Secretary of Afenifere Renewal Group, Yinka Odumakin, in this interview with Assistant Editor (South West), MUYIWA OLALEYE, speaks on the developments in the organisation and the report of the Amnesty International on the Boko Haram insurgency.
Amnesty International report condemning the Nigerian military on strategies against Boko Haram
The Amnesty International has a sinister agenda. Its report released on June 3 is the most useless report I have ever seen by any organisation anywhere in the world. Boko Haram is an organisation that has killed thousands of people, and even bombed the United Nations (UN) building in Abuja, the headquarters of the Nigeria Police, among others. Indeed, when the military arrived at one of the recaptured territories in Adamawa State, they found 128 corpses in one building alone. Yet Amnesty International did not see anything wrong with all this. In fact, they don’t have conscience. It is not surprising. I hope the world has not forgotten that in December 2013, Amnesty International ran into problems in Qatar when it admitted that the co-founder of one of the organisations it was working with, Abdul Rahman Al Nuaimi, was a financier of Al-Qaeda. The United States Treasury Department had vowed then to impose sanctions on Abdul Rahman Al Nuaimi, for raising funds for Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Syria, Iraq, Somalia and Yemen. So, we need to ask whether the current report is financed and sponsored by Boko Haram.
Examining activities of Boko Haram
Activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria have been very sophisticated. What Amnesty International is after is not human rights; it is an agenda it is pursuing. It is aimed at demoralising our military. They are saying, in their report, that those who are defending lives and property and keeping law and order should be punished, but those who are terrorists be left untouched. I think the report should be discarded. Nobody takes the report seriously. And like one journalist warned in 2009, any journalist who is using Amnesty International’s report is doing so at his own risk. This journalist was taken to court based on the report of Amnesty International that he used in his writing, and when he was sued, Amnesty International refused to defend his cause in court. So, I think this report should be thrown into the trash can because it does nothing but to aid terror in Nigeria and to dampen the morale of our gallant forces who are fighting terror.
Intention of Amnesty International
According to a former Director of Amnesty International, the organisation is not even driven by human rights, but driven by cheap publicity and money. We don’t know where the current report is coming from. The organisation that calls itself a human rights outfit callously neglects the fact that thousands of people have been killed and thousands have been maimed while property worth billions of naira have been destroyed. Amnesty International, which had nothing to say when Boko Haram was perpetrating its terrorist activities, is now coming out to defend the rights of Boko Haram members. The latest report was made in aid of terror.
Winning the war against terror
Recently, the military succeeded in flushing Boko Haram out of occupied territories. But they always have cells and seem to be regrouping. So, what we need now is more of intelligence gathering in order to flush them out of those cells: catching them before they strike, not waiting for them to strike before we react. The approach in the long run has to be different; it should be to ensure that they don’t strike in the first place.
Aspects of 2014 National Conference recommendations dealing with insurgency
Part of the issue of terror war is also dependent on nationhood, the fault lines and the clash of civilisations. We made sufficient recommendations in the conference report that could stem extremism. In the area of insurgency, there were different parts. There was the question of maintaining law and order, question of combating the ideology that gave rise to this extremism and fundamentalism and, more importantly, we touched on the issue of reconstructing the areas that were devastated. Education is important as well as ensuring that there is no breeding ground for extremism.
Afenifere and other groups across the country keeping up pressure on Buhari administration to implement the report
We need to give the government 100 days from since its inauguration and see the direction it is moving. The government came to power with some policies; so let us see its direction first.
Almajiri education initiative as antidote to insurgency
Not really. Until the elite of the North accept that Almajiri is a menace, we cannot solve that problem. You read the interview of former Kano State governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, in a national daily where he said that former President Goodluck Jonathan’s wife, Patience, abused the Almajiri and they (Northern leaders) used them to flush Jonathan out, and that Almajiri is a thing of pride for them (Northern leaders). So, until the elite of the North accept that the children they call Almajiri were created by God and should not be used to foment trouble or create crisis, a million Almajiri schools will not work. As long as Northern leaders, the likes of Kwankwaso, have the mindset that Almajiri is a social system for breeding children that can be used for a variety of negative purposes, we cannot make any progress.