Nigeria's Boko Haram a holy war? Maybe not entirely

From a distance, the violent campaign of a shadowy Nigerian Islamist group called Boko Haram is nothing less than a holy war between Muslims and Christians that has killed more than 2000 people.  

But look beneath the surface, says Nigerian Roman Catholic Archbishop John Onaiyekan in a recent visit to Nairobi, and you find that the crisis is “not purely religious.”

In Nigeria’s “winner take all” political culture, the archbishop said, where the country’s political elites from a number of regions, religions, and ethnicities compete for power and the control of oil resources, militant groups serve as a kind of pressuring mechanism for achieving what cannot be achieved in elections, in parliament, or in backroom deals. Far from uplifting the entire populace, oil wealth has remained in the hands of a very powerful few, creating economic and social inequality for those regions – such as the Islamic north and the oil-producing but poor Niger Delta region – who are left out of the power balance.

So when Boko Haram targets Christian churches or Western-model schools, they aren’t doing so out of mere hatred of Christianity or the West. They are doing this for much more basic reasons, to protest the north’s feeling of being excluded from power.

It’s a lesson that rings true for many Kenyans as well. After post-election riots in 2007-2008, which targeted ethnic communities loyal to Kenya’s main political parties, Kenyans realized that their political leaders were using ethnic suspicions for their own political purposes, and with murderous results. More than 1,300 people were killed, and another 600,000 displaced from their homes after the December 2007 elections ended with disputed results.

Africa cannot afford to allow its territory to become a proxy battleground for its own politicians, or for the ideological wars over “terrorism” of foreign nations and radical interests, the archbishop and others say.

"The ‘terrorist’ and ‘insurgent’ groups in various parts of the world are a phenomenon of the early twenty-first century. They teach us that there is something fundamentally flawed about global governance,” says Jesse Mugambi, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at the University of Nairobi. “Such groups are in all continents - Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas! Such groups are the symptom, rather than the cause, of instability.”

In Kano, Nigeria, a town that has borne the brunt of much of Boko Haram's violence, Rev. Ransom Bello of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), Kano state chapter, says that the activities of Boko Haram are “not religious. It’s the aggrieved people, disguised under the aegis of religion to cause insecurity in the country.”

The current insurgency by Boko Haram, a nickname for the Islamist group, based on their common slogan “Western education is forbidden,” gathered pace after the group’s founder, Mohammad Yusuf, was killed in police custody in July 2009, during a general crackdown on the group.

Boko Haram’s original campaign for Islamic sharia law was aimed at the corruption and maladministration of local political elites and of the federal government in Abuja. But after the killing of Yusuf, Boko Haram became radicalized, and under new leadership, it joined with other Islamist groups such as Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and Somalia’s Al Shabab, picking up a global-jihad ideology and a few new tools, such as suicide bombings, to carry out their war.  

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