AKIN OYEBODE, Professor of International Law at the University of Lagos, examines the reluctance of the American government to help Nigeria tackle the Boko Haram insurgency, confab recommendations going to the National Assembly and other national issues, with Senior Correspondent, ISHAYA IBRAHIM.
Boko Haram seems to be overwhelming the military and taking towns. How much danger does this pose for Nigeria?
Akin Oyebode
The way I see it, Boko Haram is just a local tentacle of a global octopus. Islamic fundamentalism has been on the high since the emergence of Al-Qaeda. Mohammed Yusuf (Boko Haram founder) in 2007 was just a proselytiser. He was not seen in the mode of a Maitatsine. He had some connections with Ali Modu Sheriff (former Borno State governor). Sheriff was said to have used his services for re-election. He was executed summarily. The military got him and handed him over to the police. In the process, he was killed. And that really agonised his ranks. They became very violent and wanted to revenge the execution of their leader. So, what you call Boko Haram is working hand-in-glove with Al-Shabbab in Somalia.
What I am saying in essence is that you don’t look at Boko Haram as a local outfit. It has international nuisance value. In fact, it is Nigeria’s equivalent of ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria), which you know has overrun civilian portions of Iraq and some territories in Syria and has announced a Caliphate too in those areas with its black flag insignia. Abubakar Shekau (Boko Haram leader) is just mimicking what is happening in ISIS. And he is very well financed. It is a well-financed and well organised operation. It’s not just a ragtag army as the media would depict. So, I want us to see Boko Haram in that context. It wants to fight the Nigerian state to a halt, because it wants to subvert and suborn the Nigerian state. It is now taking control of important areas in Borno, and I hear it is even threatening Maiduguri. This was what began as a protest but has now become an insurgency. And before you know it, it might attain the status of belligerence. These are different statuses under International Law.
United States of America (U.S.) and other countries promised helping Nigeria to tackle insurgency, but we have not seen the impact of their assistance. Are we alone in this fight?
It’s not only U.S. that promised help; Britain, France, and even Israel promised. But it seems to me that they think they might be casting pearl before swine, because the Nigerian state itself has not demonstrated sufficient capacity. They are also humiliating the Nigerian military. We’ve heard stories of desertion, what some apologists have called tactical manoeuvre; 500 Nigerian soldiers seeking refuge in Cameroon, suffering the indignity of being disarmed and being treated like a ragtag army. Quite sincerely, Nigeria has not demonstrated sufficient panache in terms of putting its house in order. When you show great resolve, then you can ask for help.
I think Nigeria has not demonstrated sufficient know-how, capability and resolve to wrestle the Boko Haram. I am not making an apology for the West; I know the U.S. has drones stationed in Niger Republic. You saw what they did to Al-Shabbab with those drones last week, killing their leaders. You know what Israel did to Hamas in Gaza. These countries have satellite capability to pinpoint movements and location.
So, you asked a very important question: why are these countries not availing Nigeria of superior intelligence, material and ability to organise? It’s a question that should bother every patriot. Do they wish us bad or want Nigeria to endure a low intensity conflict that will wear us down? Who really is behind Boko Haram? We have to know. These people are not wizards. At least, human beings are helping them, maybe certain forces.
Nigeria’s intelligence forces need to be stepped up to identify the financial links, the financial backbone, because you need a lot of money to purchase those vehicles, to purchase guns, to even get fuel and food. It’s like an army. Boko Haram is not child’s play; it is a serious military force. And the stories that we hear, might not be exaggeration of Nigerian soldiers fleeing on hearing that Boko Haram people are around. What type of situation is that?
The Australian negotiator linked Sheriff and former Chief of Army Staff, General Azubuike Ihejirika, to the sect.
The link with Sheriff is nothing new. The State Security Service (SSS), now telling us they are investigating him, is belated. People now say that once you want protection, you join the ruling party. You defect from your old party and then the quid prod quo is to give you protection. So, people defect for different reasons.
I read the statement; in fact, I watched the YouTube of Reverend Davis. It’s very easy to disparage him or to discredit him. But if he had access to presidential jets and well quartered at the Transcorp NICON, he must be very close to high quarters, because a Whiteman cannot be travelling in Nigeria without some security knowledge. It’s not just to me disinformation. The man knows a lot about the goings down here and he has been on it for a while.
He said he interacted with the Niger Delta militants, including Mujahid Asari Dokubo. A guy like that who knows so much about Nigeria is not somebody you just ignore. Where I found it a bit outlandish was Ihejirika. That was (a former) Chief of Army Staff! That he was behind Boko Haram is inexplicable. Maybe he wanted to mention somebody else. He mentioned the Central bank of Nigeria (CBN) operative. I think it is Davis himself that needs to be debriefed properly by the Department of State Security Services, instead of just dismissing him as a self-appointed peace-maker or negotiator.
Those of us who are familiar with international realpolitik know that the first casualty in such transaction is truth. So, who is now to be believed between Davis and a discredited spokesperson of DSS? So, quite sincerely, I think the jury is still out on who really is behind Boko Haram.
Do you think the insurgency has reached the level where Nigeria should seek the intervention of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) peace-keeping force or even that of the United Nations (UN)?
That will be a slap on our own face. It will be an admission that we are a failed state. Part of the basic requirement of a state is to afford protection of life and limb of its citizens. Where a state can no longer guarantee life and limb of its citizens, the state has lost the reason for its existence. So, if Nigeria now has to go cap-in-hand to ECOWAS, for me it amounts to a tail wagging the dog, because It was Nigeria that stepped in in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Cote d’Ivoire.
We used to see ourselves as a regional power, if not a continental power. If Nigeria, the giant of Africa, now goes cap-in-hand to a country like Sierra Leone to come and bail us out, for me, it’s imponderable. I don’t want to look at that scenario. The Secretary General of the UN has been making some statements that the situation in the North East of Nigeria was intolerable. But you need the Security Council of the UN to authorise the dispatch of UN peacekeeping forces to Nigeria.
Nigeria is one of the most important contributors of UN peacekeeping forces in different countries – East Timor, Lebanon, Haiti, starting from Congo in 1964. We have a fine track record of fulfilling our obligations to the international community. Should it be Nigeria now expecting to be bailed out? We fought a 30-month civil war to keep Nigeria together. Where did Yakubu Gowon find that resolve to rein the Biafran forces in. Obafemi Awolowo, as vice chairman of Federal Executive Council (FEC) and Minister of Finance, made sure that the civil war did not put Nigeria into indebtedness. So, I don’t see why 44 years later, we will now be so browbeaten, so outsmarted and outfought that we should now be appealing to foreign forces to come and bail us out.
In fact, the day foreigners now come to help Nigeria, that’s the end of the government of Jonathan, because Jonathan would have lost any basis to remain in government. And I think that is what Boko Haram wants to attain; to show Nigeria and Nigerians that the government we have is incompetent, ineffectual and incapable.
I don’t think Boko Haram really wants to dismember Nigeria. It can’t dismember Nigeria. Nigeria has come to stay. I think it is too late in the day for that. In the confab, which I participated, we spent a whole day discussing the situation in Borno and the North East. What I took out of that conference was a resolve by Nigerians from different persuasions about the need to keep the country one.
We pray that Boko Haram will be put in check, so that we can continue. It has caused dislocation and disruption in the entire North East. Boko Haram is forcing salt down the throat of corporate Nigeria. I don’t think it will suit us to dismember this country because we are going to lose out in the final analysis. So, if the government of the day can’t do the job, they should yield to a government. And I think that is what the election of next February is all about. If you don’t like the heat, you get out of the kitchen. If you have failed to do the needful, please surrender the office by free ballot and let another person take the chance. That is why democracy is a very beautiful system – the right to choose.
Majority of people are now saying we are sick and tired of what is happening in the North East. We need people who can cage Boko Haram. And I don’t care where the person comes from. It is not an issue, if you ask somebody like me. Nobody chooses where he is born, or his family; you just find yourself being born to a particular family, or to a particular religion. It’s not out of your choice.
The purpose of the opposition is to put the ruling party in check. But the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) has suffered a lot from defections. Do you think it has the capacity to keep the PDP in line in 2015?
I’m not a prophet. APC has suffered a lot of haemorrhage because of its failure to get its acts together. Ideologically, the APC looks confused. It looks like the PDP called by another name. There must be a clear-cut distinction between the ruling party and the opposition. In Nigeria now, it is quite easy to belong to one party in the morning, switch to another during lunch, and when you are having dinner, you change to another. Nigerians generally look at the personalities not the parties. They vote for persons. Look at a party like APC; five months to the presidential elections, there is no candidate. APC is not serious. A party that is formidable and credible should have presented Nigeria with an alternative candidate. The party has left the field to Jonathan. And if care is not taken, Jonathan will have a landslide return to Aso Rock, despite his lapses and ineffectiveness. People call him clueless. But Nigerians generally say clueless or no clueless, at least better the devil you know than the one you are yet to meet. The parties in opposition have not gotten their acts together. By now, we ought to have had a broad national democratic coalition. Not just the APC. You bring Accord, DPP, even APGA, so that you have a broad national coalition because of the elections. But there is nothing like that in the offing, and I am not sure in the political landscape whether we are going to have the type of thing we are talking about. It’s only five months left. Who is the APC candidate? I don’t know the APC candidate. And I can’t vote for somebody I don’t know. What I am saying is that for us to have a virile democracy, as we say in Nigeria, there must be the opposition winning power.
Ghana has had it three times, that is why Ghanaian democracy is more robust, more thoroughbred and a wholesome experiment than Nigeria’s. In a place like Ghana, imperative of the right to choose is recognised. Where the people’s right to choose is foreclosed, you can’t talk of a democratic system. But we have to blame those who are in the opposition for failing to rise to the occasion. By default, the APC may lose the next presidential election. So, we are going to have more of the same, however optimistic they are, however romanticising their prospect. I am a realist and I am not impressed by the opposition, not because I admire the PDP either, because the PDP, for me, is an aggregation of incompatibles who just have one mission – to exploit Nigeria.
The president has set up a committee to advise him on how to implement the recommendations of the confab. What is your reading of this?
I am sorry for President Jonathan. He seems to have succumbed to the forces of the status quo. I think those that pin their hopes on him that he would summon the political will and the guts to do the needful by throwing the ball to the Nigerian people have been grossly disappointed, because the National Assembly had said it to people who cared to listen that the national confab was a charade, because it seemed to have stolen the thunder off the National Assembly. The president himself came to the confab on March 17 and said: “Look guys, I have no hidden agenda. I don’t even know how we are going to implement what you are going to come up with. So, give me ideas on what to do.” And the confab gave him ideas on what to do. We had a committee on judiciary and the rule of law. And they suggested this question of referendum.
What the president should have done, in my view, was to have made a nationwide broadcast, just like the October 1 broadcast where he said we were going to have a dialogue. He should have said the people in the confab have finished and we now want Nigerians to decide. It will be technically not provided for under the law. But then, the president has the executive authority to do the needful. There was no provision, even till now, for convening a national conference. So, since he seized the initiative and convened a national conference and put it in his budget, we thought the president was going to drive the walk to its logical conclusion.
But that he surrendered, for me, was an embarrassment, because anything going to the National Assembly from the confab, in my view, will be dead on arrival. When he said at the dinner marking the end of the confab that he was going to submit the recommendations to Council of State and National Assembly, for me, it was an admission of inertia; that he has no ideas as to what to do. The recommendations – more than 600; some will require just administrative action or policy redirection, and some may require lawmaking in terms of Executive Bills to the National Assembly. But the critical ones are constitutional.
The Nigerian constitution is beyond amendment. That Abdulsalami Abubakar Constitution was a dictate, a military dictate. Decree 24 of 1999 is what is masquerading as the constitution of Nigeria. That constitution has outlived its usefulness. I said that much at the confab. I was booed and heckled. But I stood my ground that the 1999 Constitution needs to be jettisoned, that we need a brand new constitution for a new Nigeria. Col. Tony Nyiam also rose in defence of that position.
That constitution is fraudulent. It’s a unitary constitution pretending to be federal constitution. Too much power has been concentrated in the federal government at the expense of states which are the constituent units. What do local governments have in a federal constitution? The local governments are not federating units anywhere federalism works. I have lived and studied in three federations – the old Soviet federation, the U.S. and Canada. One of the federations is defunct; that is the Soviet Union. What about U.S. and Canada?
We know how federations work. What we expect is to reconstitute. And the confab went to that extent, giving more powers to states, first in terms of revenue allocation formula; from 56 per cent of revenue to the federation to about 42 per cent. And we gave the state more revenue. Each state is to have its own constitution like we had in 1963. Each state, if they feel, could have its police, because how do you have state legislature, state executive and you don’t have police to enforce state laws? In the U.S, you have federal laws, you have Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), state laws, state police, and you even have county police. In my university, they have their own police and heavens have not fallen. All Jonathan needed to do was to just set up a group of lawyers to put into legal form the recommendations and then submit the recommendations to the Nigerian people. If 51 per cent vote for the new constitution, a new constitution is born. And the National Assembly would have become irrelevant by necessary implication. It would have been a revolutionary posture. But I’m sorry Jonathan is not a revolutionary. He wants to keep the status quo. He lacks the political will to do what a great man would have done.
