Bis repetita. After the kidnapping, in 2014, of 219 high school girls from the city of Shibok, in northeastern Nigeria, this is the one of no less than 333 high school students carried out on the night of Friday 11 to Saturday 12 December, this time in the northwest of the country, in the state of Katsina, where the country’s president is from, Muhammadu Buhari. To maneuver, if we are to believe the claim made Tuesday, December 15 by Abubakar Shekau, the leader of one of his factions: Boko Haram. What interpretation can we make of it? What is the government’s room for maneuver? What can we attribute this phenomenon to? Researcher at the Les Afrique dans le monde laboratory (CNRS-Sciences Po Bordeaux) and consultant for the International Crisis Group, Vincent Fouchet answered Point Afrique’s questions
How to interpret Boko Haram’s demand for the kidnapping of students so far from its base in Borno State?
Vincent Fouchet : The claim is a first, indeed, and some Nigerian commentators are skeptical. We are more than 600 km from Borno, in northeastern Nigeria, where the two factions of Boko Haram operate. But we’ve been waiting for something like this for some time. Shekau’s faction claimed the presence of two groups of supporters in two northwestern states last summer. And security sources mentioned the movement of some jihadists in the area. Apparently, Shekau was able to partner with local bandit groups to conduct the case, but the nature of their cooperation is unknown.
© HANDOUT / AFP
For Shekau, who seemed weak compared to the other faction, the Province of the Islamic State in West Africa (PEIAO), it is a big blow, which puts him back in the center of the game. launches a scathing challenge to the state, especially as President Buhari is from the area where the kidnapping took place. Does he hope to bring back the discontented of the internal struggles within the PEIAO? Does he hope to show off the Islamic State itself
What can the government really do? Can we say that the situation escapes him slowly and surely?
Between urban and rural crime, and even maritime crime, violence between herders and farmers in the center, the separatist revival in the South-East and Boko Haram, the Delta which remains uncertain, we actually have the impression that the Nigerian state is overtaken, little by little. The fronts are multiplying, no problem is resolved. How is the state going to do it? A frontal attack is risky, and we know that the Nigerian security forces are not really in the lace. But paying a ransom also poses problems: in the past, Boko Haram gained a lot of strength thanks to ransoms. The authorities have closed several boarding schools in the North – this is an admission of their failure to secure the territory.
What does this say about Nigeria and its governance?
This is undoubtedly the basic problem. Boko Haram itself was born out of a critique of failing governance, the impression the powerful give Nigeria that they are unjust, violent, unbelievably rich, and go unpunished. And so citizens are looking for alternatives to the strange failure of this state that is both rich and weak, violent and intermittent. The militias, the promises of religion, from jihadism to the most baroque Pentecostalism, criminality, all of this results from the failure of the state to reduce the uncertainties that affect the lives of citizens.
What impact could the federal organization of Nigeria have on the inadequacies of the authorities to contain and curb phenomena such as those of Boko Haram or villainous groups specializing in kidnappings?
It is complicated. Federalism was born out of an attempt to provide a solution to Nigeria’s problems. It sometimes ensures a form of democratic pluralism, a tension which can be productive, and also a form of flexibility, of sensitivity to local particularities. The governor of Borno, with his electoral legitimacy, is thus one of the few who dare to question the results of the federal army. But federalism sometimes has perverse effects – the struggles around indigeneity which ensures exclusive benefits to those originating from each state in that state, the costly multiplication of levels of governance, the problems of coordination
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