Boko Haram success is result of Nigeria’s structural failure

 

Prince Michael of Liechtenstein

January 16, 2015Statements EN

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Militant Islamist group Boko Haram is achieving more terrorist success in northeastern Nigeria and neighbouring areas. It intends to build an Islamic state, similar to the achievements in Syria and Iraq of ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, writes Prince Michael of Liechtenstein.
Nigeria, in a general terms, consists of a mainly Islamic north and a Christian and animistic south. The number of ethnicities is important. Nigeria’s oil wealth is based mainly in the Niger Delta in the southeast.
Nigeria’s army, although in theory well-equipped, is helpless against the Boko Haram terrorists, who are allies of al-Qaeda and killed more than 2,000 civilians in the first six months of 2014.
The international community expects the Nigerian government to regain control over the northeast of the country, stop the atrocities and free Boko Haram’s hostages, especially children.
This is not going to happen. It is naive to believe Nigeria’s government can offer more than words.
The country is artificial. Political parties, the armed services and functionaries are driven primarily by the personal interests of themselves, their families and their particular race. Governance is poor at state and federal levels
Boko Haram, which means Western education is forbidden, has no real challenge in this environment.
Boko Haram is also trying, with little success, to spread its terrorist operation to neighbouring northern Cameroon. This has a similar muslim-majority population in the north.
Parallels exist with Iraq, where ISIS operates. Both Nigeria and Iraq are artificial states. Iraq showed that a fiction of democracy helped the strongest ethnic group, the Shia Arabs, to the detriment of the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds. Invading the Sunni Arab areas in Iraq from another broken artificial state, Syria, was a natural and pretty easy extension for ISIS.
We have to abandon the illusion that artificial countries should be preserved and can work as democracies. Democracy can work well in multi-ethnic states so long as they are sufficiently federal, decentralised and their regional autonomies are respected.
The key is a right of self-determination for the regions and proper accountability on regional and central level. If that fails, the fiction of a ‘robust’, democratic nation state leads to totalitarianism of the majority and, in the longer term, a failed state.
The terrible consequence of a lack of self-determination provides fertile ground for radical groups to take control.
Boko Haram’s success is a symptom. Nigeria, and other African countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, will be the sad successors of other failed-state structures. These countries did not grow organically or by well-weighed bilateral agreements. They were engineered by the ‘international community’ for various other interests in the same way as Yugoslavia, Iraq and Syria were created.
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