BusinessDay 08 Apr 2018

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Feature
Sunday 08 April 2018
Boko Haram: The benevolence of a vampire
ZEBULON AGOMUO
When recently a band
of members of the
Islamist sect, Boko
Haram, returned
about 104 school
girls who it kidnapped in a school
in Dapchi, a sleepy community
in Yobe State, many Nigerians
screamed foul. They wondered
when a blood-thirsty foe suddenly
became a friend. That episode
remains a riddle which observers
believe only government can
crack.
Nowadays, all over the world,
terror groups have emerged with
the sole aim of dispensing anguish
to the human race in order
to satisfy some weird objectives.
Boko Haram is one of them.
Since 2009 it started its deadly
campaign in Nigeria, the Islamist
sect has not left anyone in doubt
that it is an enemy of the country
and its citizens.
Although Islam Online, according
to Wikipedia, suggests that
politics, not religion, was the
cause of the violence, activities of
the sect, over the years, appear to
put a lie to that claim. Numerous
Christians have been gruesomely
murdered specifically because
they refused to convert to Islam.
The continued detention of
Leah Sharibu, one of the abducted
Dapchi school girls, by her Boko
Haram abductors weeks after her
mates were freed over her alleged
refusal to convert to Islam under
duress, further proves that the
Boko Haram
Islamist sect is also pursuing a
religious agenda.
Boko Haram’s bloody attacks
in the Federal Capital Territory
(FCT), Abuja, Maiduguri, Borno,
Yobe, Bauchi and other parts of
the North in the days of Goodluck
Jonathan, a Christian president,
sent many people to their untimely
death in the most horrendous
way.
The attacks were targeted at
worship centres. The most mindnumbing
of the attacks was the
one on Churches by the terrorist
sect, one of which took place on
2011 Christmas Day, when the St.
Theresa Catholic Church in Madalla,
Niger State, was bombed. The
blast instantly left 44 worshippers
dead and 75 others injured.
On 14 April 2014 at about
6:45am, two bombs exploded at
a crowded bus station in Nyanya,
Nasarawa Strate, killing at least
88 people and injuring over 200.
The bus station is 8km southwest
of the Federal Capital Territory,
Abuja.
These were among the worst
attacks carried out by the violent
sect until the night of April 14,
2014, when about 276 female students
were kidnapped from the
Government Secondary School in
the town of Chibok in Borno State.
Since 2009, the sect has left
many families devastated and
destroyed people’s means of livelihood.
A good number of people
have been violently uprooted
from their ancestral homes and
are now living in camps as Internally
Displaced Persons (IDPs).
Several orphans, widows and
widowers have been made by
Boko Haram.
In some parts of the North East,
academic programmes have been
disrupted and school system altered
as many schools have been
reduced to rubbles by a sect that
claims to dislike everything that
has a tinge of Western education.
Today, billions of dollars are
being spent in rehabilitating the
areas devastated by the sect. In
many released videos, leaders of
the group have severally taunted
the Nigerian government and had
bragged that the government had
not got the power to defeat it.
When the Muhammadu Buhari
administration claimed it had
killed Shekau, the leader of the
group, the sect had a good laugh.
And Shekau has “resurrected”
many times.
The sect has remained a bloodsucking
group in the estimation
of many Nigerians. A vampire-like
group that slashes the throat of
victims and dismembers victims’
bodies as if they were mere
animals are still holding hostage
over 100 Chibok young women
kidnapped in April 2014.
Since the All Progressives Congress
(APC) came to power in
2015, the battle has been on to
reclaim Sambisa forest which is
believed to be the dwelling place