NigeriansTalk

This arti­cle is a response to an email a friend sent me. In the email, my friend pointed out that “Mr Soyinka does not have the right to call UK a cesspit and a breed­ing ground for ter­ror­ist when his home coun­try is bat­tling with reli­gious con­flict, exported a ter­ror­ist that nearly blew up a plane with 279 pas­sen­gers and is on US Ter­ror Watch­list”. While her irk, I believe, was not directed at me but at the audac­ity of Mr Soyinka, I could not help but won­der if ter­ror­ism should be, in addi­tion to all other crimes we’ve been known to com­mit out­side the shores of our coun­try, included to the list? In my opin­ion, I don’t think so. Allow me to explain.

1. Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab was rad­i­cal­ized in Yemen and pos­si­bly, the UK.

Reports that emerged imme­di­ately after his attempt to bring down the North­west Air­lines flight, his sub­se­quent arrest and the weeks of inves­ti­ga­tion that fol­lowed showed that grow­ing up, the sus­pect was a devout Mus­lim but he was not in the least mil­i­tant. Dur­ing his high school years in Togo, he was fondly called ‘Pope’ and ‘Alfa’ because of his pious atti­tude, “very decent and gen­tle, in fact a paci­fist. His views on reli­gion were very main­stream,” thus indi­cat­ing that at this stage, he was just a young boy try­ing to be morally upright as preached in the holy book, Quran. While under­tak­ing his under­grad­u­ate stud­ies at the pres­ti­gious Uni­ver­sity Col­lege Lon­don, Abdul­mu­tal­lab became the head of a British Uni­ver­sity Islamic Soci­ety (ISOC). It could have been here as the head of ISOC that he became rad­i­cal­ized as he was in the most con­ducive envi­ron­ment where he can meet and inter­act with Islamist extrem­ists. The guys over at Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor asks whether the fact that “his four for­ma­tive years in Lon­don coin­cided with pub­lic anger over the Iraq war and the Lon­don sub­way and bus bomb­ing by Islamists in July 2005″ played a role in his ter­ror­ist aspi­ra­tions but one can­not be cer­tain for sure. After grad­u­at­ing from UCL and in between mov­ing first to Egypt, and then Dubai in the United Arab Emi­rates where he stud­ied for an MBA before drop­ping out, Abdul­mu­tal­lab made two trips to Yemen for short Ara­bic and Islamic courses. It was the trips to Yemen that many believed left a deeper mark on the young man and where he became rad­i­cal­ized. In inter­views with FBI agents, Abdul­mu­tal­lab said he made con­tact via the Inter­net with a rad­i­cal imam in Yemen who then con­nected him with al Qaeda lead­ers in a vil­lage north of the Yemeni cap­i­tal, Sana’a. Addi­tion­ally, he said he lived with the al Qaeda leader in Yemen for about a month and was not allowed to leave as he was trained in what to do and how to explode the bomb device.

From the above brief inves­ti­ga­tion reports, one needn’t be a rocket sci­en­tist to real­ize that the only link between the sus­pect and Nige­ria stems from his nation­al­ity– a Niger­ian, though he is of a dif­fer­ent pedi­gree than most Nige­ri­ans of his age. Does being Niger­ian auto­mat­i­cally makes him or other Nige­ri­ans a ter­ror­ist? No. One thing to remem­ber about Abdul­mut­ta­lab, in addi­tion to the fact that he was not rad­i­cal­ized in Nige­ria, is this: his for­ma­tive years– a period of psy­cho­log­i­cal, ide­o­log­i­cal and iden­tity devel­op­ment– was spent out­side the shores of Nige­ria, in Togo and UK respec­tively. This fact says more about where the real ter­ror threat is (and is not) com­ing from. Also, his elite upbring­ing and back­ground puts in a dif­fer­ent class from most Nige­ri­ans and into that of known inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists. Dayo Olopade in her arti­cle points out that “like Bin Laden, [Abdul­mu­tal­lab] is an afflu­ent cos­mopo­lite whose wealth allowed him to move with ease from Lagos to Lon­don to Dubai, as a result, joins a group of attack­ers, from Zazi to “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla to “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, who have spent sig­nif­i­cant amounts of time in Europe or the United States.” Also, let’s not for­get that Abdulmutallab’s father,  was so dis­turbed by his son’s rad­i­cal­iza­tion that he reported him to the Amer­i­can author­i­ties.  Surely, this is not a sign of a coun­try filled with home­grown ter­ror­ists out to destroy Amer­ica and her inter­ests, no?

2.  Reli­gious con­flict does not prove that Niger­ian Mus­lims are nut jobs out to harm Amer­ica and rid the world of west­ern influences.

I’d have to go into far more detail than a blog post allows to fully ana­lyze the cause of the religio-tribal con­flict in North­ern Nige­ria, but I think one can safely assume that the vast major­ity of these con­flicts stems from mis­un­der­stand­ing between local tribes, strug­gle for resources, poverty or polit­i­cal strug­gle manip­u­lated by the rul­ing elite, and con­fused or potr­trayed as reli­gious con­flict by the media. Again, my point is not to prove that some of the con­flicts aren’t strictly reli­gious in its con­text. In fact, the Boko Haram inci­dent of July last year is a recent exam­ple of religious/terror inclined clash but the fact that it was quickly quelled by the Niger­ian police and armed forces, and con­demned by the national body of Mus­lims shows that Nige­ria is highly unlikely to become the next Afghanistan or even Yemen, or even a sup­porter of those who do.  Which bring me to my main point: reli­gious clashes and by exten­sion extrem­ism in the Northen Nige­ria have been less about ‘reli­gion’ itself and more about gen­eral dis­sat­is­fac­tion among many due to lack of rule of law and func­tion­ing insti­tu­tions. I know we have a lot of things wrong at home but active expor­ta­tion of jihad and jihadists abroad is NOT one of them.

Should we be wor­ried at all?

Of course not but as a coun­try, we should be watch­ful lest we fall and become that we thought we would never be.  The above analy­sis points to the fact the major­ity of clashes stems from gen­eral dis­sat­is­fac­tion, poverty and mis­un­der­stand­ing. The pol­icy and polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions are clear. In fact, Nneoma’s write-up on the impor­tance of edu­ca­tion of boys, which pre­sented the World Bank find­ings that coun­tries with a low rate of sec­ondary school attain­ment amongst young males are more likely to be conflict-prone attests to this. It goes with­out say­ing that conflict-ridden coun­tries serve as a breed­ing and recruit­ment ground for would-be ter­ror­ist (see Afghanistan, Iraq).  To pre­vent the con­stant occur­rence of clashes of var­i­ous kinds, thus a de-facto breed­ing ground for both local and inter­na­tional ter­ror­ists, our gov­ern­ment must, in addi­tion to ful­fill­ing its other legit­i­mate duties, actively seek ways to use edu­ca­tion as a strat­egy to reduce the risk of polit­i­cal vio­lence, par­tic­u­larly among the Niger­ian youth.

Which brings me back to Mr. Soyinka, I under­stand his frus­tra­tion and why he’s not happy about Nige­ria being on the ter­ror watch list. If any­thing, Abdulmuttalab’s case tells us less about rad­i­cal­iza­tion in Nige­ria and more about rad­i­cal­iza­tion in the UK or else­where.  Also, attribut­ing the var­i­ous religio-tribal con­flicts in North­ern Nige­ria as signs that the coun­try is on its way to becom­ing the next ter­ror­ist hotspot shows deep lack of under­stand­ing of polit­i­cal real­i­ties on the ground, as they may have noth­ing to do with inter­na­tional ter­ror­ism but more about local rad­i­cals moti­vated by local griev­ances and politics.