By Waziri Adio
The last few weeks have not been good for us in our fight against terrorism. And that is putting it mildly. Boko Haram has put our troops on the back-foot and has significantly expanded the climate of fear beyond its immediate areas of operation. More than at any other time, we need President Goodluck Jonathan to rise up to the occasion and earn his stripes or epaulettes as our Commander-in-Chief. He needs to take charge and lead this war with more decisiveness before the terrorists run us out of territory. President Jonathan needs to quickly shake things up, starting with, but not limited to the leadership of our security agencies.
If he needed any evidence that those leading the war on terror and that our current war-plan are not producing the desired result, President Jonathan got more than enough in the space of two weeks. Within that time, Boko Haram became more murderous and more audacious, graduating from a mere hit-and-run terrorist organisation to a conquest-minded terror group, with an eye on sitting pretty on our territory. Within that time, Boko Haram took over police training academies in two states. Within that time, Boko Haram captured Gwoza, Gamboru-Ngala and Dikwa in Borno State and Limankara in Adamawa State, and hoisted its flags as indication of conquest. And within that time, Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the terrorist group, declared an Islamic Caliphate within our country. This last move, which has been dismissed by our officials as delusional and crazy, clearly has Islamic state written all over it and should get all of us, including our president, deeply worried. It has clearly bumped this war in another territory. Unfortunately, the news from our side has been equally, if not more, disturbing. And it is disturbing because it shows a soughing mismatch between our seriousness about winning this war and the determination of the increasingly emboldened terrorists. About the same time that Boko Haram launched a series of lightning offensives against us, wives of some soldiers demonstrated in Maiduguri against the deployment of their husbands to fight the insurgents, a group of soldiers reportedly refused to confront the terrorists without adequate arms, and 480 Nigerian soldiers “tactically manoeuvred” into Cameroun and had to be disarmed, quartered and escorted back to Nigeria days after by our less illustrious neighbour.
The curious case of the 480 soldiers is a new low for us as a country as well as a sad marker of the sharp decline of our military profile and prowess. We used to be the big brother in the neighbourhood, with our soldiers gallantly bailing out other countries in distress, and with remarkable success, especially in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Now we are becoming both a laughing stock and a potential problem for the sub-region and a clear worry for the world.
To be sure, fighting terrorism remains uncharted territory even for the most technologically and militarily advanced countries. Terrorism is asymmetrical warfare with no known enemies and no clear enemy lines. Unlike in conventional warfare that traditional militaries are trained for, the enemy in asymmetrical warfare thrives on disguise, sabotage, surprise and fear. These challenges should be acknowledged, though it does not mean we could not have done better given the residual and immediate experience of our troops in fighting insurgents at home and abroad and given the quantum of resources allocated to this war so far. [eap_ad_1] Also, the gallant efforts and uncommon sacrifice of our troops must be appreciated. They put their lives on the line to keep us safe. But this is the more reason we should make adequate provisions for them. Sadly, this doesn’t seem so. For a while now, national and international media have been heaving with stories about how corruption is undermining the war against terror, about how our soldiers are lowly resourced, poorly motivated and clearly out-gunned by the terrorists, about how soldiers lobby not to be posted to the North-east, about how our soldiers are deserting in droves, and about occasional mutinies. Most of those stories have been brushed aside or rebutted with clever sound-bites. With issues of morale, welfare, and ammunition denied rather than addressed, it was inevitable that soldiers’ wives would become demonstrators, or that soldiers themselves would refuse to fight or would conveniently undertake tactical manoeuvres into another country.