Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State at the weekend said that his call for Amnesty for Boko Haram insurgents at his inaugural speech on May 29 was misunderstood by many Nigerians.
According to him, recent attempt by 16 members of the sect to renounce the murderous ideology was one key proof that an amnesty programme targeted at creating exit window for forcefully conscripted members was very capable of reducing the number of Boko Haram fighters.
Shettima, spoke through his Special Adviser on Communications and Strategy, Malam Isa Gusau, at an interaction with journalists in Abuja.
Gusau said Shettima’s call was scientific and had been vindicated by a very desperate effort of Boko Haram leaders to stop their fighters from leaving their fold when a group of 16 members renounced the sect ideology in Borno State, following which they were slaughtered by the sect leaders.
“Governor Kashim Shettima was misunderstood by many Nigerians when in his May 29 inaugural remarks he revisited his stance on the need to apply a political solution to fighting the Boko Haram by way of granting a window to admit those willing to surrender their arms and renounce the Boko Haram ideology,” he said.
“Shettima has held this position from his campaign days ahead of the 2011 elections for his first term. He had always advocated a combination of three approaches, military which we is what we have in force, an economic approach to provide jobs for people and discourage citizens that Boko Haram insurgents are recruiting by paying them as little as N5,000 to set schools ablaze or spy on soldiers as well as paying women to smuggle arms from one point to the other.
“Arrests were made and the military discovered the role economy plays in favour of insurgents. The third which seem to be the bone of contention is the political approach which I’m simple terms means pardon to insurgents who are willing to drop their arms and embrace peace.
“It is important to note that the Governor has always advocated that the three approaches should be applied together not exclusive. However, the amnesty issue has been the controversial one. The Governor is not really talking about dialogue as a start, what he is advocating is to create an opening for those ready to abandon the sect to be able to do so freely so that the sect can be broken. He is very particular about hundreds if not thousands of members that were conscripted or forced to join the sect and become killers against their wish.
“We all have seen that many communities has continued to suffer from these attacks because the communities are so much not only in Borno but round Nigeria and we don’t have the right proportion of security personnel to secure all communities. Now, when insurgents attack communities, they mostly target male youths, they arrest them and guard them into bushes.
“In most cases even before taking them out of the twins they attack, they preach in support of their ideology with promises of heaven for adherents and then openly ask aloud if any of the youths wanted to join them or not and whoever said he wasn’t ready to join them, they slaughter him right there sometimes in the presence of his parents or they lay them on row and shoot all of them in matter of seconds targeting their skulls as killers walk round, we have seen many of these instances in videos recorded in Gwoza and other parts of Borno State.
“Now, what Governor Kashim Shettima has been saying is that hundreds of these forcefully arrested and initiated young men may want to run away and drop their arms and they should be a policy and programme to admit them so that insurgents loose members and their strategy of arresting youths and forcing them to join them which is what they apply in sustaining their membership, can be deflated and I think the Governor’s call on May 29 has been vindicated less than two weeks ago.
“You might have read it on most news platforms that on Friday, 3rd of July, 2015, Boko Haram insurgents beheaded 11 of its members who renounced their ideology. According to accounts by some locals, what happened was that it some members of the sect who are indigenes of some villages in Damboa local government area indicated interest to abandon the ideology but most of them were afraid of the consequences. Out of them, 16 summoned courage to renounce the ideology and they moved to Miringa village in Biu local government area of Southern Borno.
“They wanted to join some residents of villages like Ajigin and Talala in Damboa who have been taking refuge in Miringa due to re-occurring attacks on the two villages by insurgents. The 16 insurgents went to Miringa on Friday, July 3rd according to locals, then at night, commanders in the Boko Haram, sent a team to Miringa to fish out the 16 members that denounced the sect. The team went from house to house and got the 16 members intact, they didn’t fire any shot in order not to attract soldiers, they took the members out of Miringa and slaughtered 11 of them and went away with 5.
“The bodies of the 11 ex members were found the following day while the other 5 were not seen. Now, here is Governor Kashim Shettima’s analysis of this scenario. From an ordinary point of view, Nigerians may see it as nothing after all, the 11 members must have also killed people and they were insurgents anyway, so they paid for their sins.
“But the Governor feels that what Boko Haram succeeded in doing is to stop loosing members because by slaughtering the 11 members, they would have succeeded in stopping many others like the 11 who want to leave the ideology. The issue is this, if there had been a policy in place to give widows to those insurgents willing to abandon the ideology, these 11 members would probably have run to Government officials in charge of that policy and they would have returned their arms and that would have encouraged others willing to leave the sect and what will happen at the end is that the sect will be loosing adherents which would have been a major psychological warfare.
“Of course, if the 11 ex-members had returned to security officials under an amnesty, they probably would have no choice but to offer information that could be helpful and they would have to do that in order to stay alive knowing that their former colleagues in the sect would come after their lives. So in order for the 11 ex sect members to prevent being killed by the sect, they would offer information.
The Governor also feels that it will be an endless war of attrition, to use his exact words, so long as those who might have been forcefully recruited cannot leave the sect because they have been identified with the sect, therefore they won’t be safe if they return to the civilian population.
“So, they would be faced with three options, whether to remain in the sect and fight for whatever they are made to believe in search of heaven or to renounce the ideology and be killed by fellow insurgents or to renounce the sect and run to a place like Maiduguri which has higher concentration of security forces and that makes it difficult for fellow insurgents to come after them. But then, they also risk being killed or arrested by security forces and all of these three options leave the Boko Haram as a winner when it comes to forcing youths to join their ideology”, Gusau explained.
The spokesman noted the his boss was very much worried about recent step up of attacks by insurgents but that the Governor doesn’t feel hopeless over the current situation.
“Governor Kashim Shettima is deeply worried by the trend of events but he doesn’t feel hopeless or defeatist. As we speak the Governor is in Maiduguri, he didn’t go for Umrah as to be expected, just like he did last year, he travels out of the country only on matters connected with security, he prefers to stay with his people, deploy enormous resources to support the military and civilian volunteers, comfort victims and alternatives and work with communities in taking proactive measures to avert attacks.
“Sometimes, it annoys a victim when one says this, but the truth is that for one attack that insurgents might have succeeded in executing, so many planned attacks might have been prevented but like we all know, in matters of security such as dealing with insurgency, what matters are not how many attacks prevented by Government forces but how many attacks insurgents succeeded in inflicting and the number of casualties.
“Security is like defending or goal keeping in a final of top flight football match, no matter how defensive a football team has been, what matters is whether the team conceded goals to its opponent or not, that is what determines the winner and loser.
“Governor Shettima is mostly on ground, moving round the State, meeting security heads almost on daily basis, working assiduously in providing more than what you may assume to security agencies in order to aggressively complement the efforts of the Federal Government which has the constitutional mandate of protecting citizens as contained in the exclusive legislative list of the Nigerian constitution which spells out duties of every tier be it Federal or State Government”.
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