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Excerpt: "Islamist fighters have declared a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria that's the size of Belgium. Whether the region becomes autonomous or not, the damage has been done."

Refugees in Maiduguri, Nigeria. (photo: Jossy Ola/AP)
Refugees in Maiduguri, Nigeria. (photo: Jossy Ola/AP)


Boko Haram Declares Caliphate in Northeastern Nigeria That's the Size of Belgium

By Michael Olukayode and Mustapha Muhammad, Bloomberg

29 January 15

 

slamist fighters have declared a caliphate in northeastern Nigeria that’s the size of Belgium. Whether the region becomes autonomous or not, the damage has been done.

As Nigeria prepares to hold general elections next month, Boko Haram is expanding a six-year campaign to impose its strict version of Islamic law on a region around Nigeria’s northeast and spilling into neighboring Chad and Cameroon. While it’s failed to capture the Borno’s capital, Maiduguri, the state’s emergency agency said this month that its officials can’t travel to 20 of 27 local government areas in Borno.

If Boko Haram maintains its hold, “we would have a divided Nigerian state, where you have a multiplicity of leaders like what is happening in Libya,” Bawa Abdullahi Wase, a security analyst and associate at the Network for Justice, said by phone from the capital, Abuja. Boko Haram fighters ride around in pickup trucks wielding rocket-propelled grenade launchers, weapons taken from Libyan armories after the fall of its former dictator Muammar Qaddafi, he said.

Boko Haram’s advances are intensifying pressure on President Goodluck Jonathan as he heads into the tightest election since Africa’s biggest crude producer emerged from military rule in 1999. The chaos spreading through the northeast and a 50 percent decline in oil prices last year are prompting investors in the richer south to temper their enthusiasm for a country whose economy has expanded more than 5 percent a year over the past four years.

The naira has tumbled 15 percent in the past six months, the most among 24 African currencies tracked by Bloomberg. The Nigerian Stock Exchange All-Share Index has fallen 14 percent this year, the worst performer globally.

Investment Risk

“You’ve got an escalation of violence in the north and a fall in the oil price,” Joseph Rohm, who helps manage $2 billion of African equities excluding South Africa for Investec, said by phone from Cape Town on Jan. 26. “Nigeria’s a market where the risks have climbed considerably. Are we out there aggressively buying the market? No.”

Like Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, Boko Haram’s spread has been aided by the weakness of the national army. Its fighters routinely rout poorly equipped government troops as they rampage across the Nigerian savanna. Neighboring countries such as Chad, Cameroon and Niger are discussing beefing up a multinational force to fight the insurgents.

Boko Haram killed more than 4,700 people last year, double the amount in 2013, risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft estimates. It’s increasingly coercing young girls to carry out bombings. This month, a girl as young as 10 set off explosives at a market in Maiduguri, killing at least 20.

The violence threatens to derail the conduct of peaceful, fair and credible elections in the country’s northeast, New York-based Human Rights Watch said in a statement Thursday.

Government Experience

It’s too early to say if Boko Haram has enough leaders with army and government experience to administer a breakaway state, according to Manji Cheto, vice-president of corporate advisory company Teneo Intelligence in London.

“The longer the group is able to retain control of the towns it has captured, the greater the chance that it will be able to adapt and implement quasi-government structures,” she said.

Nigerians who’ve lived in Boko Haram-controlled areas in the northeast, a region where Islam has been practiced for almost a millennium, say the rebels have imposed a strict regime of Shariah that’s closed shops and pharmacies and restricted movement.

“We were living under their brand of Shariah law, which is alien to the Shariah that we Muslims know and practice,” said Yagana Bulama, a 46-year-old mother of five who escaped her hometown of Bama a month after the insurgents came and killed her husband Abba Bulama. “We were like slaves in prison,” she said in an interview in a camp for displaced people in Maiduguri.

Obama Concern

Boko Haram’s kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls from the northeastern town of Chibok in April sparked worldwide condemnation. Michelle Obama and thousands of others campaigned on social media with the hashtag BringBackOurGirls.

The group’s self-styled leader, Abubakar Shekau, has since boasted on videos posted on YouTube that the young women, who’re still missing, have converted to Islam and have been married off to his fighters.

Banne Musa, a 50-year-old housewife from the town of Gwoza, knows how the girls and their parents must feel. She lived under Boko Haram’s rule before escaping to a camp for war displaced in Maiduguri, about 130 kilometers (80 miles) away. She and other women were forced to wash and cook for the insurgents, some of whom paid girls 2,000 naira ($11) as a fee for “marriage.”

“You are at the mercy of the glorified lunatics and drug addicts that deceive themselves to think they are fighting for Allah,” she said in an interview.

Afghan Taliban

Boko Haram’s origins can be traced to 1995, when worshippers gathered at the Alhaj Muhammadu Ndimi Mosque in Maiduguri. The group’s violent path dates to 2002 when preacher Mohammed Yusuf became its leader. He was able to attract the unemployed and high school and university students drawn by his preachings against the mixing of sexes, the corruption of the Nigerian state and elite and the lack of jobs.

A year later, militants attacked police stations in neighboring Yobe state and hoisted the black flags of the Afghan Taliban. Named Jama’atu Ahlissunnah Lidda’awati wal Jihad in Arabic, meaning “people committed to the propagation of the Prophet’s teachings and jihad,” the group was dubbed by local residents Boko (book) Haram (forbidden), which is commonly translated as “western education is a sin.”

Bank Robberies

The group’s full-scale military campaign erupted after Yusuf’s death in 2009 in police custody, when his second in command, Shekau, assumed leadership. As the violence worsened, in 2013 the U.S. State Department put a $7-million bounty on his head.

Revenue from kidnapping ransoms, bank robberies and extortion has helped to fund the movement and allow it to pay fighters monthly salaries, Martin Roberts, senior analyst for sub-Saharan Africa at IHS Country Risk in London, said by phone.

“Boko Haram is able to pay people infinitely more than they would expect to earn by legitimate means,” he said.

More than half of the 60 million Nigerians who live in poverty reside in the north, the U.K.’s Department for International Development said in September. The World Bank said in July that more than half of people in the northeastern region lives below the poverty line.

“A lot of people in northeast Nigeria feel no loyalty to the central government,” Roberts said. “They feel that the central government is not a force for good.”

Yet Boko Haram’s extreme violence has convinced many civilians that they prefer the government’s neglect to the insurgents.

“I hope that one day we will go back to our villages under Nigerian government control,” Fannami Modu, a 65-year-old farmer, said by phone from Maiduguri, where he fled to when militants overran his home area near Lake Chad. “It is not that the Nigerian government has provided good services for us, but Boko Haram kills at will.”

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