haram’s Formative Influences
and Ideology of Violence
Even though most of the conflicts mentioned above require some
level of military involvement, none has had the tragic dimension that is now
associated with the Boko Haram insurgency in north-eastern Nigeria. In other
words, the Boko Haram insurgency ranks as the deadliest, most significant
security threat to the corporate existence of Nigeria since the civil war.
Apart from their use of highly sophisticated military gadgets, one of the major
things that define Boko Haram’s modus
operandi and make them difficult to handle is the guerrilla strategies they
adopt. Predominantly, they are not visible, hiding mostly in the vast expanse
of the Sahelian landscape called Sambisa Forest, located in the heart of Borno
State, Nigeria. The thick, thorny bushes and the somewhat undulating topography
of the area make it a suitable hideout and operational base for the group. From
this location, Boko Haram, loosely translated as “Western education is
forbidden,” launches out every now and then, usually unexpectedly, deadly attacks
on public infrastructures such as schools, motor parks, worship centres like
churches and mosques, police stations, prisons, military formations, markets,
offices, police and military checkpoints, before vanishing into the bush. They
also regularly raid isolated villages and settlements, even towns as big as
Maiduguri, Kaduna, Kano, and Abuja, killing, looting, abducting, raping,
burning down houses, and leaving all manners of catastrophes in their trail.
The group acquired such notoriety through their ideology of violence and
terror.
In The Chibok Girls,
Habila traces the group’s formative influences to a number of factors. One of
such factors is, according to him, “Saudi Arabia’s fundamentalist Salafist
doctrine” which Mohammed Yusuf, the founding father of the Boko Haram, had
followed. As Habila (2016), further argues, this made Yusuf to call “for the
overthrow of the secular Nigerian government”. According to Habila (2016),
another factor which shaped Boko Haram, and closely tied to the above factor,
is the
...
predecessor group commonly known as the Nigerian Taliban, which was formed when
about 200 young students, some of them sons of prominent government officials,
withdrew from Maiduguri and moved to Kannama, a small desert town in Yobe
State, near the border with Niger. They got their name because of their
professed admiration for the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan [....] But in
2003, a rift occurred between them and their host community over fishing
rights, and this might have led to the authorities, who had been observing
them, giving them notice to quit the area [....] It is the stump of this
dispersed group that later returned to Maiduguri to form the vanguard of the
Yusuf sect that became Boko Haram. Many external factors may have played their
part in the radicalisation of the Kannama group, and the list includes
America’s global war on terror after September 11; the Israeli occupation of
Palestine; the Iraq war; the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But local factors
bore a weightier influence on the rise of radicalism in northern Nigeria.
One of these local factors is the almajiri system which Habila also identifies as a tool which
facilitated the growth of Boko Haram especially as it serves as a ready pool
from which the group draws its membership. The writer observes that “[a]
critique of the almajiri system in
northern Nigeria is that unscrupulous teachers and politicians often turn these
young boys into their private foot soldiers for their selfish ends. Many Boko
Haram fighters were drawn from this pool.” (Habila 2016)
In spite of the roles played by the Salafi, Kannama, and almajiri factors, Habila (2016) reasons
that the Maitatsine uprisings of the 1980s is the “single event in Nigeria’s
history that marked the rise of this age of intolerance” epitomised by Boko
Haram. In other words, those uprisings provided the template for Boko Haram’s modus operandi. He identifies striking
parallels in Maitatsine’s aversion for Western modernity and Boko Haram’s
similar gesture towards Western education, and contends that these parallels
are not accidental, as they are better construed as some of the traces of the
influence of Maitatsine on Boko Haram (2016). Indeed, the radical orientation
and teachings of Mohammed Yusuf, Boko Haram’s founding leader, may have
prompted the Nigerian government to go after him, finally bringing him down in
what a section of the public would consider as “extra-judicial killing” in
2009. The violent tenor of this doctrine makes it unacceptable to both
Christian and Muslim faithful in the society. For instance, the chief imam of
Chibok, Mallam Kyari, whose father, the former chief imam, had died while
trying to escape Boko Haram attacks, repudiates this ideology in his statements
quoted at length by Habila (2016):
The
only thing it is okay to kill are animals, and only for food. If you are not
going to eat it, don’t kill it. How then can you kill a man, who is just like
you, with hands and feet and life like yours, who has done nothing to you; you
never knew him or met him before; how can you question his existence, and even
kill him? In Islam, any man who kills another man, with no just cause, he
should also be killed. They now even kill other Muslims; they throw bombs in
mosques while people are praying. Islam doesn’t sanction that. This is just a
sect with its own doctrine and its own way of thinking, but it is not Islam.
This shows that the ideology of violence and terror espoused by
Boko Haram is not acceptable to many Muslim faithful in Nigeria. Habila
corroborates the above view expressed by Mallam Kyari in his identification of
two versions of Islam, the tolerant and the less tolerant versions. The
narrator laments this demarcation of Islam as follows: “But still, the version
of Islam I grew up with was a tolerant Islam [....] That version of Islam was
able to accommodate tradition and diversity and didn’t view the rest of the
world through a puritanical lens. But all that changed, as if in a day. A
stricter, less tolerant version of Islam emerged and took over the scene.”
(Habila 2016)
Since, as we have established, violence is central to the
operational activities of Boko Haram, it is necessary to briefly define it
here. Simply put, violence is the process or act of using force to cause or
inflict injury, pain, suffering, loss, and death on someone else. It could be
physical, in which case the harm inflicted directly affects the body; and it
could be psychological, in which case the harm is more subtle, sometimes less
forceful, with the goal of leaving painful effects on the mind of an individual.
Both forms of violence are capable of causing great damages to the victims,
including death. Many writers in Nigeria address the theme of violence in
various ways. War narratives such as Elechi Amadi’s Sunset in Biafra, Festus Iyayi’s Heroes, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, and Biyi Bandele’s The King’s Rifle are overt stories of violence, bloodshed, and
death, while Violence, another novel
by Festus Iyayi, typifies the novel of subtle violence in which the masses are
subjected to slave labour and made to suffer all sorts of socio-economic
deprivations by the privileged few. Then, there are other novels which portray
gender and domestic violence including Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus. These are just a few of
the representations of violence in Nigerian literature. Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls encompasses some of the
trends in the first two categories, but in different ways because it directly
addresses an issue that is unique, which is the abduction of about 276 students
of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, by Boko Haram, on April 14, 2014.
Indeed, Boko Haram’s ideology embraces both forms of violence,
physical and psychological. It manifests in physical torture, raping, maiming,
and killing of the victims, as well as forceful conversion and recruitment into
their group. Many of the victims are married off against their wish, used as
slaves, or converted into suicide bombers. In Helon Habila’s The Chibok Girls, the writer highlights
the major factor(s) that enthrone(s) a culture of violence as epitomised by the
Boko Haram insurgency. He blames the ruling elites, those who hold the reign of
power, for their roles in establishing this culture of violence in society
through deliberate acts of public manipulation, using poverty, religion, and
ethnicity as tools. Habila (2016) argues that
violence
is a symptom of a dysfunctional system, where people have no patience for or
confidence in due process. The poor don’t believe they can get justice from the
courts, because usually they can’t; the elite know the system is rigged because
they rigged it. The ones at the top keep the door shut because they don’t want
to share the spoils of office. Actual violence, or the threat of it, helps to
keep the populace in check, just as poverty does. Keep the people scared and
hungry, encourage them to occasionally purge their anger on each other through
religiously sanctioned violence, and you can go on looting the treasury without
interference.
As if this is not enough, the writer fearlessly calls out certain
political actors for their roles in entrenching this culture in society. This
is discussed further in a latter section of this study. The immediate task now
is to examine the Chibok abduction as a significant historical moment and
event.
The Chibok Abduction: A Significant
Historical Moment and Event
Helon Habila describes Chibok as “a sleepy, dusty town where
nothing ever seems to happen.” That was before the Boko Haram attack on April
14, 2014, in which about 276 school girls were reported to have been kidnapped
to mark an event of a monumental, tragic nature, which may forever redefine the
socio-historical context of the town. After that, the new Chibok “abounded with
stories of violence and assassinations, most of them related to religion and
politics” (Habila 2016). This underscores how one event can affect the fate of
an entire community and people. In his book, The Chibok Girls, Habila did not only narrate his hazardous,
fact-finding mission to the heartland of Boko Haram activities; he also takes
the readers along with him on this perilous excursion, going as far as the
school where the abduction had taken place, the homes of the victims where
their parents and relatives, as well as some of the lucky escapees and other
eyewitnesses, relieve their gory, traumatic experiences. For this reason, there
is a multiplicity of narrative voices in the book, all submerged under the
single, dominant authorial narrative voice. The first of these numerous
narrators that Habila interacted with is the Reverend Philip Madu who doubles
as the senior pastor of the Good News Evangelistic Ministry and chairman of the
Christian Association of Nigeria in Chibok. He explains that the attack took
place between 11pm and 2am and that two of his brother’s daughters were among
those kidnapped, and have not been found ever since. He narrated that some of
the girls who were able to escape informed him that the kidnappers who were
dressed in military uniform lied to the girls that they were soldiers who had
come to the school to protect them because they heard that Boko Haram were
about to attack the school. This strategy was employed by Boko Haram to ensure
that the girls did not become too agitated to the extent of fleeing into the
darkness. Reverend Madu narrates that in this way, “they gathered them in one
place. Then they marched them out of the school gate to the waiting cars. There
was a truck they had seized; it had brought grains to the market. They took
down the grains and put the girls in the truck and other small cars and
pickups, according to the girls. They took the road toward Damboa, you will
pass a village on the right, called Mboa, and the road goes to the right and
leads all the way to Sambisa Forest” (Habila 2016). As the man further reveals,
“they went into town and burned down a few shops, including the house of the
local council chairman, and another man living in Maiduguri. In some shops,
they took foodstuff. In the school, they took foodstuff from the store and
burned down some classes and hostels” (Habila 2016). This is one of Boko
Haram’s ways of demonstrating their aversion for Western education. And, as
Habila observed while on transit, burnt houses and vandalised structures are
some of the first indicators that Boko Haram had visited a community, and the
Chibok experience validates this fact.
The fathers of the kidnapped girls “formed a group and went after
them” (Habila 2016), but were advised by some villagers along the way to give
up the pursuit as they are not likely to survive a confrontation with Boko
Haram. When quizzed by the writer on what the security agents, specifically the
military, had done to rescue the girls, Madu says, with a tone of resignation:
“No, not a word. And that was how it happened. And until today, there is no
sign or word about these girls” (Habila 2016). Madu’s response, though cryptic,
is quite revealing of the attitude of the Nigerian security agencies which
frequently fall short in cases demanding urgent security interventions. Indeed,
it is the lack of trust in the capacity of the security agencies to deal with
the situation that compelled the parents of the kidnapped girls to chase the
abductors because they believe that leaving the matter for the security
agencies will not yield any positive outcome. Sadly, they also were helpless
and could not do anything to salvage the situation.
The next person Habila engaged with is Yana Galang, the mother of
Rifkatu, one of the kidnapped girls. In her narrative, Galang recollects that
her daughter was not in the best health condition when she was kidnapped
because she just “had an appendix removed not too long before that day” (Habila
2016). The girl had insisted on going to school to enable her prepare
adequately for her exams. Unfortunately, she was abducted. Galang recounts the
events of that fateful day, how her daughter had spent the weekend at home and
returned to school in the company of one of her friends early that morning, and
how the rest of the family and other people had attended a wedding later that
day, unsuspecting of the impending catastrophe which was to befall their girls
that night. When the attack started, they fled to the hills for cover. As
Galang narrates, “we sat there, and each time I heard the gunshots, my stomach
would turn and I had to go into the bush to defecate” (Habila 2016). At this
point, they did not know where the attack was happening until they climbed down
the hills the next morning to discover that their girls had been taken away.
This is, for many of the residents, the worst that could possibly have happened
to them. Galang narrates the situation the morning after the abduction,
illustrating the traumatic effects of the events of the previous night, as
follows:
I
went back home and as I got there, I saw my husband’s brother coming toward me
on his motorbike. He was crying and shouting as he came. And I thought,
‘Someone has died.’ He dropped the bike like this on the ground and said,
‘Better if they had burned the whole town than what they have done to us. They
have taken all the girls at G.G. [“government girls” school].’ I started
screaming and I felt as if my life would come out. I called to their father who
was sleeping inside the house. I started running toward the school, screaming
and running. I felt as if my life had ended [....] For two weeks after, I
couldn’t eat or sleep. I’d put food in my mouth and them throw it out again. I
would go to the toilet but nothing would come out. I would walk up and down thinking.
Two weeks. I couldn’t sleep. (Habila 2016)
This is obviously a very traumatic experience for parents like
Galang and the girls themselves who are the direct victims, and whose
sufferings can only be imagined. For the parents, the very thought of having
one’s daughter, and, in some cases, daughters, in the custody of Boko Haram is
more than enough source of psychological torments because they are not sure of
the fate befalling their daughters. For this reason, some parents assumed their
daughters dead after a while and organised funeral ceremonies in their honour.
In the next section, this study demonstrates how literature, in its portrayal
of insecurity, critiques political leadership in Nigeria.
Literature, Insecurity, and Critique of Political
Leadership
The Chibok experience is a
reflection of the Nigerian situation. The difference between the pre-abduction
Chibok, a peaceful town “where nothing ever seems to happen,” and the
post-abduction Chibok that has become a theatre of violence and assassination,
is the vicious, notorious brand of politics espoused by the Nigerian political
elites. When Nigerians voted for democracy over military rule, Boko Haram is
not the kind of fruit they had hoped to harvest; but it is what Nigerian
politics has placed on the laps of the masses. A system where the electoral
process is rigged, the economy rigged, the justice system rigged, education
rigged, medical services rigged, employment opportunities rigged, everything,
including security rigged in favour of the rich and the ruling class, a thing
like Boko Haram can only be the logical outcome. Habila agrees with this
assertion in his submission that “violence is a symptom of a dysfunctional
system...” which has been “rigged” by the elites to favour only them, their families,
and their associates (2016). This theory clearly explains the preponderance of
violent militant activities in different parts of the country at one historical
moment or the other. Apart from Boko Haram, the nation has witnessed the
militant activities of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta
(MEND), the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB), Ooduwa People’s Congress
(OPC), among many others which all serve one political interest or the other.
In
comparison with these militant organisations, Boko Haram is in a class of her
own, bearing a garb of a terrorist organisation with international outlook
spread across the Lake Chad Basin from Nigeria to Cameroon, Chad, and Niger
Republic; with support from international terrorist organisations like the
ISIS. Furthermore, the peculiarity of this group derives from the religious
interest it claims to be pursuing. But, as stated earlier, no religious group
seems spared from the group’s onslaughts even though they claim to be waging a
jihad to advance Islamic interests. As the narrative goes, the group was not
satisfied with the level of implementation of Sharia in Borno State: “Sharia
law had been established in the state, but Boko Haram founder Mohammed Yusuf
wanted an even stricter version in place, where schools would be segregated
between boys and girls, adulterers would be stoned, and thieves would be
amputated...” (Habila 2016). In spite of the establishment of Sharia, the group
goes on attacking both Christians and Muslims and their worship centres, and
this leaves one wondering which religious interest Boko Haram is purportedly
advancing. Based on this, it seems that the group may be using religion as a
decoy not only to win the sympathy of the Islamic world but also to mask and
deflect attention away from their real intentions which may be politically
motivated. Scott MacEachern notes in his book Searching for Boko Haram: A History of Violence in Central Africa
that although the organisation has religious background and ideology, there are
some “political processes that gave rise to it in Nigeria and around the Lake
Chad Basin.” (2018)
In The Chibok Girls, Habila calls out some Nigerian political leaders
for their roles in escalating the challenge of insecurity in the country. With
reference to some governors, Habila writes that “at the state level, governors
keep private armies to intimidate the opposition and to ensure their own
re-election and that of their associates. Bauchi State had the most
unambiguously named private army of all, called Sara-Suka, meaning, ‘hack and
stab’ in the Hausa language” (2016). An unnamed former follower of Mohammed
Yusuf, Boko Haram founder, volunteers that while the man was still alive, his
Maiduguri base, Markaz Ibn Taymiyyah, was a beehive of activities, regularly
drawing people of all classes, including political actors. The unnamed source
narrates that “before he was killed, you should have been here on a Friday....
The whole area would be lined by exotic cars as very powerful individuals went
to see Yusuf. They went in cars with tinted glasses so nobody would be able to
see them. That is why many people believe that the man was being sponsored by
some very powerful individuals.” (Habila 2016)
The
writer goes on to mention some political figures for their roles in the growing
trend of violence and insecurity in the northeast. The Chibok Girls shows that owing to the dissatisfaction of
Mohammed Yusuf with the level of implementation of Sharia law in Borno State,
the governor, Ali Modu Sheriff, had promised a stricter version of Sharia in
his attempts to win the support of the group to enhance the actualisation of
his political aspirations. Accordingly, “Boko Haram worked to ensure the
governor was returned to office. But after winning re-election, Sheriff reneged
on his promise. The enraged Yusuf began to openly call the governor an infidel”
(Habila 2016). What this reveals is that Boko Haram had once collaborated with
the governor for whom they carried out some “work.”
The ineptitude of the Nigerian
government is also lampooned in Habila’s work. The Goodluck Jonathan
administration had misconstrued the abduction as a fallacy, denying that such a
thing ever happened until it became an embarrassment to them, and the fate of
the girls was sealed. The government had not really bothered about the growing
threats of insecurity in spite of serious attacks by Boko Haram, notably, on
the headquarters of the Nigerian police force, and the United Nations office
complex at Abuja until elections were around the corner and it was clear that
Nigerians wanted a change before the government embarked on the usual fire
brigade approach to combat insecurity. By that time, the harm has already been
done as several cases of mass abductions and killings have been recorded at
Chibok, Buni Yadi, and other places; thousands have been displaced, maimed, and
lost their sources of livelihood, leading to the emergence of large, new
communities of internally displaced people across the country and beyond. The
appalling condition of the internally displaced people’s camps is aptly
described by MacEachern (2018) as follows:
Tens of thousands of people have been driven from their homes in
Nigeria entirely, so that they have become domestic refugees, living in the
most tenuous of circumstances as internally displaced persons (IDPs) in camps
that often suffer from appalling deficiencies in food, water, housing, and
sanitation. Tens of thousands of others have fled across the border into
Cameroon, to live in refugee camps there.
Many of the
displaced people have remained in this situation for more than a decade. The
fact that government has not done much to improve the condition in the IDP
camps, and also initiate a policy to resettle these people shows the poor
attitude of the ruling establishment to the plight of the internally displaced
people.
Conclusion
This study has so far examined the
problem of insecurity in Nigeria as epitomised by the Boko Haram insurgency,
the height of which is the mass abduction of about 276 students of Government
Girls Secondary School, Chibok, on the night of April 14, 2014. The Chibok Girls identifies the
Maitatsine uprisings, as well as the Salafi, Kannama, and almajiri as factors which shaped the formation of Boko Haram and
influenced their ideology of terror. Adopting a guerrilla approach, the group
wages a relentless war of terror on the Nigerian state, bombing, killing, and
kidnapping people, burning houses and looting shops, and even sacking entire
communities. By executing several terror attacks on institutions and
communities in the north-eastern part of the country in spite of the heavy
presence of security agencies, Boko Haram has successfully redefined the region
as a theatre of violence, destruction, and death. The fact that government is
unable to eliminate the Boko Haram menace after heavy investments in security
is a signpost to the tragic state of the nation.
Works Cited
Habila, Helon. (2016). The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings
and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria. Lagos: Parresia.
MacEachern, Scott. (2018). Searching for Boko Haram: A History of
Violence in Central Africa. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ogede, Ode. (2023). Nigeria’s Third-Generation Literature:
Content and Form. New York: Routledge.
Onukaogu, Allwell Abalogu, and Ezechi Onyerionwu. (2009). 21st Century Nigerian Literature: An Introductory Text. Ibadan: Kraft Books.
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