Boko Haram Is About Human Lives, Not Territories

By Ahmad Salkida

NIGERIA has been known to place a deplorable value on the lives of her citizens. It seems to run in the veins of successive administrations. And none has been more disturbing than the inclination to celebrate the much hyped technical defeat of Boko Haram over the continual massacre of defenceless citizens in the war-ravaged Northeast region of Nigeria as well as in camps holding numerous distressed Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs).

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Yes, ‘Boko Haram or the ‘Islamic’ State West Africa Provence (ISWAP) as they preferred to be called, may no longer lash out and hold territories as it used to, but this should not be held up as a victory by Nigerian officials who proudly celebrate their “technical defeat” of the group. The group still operates and kills at will in these areas. Is it the priority of government to protect deserted territories from being reoccupied by Boko Haram or, end further massacres and sufferings visited on civilian populations in the region? If the two are one and the same, then, Nigeria and the rest of the West African countries confronted with the Boko Haram conundrum are years from celebrating any victory.

Apparently, Boko Haram’s priority is not to spare the lives of the people in the communities they overrun in the Lake Chad area. They have come to realise the hard way that, it is rather implausible to enforce their model of the Sharia on the kaffirs, which is how they view the larger Nigerian society. Why, then, are government officials focusing on the diminished expanse of territories under the group’s control as an indication of a war won and settled?