Nigeria: Broader Attacks Are Costly and Might End into Insurrection

By African Bulletin on June 23, 2011

Attacks are clearly not about to end in Nigeria. A police station and a bank at Kankara city were simultaneously under attack killing seven people,

including five police officers. The perpetrators of the attacks were armed with pistols, AK-47 assault rifles and bombs.  They would have released prisoners before they blow up the police station. They also robbed the bank and fled with weapons and ammunition stolen from the police station. The authors of this attack belong to the radical Islamic sect Boko Haram, leading a violent insurgency, launched against the central government since 2009, and claiming their appurtenance to the Afghan Taliban. This last attack on Ankara is saddening more the country, already hit in recent weeks by a dozen other attacks claimed by the jihadists Boko Haram. This group, “Boko Haram is morphing from being a marginal, very violent, radical Islamic sect into something approaching an insurrection that has some popular acquiescence, if not support”, said John Campbell, former U.S ambassador to Nigeria. And if this support emerges as a result of the conflict between the Nigerian society and the state; then it will be determinant of whether the state becomes strong or weak. The Nigerian authorities and analysts are acknowledging the extremist group, once confined to the country’s northeast, is becoming a nationwide security threat. That is why the need to achieve social mobilisation and at the same time a strong central state constitutes “the rulers’ dilemma”. Very often, strong states have emerged only in the wake of severe social disruption, and social control cannot occur without the two exogenous factors first creating catastrophic conditions that rapidly and deeply undermine existing strategies of survival; this is to say: The spread of the world economy and inherited colonial rule.