Nigeria: Waiting For Godot

NIGERIA

Waiting for Godot

Armed men on motorbikes attacked a funeral procession in northeastern Nigeria recently, killing at least 65 people. Dozens are still missing.

The attack, blamed on the Islamic militant group Boko Haram, was thought to be a reprisal in a tit-for-tat conflict that has taken hold of the region, including remote areas of Cameroon, Chad and Niger.

Cows are a mainstay of the local economy in northeastern Nigeria. The mourners were villagers fed up with Boko Haram’s cattle rustling. Sick of waiting for the government to take action, they formed a militia to fight the group. Villagers recently won a skirmish, killing 11 Boko Haram fighters and seizing their automatic weapons.

“These people have been stealing from us so we decided to come together because we could no longer wait for an eternity for soldiers to defend us,” Aji Gaji Mallam told the New York Times.

Mallam was present at the funeral attack. He survived by pretending that he was dead for three hours. Four of Mallam’s brothers had died in previous Boko Haram assaults.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari condemned the attack and called for a manhunt, reported Reuters.

Few appear to have much confidence in Buhari, who won office in 2015 on promises to defeat Boko Haram but nonetheless began his second term in office in May amid “a tense backdrop of insecurity and economic uncertainty,” CNN wrote.

The militant group has been active for 10 years now.

In a video about the roots of Boko Haram, the BBC described how the 2009 death in police custody of the group’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf, led to a continuing campaign of terror that has killed 30,000 people and displaced more than 2 million.

The group made headlines in 2014 when militants kidnapped 276 girls from a boarding school in Chibok. The pace of incidents has been relatively steady since then. Earlier this year, for example, Boko Haram-related violence displaced 30,000 people in two days.

“It has been 10 years. We are still waiting – endlessly optimistic but tragically traumatized,” local photographer Fati Abubakar told Al Jazeera. “We have waited and waited and waited for Boko Haram to end.”

Nigeria is a land of contrasts. It has enormous oil wealth. But its people are impoverished amid rampant corruption. It faces problems Americans can understand: Some fear, for example, the role that fake news spread on WhatsApp might play in elections, Quartz noted. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported on how open defecation is a major public health challenge in the remote state of Kano.

Nobody can deal with real problems while maniacs are running loose.