We’ve defeated Boko haram, Lai Mohammed insists despite bloodshed

Despite the carnage carried by the terrorists in North East Nigeria in the past two days, Lai Mohammed believes the Nigerian military has largely succeeded in defeating Boko Haram because the insurgents are now “only operating from one or two local governments”.

The Minister of information who urged the media to stop “giving oxygen to the terrorists”, said the war cannot be successful without the cooperation of journalists.

“Just as I said in my meeting with the newspapers editors in Lagos on the 21st of December, the military has largely met the deadline to defeat Boko Haram, and the military has matched the capacity of terrorists to carry out the attacks they used to,” he said on Channel Television’s Sunrise Daily.

“Of course, I also mentioned that the terrorists will continue to attack such targets as markets, motor parks, entertainment centres and houses of worship; and this is exactly what is going on.

“They (Boko Haram) know they are on their way out,” Information Minister Lai Mohammed told journalists in Lagos. “They lack the capacity to launch horrendous attacks they used to do in the past.”

President Muhammadu Buhari, who took office at the helm of Africa’s most populous nation in May, had said last week that Boko Haram was “technically” defeated.

Residents of northeastern Nigeria were gripped by fear and anxiety on Tuesday after two days of bloodshed blamed on Boko Haram, pouring scorn on government claims the jihadist group was “largely defeated”.

More than 50 people were killed in a 48-hour wave of shootings and bombings in the volatile region, just days ahead of the government’s end of year deadline to stamp out what has been described as the world’s deadliest terrorist group.

ABOVE PHOTO: Displaced Nigerians sit on the side of a road in Bama on March 25, 2015 (AFP Photo/Nichole Sobecki)

In the latest attacks, two female bombers detonated their explosives in a crowded market in the town of Madagali on Monday, killing 30 people.

A spate of suicide bombings and shootings in and around Maiduguri, the capital of neighbouring Borno state, killed another 22 people in two days and injured scores more.

In Madagali, armed soldiers were patrolling the dusty streets of the agricultural town on Tuesday, searching vehicles and passengers for explosives and weapons.

But despite the heightened security, residents were bracing for more violence.

“Security has been beefed up everywhere but people are still jittery. No one knows the next target because the bombers have no known identity,” resident Timothy Manzo told AFP.

“We try to be calm and go about our daily routine but the fear is still there, we are only suppressing it because life has to go on.”

But speaking to journalists Wednesday, Lai Mohammed said: “We know that in an insurgency, the war does not end in one day. The attack on soft targets will continue, but we also want to appeal to the media to stop giving oxygen to the Boko Haram insurgency.

When we glamorise the attacks, it gives the terrorists more life and in a time of insurgency like this, the media also has a role to play, which is not to glamorize the attacks.

“What is happening is not unexpected; what is happening is what will happen in any insurgency.

But the fact of the attack is that Boko Haram has been sufficiently defeated. Boko Haram can no longer take any territory away from us.

And if you look at the context, about a year ago, Boko Haram had complete control of 20 out of 37 local governments in Borno state. There were about six local governments in Yobe and about four in Adamawa. If today, Boko Haram is operating from one or two local governments in the entire country, I think the military has largely succeeded in wiping out Boko Haram.”

For Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, a continued Boko Haram insurgency is a potential threat to his credibility — and popularity — going into 2016 

Lai argued that isolated bomb attacks on soft targets should not be confused with insurgency, saying such soft attacks will be very hard to eliminate.

“It is possible for insurgents to lay ambush on the road; it does not mean they are in control of that local government. “We are not saying we are going to eliminate ambush or attacks overnight; it is never done in any insurgency. But what we are saying is that given the fact that just less than a year ago the entire north-east was almost in their complete control, and today they don’t have that kind of command, I think it is only one or two local governments in which they have way at all; and even with what the army have done in the last couple of months, we are very hopeful that before the end of the year a lot of progress would have been met. The media also needs to play its role now and that is also reporting equally the progress reports.”

The latest carnage highlighted Boko Haram’s continued ability to stage deadly attacks even after the Nigerian government vowed to end the group’s deadly insurgency by December 31.

Over 17,000 people have been killed in Boko Haram’s six-year quest to create an independent Islamic state in Nigeria.

For Buhari, a continued Boko Haram insurgency is a potential threat to his credibility — and popularity — going into 2016.

“It is always a bad idea for the leaders of countries to declare highly active terrorist groups dead,” Max Abrahms, assistant professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, told AFP.

“History shows that terrorist groups are extraordinarily difficult to snuff out once they have reached a critical mass,” he said.

“The truth is that terrorism is very easy to perpetrate.”

The previous administration under Goodluck Jonathan made repeated pledges of a swift end to the conflict, all of which came and went, hurting government credibility and becoming a major factor in Jonathan’s ousting in the March election.

“A decisive victory against the sect was the cornerstone of Buhari’s election campaign, yet it increasingly appears that he is creating the same mistakes as his predecessor,” said Ryan Cummings, chief Africa analyst at the South Africa-based crisis management group Red 24.

While Nigeria’s military has won back swathes of territory from the jihadists in recent months, Boko Haram has expanded its network in neighbouring Chad, Cameroon and Niger.

“It is evident that Boko Haram has expanded outside of Nigeria’s borders,” Cummings said, adding that the lack of regional cooperation was cause for concern.

An 8,700-strong Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) compromising troops from Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon and Benin was supposed to be deployed earlier this year, but little has been heard about its activities.

According to the Global Terrorism Index, a report released by the New York-based Institute for Economics and Peace, Boko Haram “has become the most deadly terrorist group in the world”.

The Islamic extremists have increasingly relied on children as weapons, often deploying young girls strapped with explosives into crowded marketplaces and mosques