Can Boko Haramists be deradicalized?

(Link on Daily Trust site)

A bill for the establishment of a commission for “rehabilitating, de-radicalizing, and reintegrating the defectors, repentant and forcefully conscripted members of the insurgent group Boko Haram to make them useful members of the society” as explained by its sponsor, senator Ibrahim Gaidam of Yobe East has generated controversy.   

Countries grappling with insurgency and other forms of organized terrorism tend to introduce programs to rehabilitate captured and surrendered elements involved in such crimes to prepare them for successful reintegration into society through a structured process of psychological reform, deradicalization, attitudinal change, and economic empowerment. An affected country’s prospect of success depends on the extent of its understanding of the underlying dynamics of its peculiar situation, and indeed its ability to come up with appropriate deradicalization and rehabilitation strategy.

A standard deradicalization program is always limited in scope and period; it’s designed in such a way that it only benefits those who deserve it who are also usually relatively very few. In other words, it’s meant for those who terrorist recruiters had capitalized on their naivety and recruited them through misleading ideological indoctrination and physiological manipulation. They are largely identified among the rank and file of ideologically-motivated terror groups like Boko Haram. They are rarely found among solely greed-driven criminal groups like bandits and kidnappers.

Basically, all captured subversive elements should always be subjected to applicable criminal investigations and judicial trials to determine their respective guilt or innocence, and be treated accordingly. After all, the convicted who should face either execution, life imprisonment or extended jail terms, are automatically excluded from any deradicalization program with a view to releasing them.

Now, over the past few years, Nigerian authorities have released hundreds of the so-called repentant Boko Haram fighters said to have been deradicalized and rehabilitated. Yet, a controversial move has now been initiated at the Senate to establish a whole substantive commission ostensibly for this purpose. 

Regardless of the reliability or otherwise of the deradicalization process through which those “repentant” Boko Haram fighters were released, a move to establish such commission is not only unnecessary but also insensitive to the feelings of the millions of innocent Nigerians rendered miserable as a result of the terror activities of the very terrorists being released under this questionable program. Besides, it was, and in fact, it’s still, too early, in the first place, to embark on releasing the captured terrorists while their fellow terrorists are still out there massacring defenceless Nigerians, displacing thousands, and unleashing misery in the country.  

That move also suggests a tacit and certainly unjustifiable presumption that the Boko Haram insurgency and other major security challenges in the country are here to stay hence the need to establish a whole commission to embark on a vicious circle of rehabilitating captured and surrendered insurgents and bandits. And, of course, when established, the commission would end up as another source of stealing public resources in the name of rehabilitation and deradicalization of captured terrorists and other criminals. By the way, though one’s unawareness of the existence of something never means its absence, arguably there is no such a commission even among the worst insurgency-hit countries in the world. 

Anyway, while captured Boko Haram terrorists can indeed be deradicalized and rehabilitated to become law-abiding and productive citizens, the obvious incompetence on the part of the relevant Nigerian authorities doesn’t only undermine the program but also renders it counterproductive for that matter.

Nigerian authorities should immediately suspend this program to review the process of identifying the eligible candidates for deradicalization, rehabilitation and release among the captured and surrendered terrorists, in light of the arguments highlighted herein. This has to be part of a comprehensive policy that guarantees the achievement of the intended purpose.  

A painstaking vetting process should be put in place to identify the eligible candidates because obviously every captured terrorist or bandit will claim repentance and pretend accordingly to get away with his crime and get released.

Also, with regard to the captured members of the Boko Haram group and other like-minded groups found eligible for deradicalization and rehabilitation for possible release, Nigerian authorities should engage the services of reputable Islamic scholars in the process. Because such elements are under the illusion that they are right and that what they are doing is according to Islamic teachings. Also, having imbibed a lot of grossly misrepresented meanings of some Qur’anic verses, Prophetic hadiths and jurists’ opinions, which they vehemently cling to, they can discard those illusions only when overwhelmed with superior arguments on the correct meanings of those Qur’anic verses, hadiths and jurists’ views.

To achieve this, a relaxed but regulated environment should be provided for regular seasons of this engagement with the candidates over a reasonable period at the end of which the authorities should be guided by the recommendations of those scholars on determining whether a particular candidate is deradicalized or not. After all, spiritual guidance is exclusively Allah’s Who gives it to whom He wishes.

AU Summit: Between Buhari’s and El-Sisi’s speeches

(Link on Daily Trust site)

Though to a much lesser degree compared to Nigeria, Egypt struggles with terror-related security challenges. However, apart from the military dimension of their respective struggles, there is practically no other basis of comparison between the two countries’ approaches in this regard. Because while Egypt’s approach suggests a realistic understanding of the underlying politics of handling such type of security crisis, Nigeria’s suggests gross and indeed inexcusable naivety. 

Of course, this explains why while Egypt has been able to keep its security challenges largely contained, Nigeria appears to have exhausted all its military and intelligence capabilities to no avail as the wave of indiscriminate massacre of people, banditry, kidnapping armed robbery and other organized crimes continues to unleash misery across the country and indeed threatens its very survival.

While President Muhammadu Buhari of Nigeria inadvertently betrayed that naivety in his speech during the African Union Peace and Security Council on the state of peace and security in Africa at the recently concluded 33^rd AU summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, his Egyptian counterpart, Abdul-Fattah El-Sisi, displayed such realistic understanding in his speech. For instance, in his speech, El-Sisi called for the formation of an African anti-terror military command; and even offered to host an African summit in Cairo for that purpose; and indeed tacitly offered to host the command headquarters in Cairo as well, claiming that his call and offer were out of Egypt’s sense of responsibility and commitment to maintaining peace and security in Africa. 

However, while he indeed sounded committed to African security project, he was actually never that interested in African interests; after all, though Egypt is a major African country, its interest in African affairs, which climaxed during the era of President Jamal Abdun-Nasir, began to decline following his resignation in 1967 and has been on a decline ever since then.

President El-Sisi, therefore, was in reality only trying to mobilize and manipulate African military, diplomatic and intelligence resources in his country’s struggle to maintain control over its porous desert borders with Libya, which facilitate the movement of armed groups and weapons into Egypt that fuels terror activities in the country. He also seeks to manipulate the sheer diplomatic weight necessarily associated with a continental military alliance of such size to gain the diplomatic advantage over Egypt’s rivals, especially Turkey and Qatar, in their struggle for influence in shaping the Libyan political destiny and direction. 

Of course, if President El-Sisi decides to follow through with his plan, he will almost certainly achieve his agenda while Nigeria and other member countries struggling with existential security challenges remain constrained by their simplistic approach to the complexities of international politics of interests among countries.

On his part, however, President Buhari only called on the member-countries of the AU to “look for new strategies that would be helpful in effectively preventing, managing and resolving conflicts on the continent.” He also maintained that “trends and emerging challenges on the continent call for a better approach to resolving conflicts.  He, therefore, “called on the AU to strengthen its own mediation tools and develop a new intervention road map that would promote national dialogue, reconciliation and social cohesion.”

By the way, this line of thought has always been the fundamental feature of Nigerian leaders’ and diplomats’ speeches in this regard in various international events since the eruption of the Boko Haram insurgency a decade ago. They have always sounded helpless apparently to attract the sympathy of the international community in hopes of attracting its commitment to assisting in ending the terror insurgency in the country.

As I observed in a previous article, Nigerian leaders’  “approach to diplomacy has always suggested inexcusable cluelessness of the simple fact that that the real business of diplomacy is, in reality, practised contrary to what the relevant theories contained in academic books teach. They have acted as though oblivious of the fact that in diplomacy nothing is given or achieved for free, hence a country’s ability to get what it wants or secure its interest in a bilateral or multilateral engagement depends on its ability to deploy and leverage whatever coercive or persuasive tools it possesses to extort compromises and concessions from the party (ies), and/or entice them with tempting incentives.” (Nigeria’s toothless diplomacy, Daily Trust, Friday, September 13, 2019).

Anyway, while President Buhari’s speech has almost certainly been archived in the AU’s archives, Egypt is almost certainly already working towards achieving its actual interests, which are cleverly disguised in President El-Sisi’s purported solidarity speech.  

Besides, while diplomatic engagements do indeed enable countries to achieve their legitimate and even illegitimate interests, it takes more than official visits, attending international events and pity-arousing rhetoric to get real benefits from those engagements. Therefore, as I recommended elsewhere, “…the federal government should, for a start, identify its potential, assets, circumstances and whatever can be used as an advantageous tool to push for appropriate global recognition of its war against Boko Haram as a war that the world simply can’t afford to ignore. This is quite achievable by, for instance, engaging relevant leading international consulting firms, international pressure groups and influential lobby groups with unhindered access to the corridors of, say, the Capitol Hill and the White House in Washington, the Palace of Westminster and 10 Downing Street in London, the Élysée Palace in Paris and the European diplomatic and military institutions headquartered in Brussels, to pursue this agenda on behalf of the federal government. (Impedimentto decisive victory over Boko Haram, Daily Trust, Friday, November 30, 2018).     

One wonders how on earth these basic facts and measures elude Nigerian foreign policymakers and diplomats, as also one wonders what the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) and the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) and other relevant institutions do exactly produce in terms of policy recommendations to guide the country’s foreign policy and diplomatic engagements.