The focus, for now, must remain squarely on strengthening
the military to defeat the insurgents and giving governance a truly
humanitarian face by rehabilitating victims/survivors of insurgency.
I’ve been observing with keen interest the National
Assembly’s recent efforts to solidify President Muhammadu Buhari’s offer of
Nigeria-Delta-like amnesty to ‘repentant’ Boko Haram members. Buhari first made
the offer in March 2018 while receiving the 107 of the 111 schoolgirls
kidnapped by Boko Haram in Dapchi, Yobe State, two months earlier. The
following month, the military established a rehabilitation camp to
“rehabilitate and reintegrate surrendered and repentant Boko Haram terrorist
members” via an exercise known as Operation Safe Corridor. Last week, the
Senate started considering a bill for an Act tagged ‘National Agency for
Education, Rehabilitation, De-radicalisation and Integration of Repentant
Insurgents in Nigeria 2020, SB. 340’, sponsored by Ibrahim Gaidam, the
immediate-past governor of Yobe State, who now represents Yobe East Senatorial
District in the National Assembly. If it sails through, there will be legal
backing for the reintegration of killer insurgents into the society. The agency
to be created will be dedicated to “rehabilitating, deradicalising, educating
and reintegrating the “repentant and detained members of the insurgent group to
make them useful members of the society”.
It’s not like nothing happened between Buhari’s 2018
declaration and last week. Earlier in the month, the Borno State Government
confirmed that some 1,400 repentant Boko Haram suspects had been released by
the military and rehabilitated into society. Also this month, after visiting
the camp where former fighters were being trained in vocational skills, Goni
Alkali, Managing Director of the North-East Development Commission, revealed
that over 600 ex-Boko Haram fighters were being deradicalised under the OPSC
project. Earlier batches comprised 97 and 243 ex-combatants. And in November
2019, the Defence Headquarters confirmed that the OPSC handed over 86 Boko
Haram child fighters, “who voluntarily surrendered to troops”, to the Borno
State Rehabilitation Centre in Bulumkutu.
Since the release of the 1,400, numerous groups have voiced
their frustrations. Understandably, some of these positions have been
influenced by Nigeria’s ethnic, religious and political cleavages. But if
there’s any group whose dissent must be treated with utmost seriousness, it’s
the soldiers. “A lot of soldiers are not happy about this,” one soldier told
TheCable. “We were there at the Maimalari barracks when some of these Boko
Haram people were released. The authorities are releasing them, but Boko Haram
are killing soldiers that they capture. This does not make sense to us at all.”
For now, yes. I agree with that soldier’s misgivings about
this kind of amnesty, but only for now — for the reasons of exigencies,
voluntariness, timing and priority. At some point in the future, we will
eventually need it. The current idea of amnesty for Boko Haram emanated from
the tried and tested amnesty programme for Niger Delta militants begun by the
late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua and finalised by the Goodluck Jonathan regime. But
these are two completely different warfare, particularly regarding the
triggers. The Niger Delta militancy was triggered by agitation for improved
economic wellbeing of oil-producing communities and their people. The needs
were clear regardless of the criminality of the approach: Niger Delta militants
simply wanted a better life, whether or not they were ready to work for it. A
money-spinning amnesty was always going to quell their anger.
Conversely, Boko Haram doesn’t want money. Its demands are
unrealistic and downright impossible. The secular government isn’t going to give
way; neither Buhari nor his successor will give up political power. Nigeria is
never going to become a wholly Islamic state; Christianity and other religions
won’t vanish anytime soon. And, yes, western education has come to stay. So,
what exactly are you promising Boko Haram in exchange for a laying-down of
weapons?
It’s bewildering to see that the government indeed thinks
captured Boko Haram members have any choice other than repentance. The hallmark
of any amnesty is the voluntariness with which its beneficiaries accept it.
Majority of Niger-Delta repentant militants were youth in possession of arms
and ammunition that they voluntarily laid down in moments when they were free
men — not that they were subdued and left with no other survival option but freedom-motivated
repentance. This is why many of these supposedly deradicalised insurgents will
find their ways back to the forest to wreak more havoc on soldiers — because
majority of them only surrendered and repented after their capture.
And the timing. It is inconceivable that a government is
offering killers amnesty when the armed forces and the people continue to
suffer heavy casualties; it’s, quite simply, handing the opponent the
advantage. Only exceptions are if the supposedly repentant insurgents were not
captured or if the war itself is indeed over. The Buhari government has been
saying for years that Boko Haram has been technically defeated, but attacks
upon attacks show nothing could be further from the truth. Even if it is sporadic,
this is certainly an ongoing war, and it’s terribly difficult to see the logic
in handing amnesty to captured enemies in a war that is ongoing, one in which
the field warriors are still harming the state.
One of the most astoundingly successful examples of
reconciliation and amnesty is the Rwandan genocide. After the Rwandan genocide,
during which over a million Hutus were killed by Tutsis, President Paula Kagame
freed tens of thousands of genocide suspects from prison in a precarious
attempt to balance justice against reconciliation. Those who were freed were
required to confess their crimes and seek forgiveness from their victims. The
Roman Catholic Church, being the most powerful institution in the country after
the government, was heavily involved, encouraging ordinary people who participated
in the genocide to ask forgiveness from survivors, and for survivors to grant
it. The key thing here is that the survivors were a central part of this
amnesty; it wasn’t imposed on them.
In Nigeria, though, the government doesn’t consider
survivors of insurgency as stakeholders. Women whose husbands were killed,
girls who were raped, sons whose fathers were kidnapped, people who were maimed
are expected to accept supposedly de-radicalised insurgents back into the
community. Just like that? Importantly, while ex-Boko Haram fighters are
receiving attention, the victims aren’t. I have previously reported the
conditions in one of the country’s biggest IDP camps — the corruption, the
theft of foodstuffs, the misery, the child mortality. The government is moving
to rebuild the cities in the North-East but it is overlooking the people who
will inhabit them. Strange. As of September 2019, the North East Development
Commission, whose board had been inaugurated since May, was still talking about
how it would “soon swing into action to execute all humanitarian plans that
will be fashioned out by the management and board”.
At some point, we will need amnesty for the truly repentant
— not the arrested — insurgents. But first, the government and people like
Gaidam must understand it cannot be hinged on the Niger Delta amnesty. The
government must be able to differentiate captured from repentant insurgents.
The focus, for now, must remain squarely on strengthening the military to
defeat the insurgents and giving governance a truly humanitarian face by
rehabilitating victims/survivors of insurgency. Only when all these have been
accomplished, or at least driven to a substantial level, can any serious
government begin to talk about amnesty for killer Boko Haram fighters.
Soyombo, former Editor of TheCable, International Centre for
Investigative Reporting (ICIR) and SaharaReporters, tweets @fisayosoyombo
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