The Islamist jihadist monster is once more running amuck on the north of the never particularly stable and peaceful most populous country in Africa. The local Islamist jihadist group the name of which translates as "western education is sinful (or unlawful)" went after the police. The police shot back. Faster. Straighter.
Violence was experienced in three of the twelve provinces which voted a decade back to impose Shariah. The Islamists, who describe themselves as "Nigeria's Taliban," do not approve of the way in which the government interprets and applies Shariah. As a result they went on the offensive over the weekend.
Northeast Nigeria is the place where Islam drifting south from North African ran into the indigenous religions and later, Christianity. Today Nigeria is roughly split fifty-fifty between the two faiths. The record of violence over the past eight years indicates the Islamists within the Muslim community have started slightly over half of the violent encounters.
The Nigerian sectarian conflict takes place in the context of maldistributed wealth, an inefficient and corrupt distant government, and long standing tribal and sectional rivalries. Nigeria may have a lot of people, but it has no single Nigerian nation. The population is deeply fissured along numerous fault lines--tribal, class, sectional, religious.
The political process is not open. It is not transparent. It is not honest. It lacks both existential and functional legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens. The government is not trusted. It is not seen as honest. Or effective. Or representative of anyone or anything that does not reek of bought influence and paid for conduct.
As a result of its own tergiversations, its own corruption, its own systemic and personal inefficiencies and inadequacies, the central government has been faced by the ever-growing threat of MEND which has nibbled away the oil export base of both national prosperity and governmental malfeasance. While capable of killing MEND insurgents, the government and the Nigerian military have been completely unable to suppress the insurgency.
The measures taken by the government and army to defeat MEND have been so disasterously inept that they have grown more insurgents than they have killed or captured. Given the vulnerability of the oil industry, anything other than suppressing the insurgency through meeting its demands, which are neither excessive nor fantastic, is the best option open to the government.
This the government has refused to do--except rhetorically.
Now the central government is faced with the early stage of another insurgency. Lagos must have believed it had bought its peace with the referendum providing for Shariah in the twelve predominantly Muslim provinces. They reckoned without the Islamists for whom the new policy was one illustrative of government weakness.
Bolstered by the endemic poverty as well as the highly evident maldistribution of wealth in the region and the general disenchantment with the central government as well as the several provincial governments, the membership in and affiliations with the Islamist jihadist groups grew as the jihadists became increasingly active and ambitious in demands. Far from having bought its peace, the central government purchased many miles of increasingly bad road.
The election violence late last year gave fair warning of what was to come. Now the second warning shot(s) came over the weekend. The police won in terms of bodies counted and perps arrested. The Lagos regime will take pride in that.
The lesson which should be taken by the government is vastly different. Insurgencies and insurgents are like the Terminator--they will be back. Back stronger, better, wider spread, with more support, more skills, more weapons, more willingness to be (in this case) "martyrs."
Nigeria barely avoided energetically disassembling forty-two or so years ago. The Biafrian separatist movement was narrowly defeated. Nigeria almost died in a welter of tribal and sectional disputes.
Whatever may have been learned in those not-so-long-ago days by the Nigerian political and economic elite has been forgotten. MEND is proof of that. So also is the growing Islamist jihadist driven insurgency in the north and northeast of the country.
The bloody fighters of both MEND and "Western Education is Sinful" have written in letters too large and sanguine to be ignored that the government and its affiliated elites must work--fast--to both repair the economic inequities and the disparity in political power between elite and hoi polloi. The alternative is to fiddle while the country melts around them.
And, that will not be a pretty sight.
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