BOKO HARAM: A SHORT STORY MADE DIFFICULT

Dr. Viban Ngo, PhD.

Boko Haramism is the doctrine of an obscured group of persons in Northern Nigeria principally of Hausa and Fulani extractions who for reasons not well defined vehemently prohibit the spread of Western sort of education. They employ all categories of outrageous strategies ranging from violent killing, assassinations, abduction for ransom and intimidation to enforce their doctrine. Members who call themselves Boko Haram, [Hausa language] which stands for ‘dread of Western Education,’ (handiay turanchi in Fulfulde) come from predominantly Islamized Hausa and Fulani communities in Northern Nigeria. The abduction three weeks ago by the Boko Haram gangsters of some 237-300 school girls from their dormitories in the town of Chibok in Borno State at gun point to isolated locations in Nigeria for the first time, has focused the Western media limelight on their notoriety.  They have been engaged in wanton killing rampage since 2002. We are going to explore the raison d’etre. Further we will demonstrate that it is not an overnight reaction to political and social grievances some hacks think in Nigeria, Western Africa. Whatever the case, their actions have caused untold mayhem and no one in his right frame of mind supports them. Nigeria and its neighbors are on full alert and the end of the imbroglio is left to speculation.

Emboldened and appearing to be sophisticated are Boko Haram elements bill posting for propaganda purposes [17-05-2014]

A Catholic Priests once told me that 99% of all that happens in our lives are of
our making. I was puzzled and thought hard. Then I asked myself how I would be responsible for a plane accident crash when I wanted to travel safely to my destination and I was not piloting it or responsible for its manufacture. I also asked why I would accept to be born black to be discriminated against when I could have been born white and live a heaven on earth. Sad in a way but I had to cogitate. That is a different burning topic we will not dwell into today. 

How on earth did this tank once called the Caterpillar during the First World War come in to Boneo State?

Again I pondered upon it with another observation:  if a lad decided to ride a bike without a crash helmet, as he often complained that upon wearing one in summer his head became unbearably hot and had an accident in which he sustained serious injuries who would be blamed?  Would it be the boy, the road builders, and the manufacturers of the bike or whom? The onus will fall on the boy. He could have stayed away from biking altogether if he knew that he could not accept the city bylaw of riding without wearing his protective gear.  He ignored all endeavors from his parents to wear one when riding. His conviction was that he was a wit as the Boko Haram miscreants presume. To him only lazy nincompoops were victims of road accidents. He never had any fatal accident and died at a ripe age. Was it a matter of luck or apotheosis? Statistics have shown that many perish in road accidents for they do not adhere to road safety regulations or a combination of many factors. If many do come to the assistance of Nigeria (Canada, USA, UK, China, France, Israel, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger) to confront Boko Haram or provide logistics to the Nigerian Government, the chances are that Boko Haram might go underground and engage in a guerrilla warfare as they had been doing intermittently in the past. At least their activities could be curtailed. The truth is  they do not have the benefit of the rugged terrains of Korahcoram Range in Afghanistan or Pakistan and Rhumsiki Kapsiki range in the border region of Cameroon and Nigeria that is clad with torn scrubs of the Savannah. Sooner or later they would be cornered and contained.  In this special case they are culpable and fully responsible for all that is happening and would happen to them.

Rhumsiki Kapsiki, one of the probable hideouts of the Boko Haram, Nigeria / Cameroon border.

Still on us being the architect of our destiny, when head of states in developing nations turn to be dictators, they are warned that they will end up living in exile or heading to Elysium in the morning of their lives. They brush aside whatever counselling and are ever of the assumption that they are loved by their people. A dictator can still be popular. His popularity could be achieved by coercion and that is a different story. The citizens under his jurisdiction have but Hobson’s choice. If they do not eat the president’s poison that will prolong their existence they will die of starvation. Many eat his poison to have slow agonizing death rather than to starve. Another alternative is to go on self-exile. Then that is not food that all edentulous could digest.  Again, I once met a French student in London, England who was smoking cigarette profusely. Concerned over his health; I confronted him as to why he was committing suicide. He retorted: ‘If I smoke I enjoy my life and I am happy even if my happiness is short-lived” He continued, “If I don’t smoke I do not enjoy my life and I will still die.”  Bemused, I was taciturn though I laconically laughed for I had in my one score and a decade years buried many who had to say adieu to me because of cancer of the lungs caused by chain smoking of cigarettes. An African aphorism applied that ‘dead ears do not hear tintinnabulations of hunting beagles.’

Our lists of maddened dictators [Assad of Syria, Mubarak, Mobutu Sese Seko, Nicolae Ceausescu [died 1989]of Romania, Paul Biya the incumbent of Cameroon, General Gadhafi of Libya, Joao Bernardo Viera of Guinea Bissau, Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Siaka Stevens of Sierra Leone who was maddened to stand on the reed with one leg on the assumption that they could never fall yet fell woefully]. They fervently believed that no giant could ever hurt them as what they were doing was the right thing that could go on indefinitely. Some have crooked, corrupt entourages and their apprehension was that if their leaders failed, they were to follow suit. These dictators left mayhem on their wake when they died, sometimes violently. They tended to forget that no one had ever lived on earth ad infinitum and none had ever carried a broken pin as his possession to the life after this. Sometimes many of these elected democratically often thwart the democratic system to prolong their stay in power for selfish reasons. They project themselves to their people as being the only super intelligentsia in the state being indispensable and thus irreplaceable. Bamboozled, those naïve citizens acquiesce to their detriment. The rule of law and order are flushed by the blood of the inexperienced people who catapulted those head of states to their governorship or kingship status. Eventually the day of reckoning comes and grievances that used to be resolved amicably are settled by duels. Down are pulled all that had taken hundreds of years to be edified as piles of playing cards. Such is the case with the castles and towers of babel we have that have been pulled apart by the internecine civil war that had been raging on in Syria for the last three years.  We know that dictatorship that had been entertained by Syrians is the main reason. We now see how 99% of what is taking place there is of their making.

The stakeholders shade crocodile tears and go back to the drawing table with hats in hand begging their mentors, the World Bank to rescue them from the melee they created initially occasionally with the tacit support of some of their mentors. Soon Syria will bury the hatchet if they could be taught any lessons from experience and sit down in the hope of reverting to the status quo with a king or without one, the decadent relics.

We were being initiated into Boko Haram we saw is loosely translated as ‘Western education is prohibited.” Its leader is the firebrand middle age Nigerian who hails from Hausa tribe called Abubakar Shekau alias Darul Tawheed. They have since been attacking Christians but stray bullets have been killing their kinds.  So far they have killed 10,000 Christians and standbys. In their latest killing at El-Rufai Motor Park in the Nyanga ward of Abuja, 150 innocent people were killed by human bombs. Some of the senseless killers were arrested and are in custody and those are the ones that their leader is prepared to swap the abducted school girls languishing in the bushes and stashed in various grassed-walled compounds in Borno, Adamawa, and Yobe and most likely in Cameroun Republic to the east.  A neighboring state border of say Cameroon is as porous as the law enforcement officers would let them come in and out of their hidings so long as they give them bribes. The fear now is the mob revenge if the government of President Goodluck Jonathan is viewed to be lackadaisical. Unconfirmed sources state that the mob in Yobe stormed some of their hideouts, destroying some of their trucks and armored vehicles. At the same time some 200 of them are supposed to have been killed. This action may put the adopted girls in harm’s way and that is what should be avoided.

Abubakar Shekau flanked by his lieutenants

Lately these religious fanatics have vowed to even track down Imams, Islamic religious teachers for following Western democratic constitutions. Now we ask if Boko Haram sympathizers are responsible for their downfall or why had what the Nigerian Government was taking lackadaisically has grown out of all proportion.


Their motive is to turn Northern Nigeria into a sharia state and to do away with Westernization. True if all Nigerians vote democratically, they could adopt any governance that they cherish. It is awry when they resolve to using violence means to trumpet their motives. If the sharia law is the vox populi, let it be so. It cannot be in the modern world through violent means and intimidation. Nigeria is a potential tinder box that the rest of the civilized world cannot sit by and watch it disintegrate by a bunch of disillusioned miscreants. There were several ways they could have tabled their grievances to be debated and resolutions arrived at and perhaps all could have been happy. Then they forget that they live in the second millennium where the argument of force is being done away with as it had been tasted and seen that it was immaterial from the past two World Wars. The silent agreement is that matters had to be resolved amicably and that when people give, they take and none should be taking and never giving back in return.

The Nigerian Government fears that if force is used to get the abducted girls, their hostages they might likely be killed in the process and are likely to negotiate. Boko Haram would want their members who are in prison to be released in return for the girls. They sound as if they have carved out a country for themselves for how could they exchange prisoners and still live in the same country without being apprehended? To the cold-blooded killers, the impression is that they would carved out a country called Northern Nigeria and would dictate terms. Now, could this scenario been avoided? It is good that President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria has not accepted to have any deals with them in spite of barrage of criticisms levied against him. The point is clear. If the girls are hurt, retaliation may be swift and fast but that should be as the last resort.

President Goodluck Jonathan of Nigeria. Does he have luck with Boko Haram?

His Excellency President Goodluck Jonathan. Has he luck in the eradication of Boko Haram some Nigerians tend to sympathize with their cause?

One cannot say if history could have been changed when what one was already talking about what was already history. Perhaps as the case of Syria and other fragmented Arabic peninsular could have been avoided if all of them were not divided and given false or glorified status of countries that rightly should not have been there. The colonialists divided overseas possessions for administrative convenience and they ended up being independent countries. That was not what they had envisaged.  Brothers who once owned lands and benefited from economies of scale were separated and they lost those benefits they used to have when they were together. Was the partitioning of their once grandiose state of their making? And would the fact that they were partitioned by the colonialists lead to fighting of people who were once living together? Are their possibilities of fusing them to the past status quo, that is before colonialism?

Remote Causes: Contrariwise, no relatives are ever forced to live together when they are not compatible. This is a recipe for disaster when it transcended to state values or nation states. The Burundi and Rwanda debacle of 1994, pogrom had no overnight origin. It started in the colonial days when successive colonial masters favored one ethnic group over the other. The Tutsis who were elegant in status were favored by the German, Belgians, and French over the majority Bantoid Hutus who treated them as second class citizens in their homeland. So is the Boko Haram blundering in Northern Nigeria that many in the West are learning for the first time. For many of us, it came up in 2002 but we will see that its root causes go centuries back.

Africa is no longer in isolation of the Western World. It is no longer DARK there from the point of view of information and transparency that gave rise to the prefix dark. Many Westerners often misinterpreted the adjective dark to stand for the color of Africans. No, it origin stems from the lack of information that made the first English geographers to depict it on their map with the dark color. The only known parts were the Barbary States, Egypt and Southern Africa in the 17^th century. The hack Henry Morton Stanley working for King Leopold II of Belgium articulated it in his report, travelogue Through the Dark Continent. It has nothing to do with the color of the people as African was also peopled by light-skinned peoples as hitherto. (Interested readers should read my works on Origins of African Place Names)

Modern media had made it possible for Africans and non-Africans in diaspora to follow what is happening even in the jungles with the aid of satellite images, thanks to Google images of the world.  The CIA, and the French with their SPOT imagery are already following the armored vehicles of the Boko Haram and what used to be no-go areas of Africa to all and sundry are now thorough. There is no question of King Leopold II sending Henry Morton Stanley or Dr. David Livingstone or John Hanning Speke being the first Europeans who would report of the darkness or diaphanous of  Africa. Again Africa was only dark to the Europeans as their Dark Ages when they were sedentary and were inferior and not adventurous. The Chinese, Arabs and East Indians were in touch with Africa and Africa was never to them in darkness. It was Europe that was in darkness to the rest of mankind during the Dark Ages.

The Boko Haram fiasco started in earnest in the European Colonial days, from the beginning of the 16^th century. [Today it is another modern Usman dan Fodio (1754-1817) emerging forcing in the throats of men a religion that is responsible for violent killings and mayhem in the modern world]. If you did not accept Dan Fodio and his cronies you were seized and sold into slavery. How do we trust men who impose their philosophies on us by brutal force? How do we marry unemployment with religion and levy blame on Westernization as Boko Haram is doing? 


Can we copy from the Japanese? They welcome Westernization yet are deeply within themselves Japanese. When you force people to like you, the moment that force will dissipate, that link will be severed. Boko Haram followers are presently inculcating Koranic verses on Christian school girls as their way to have their sympathy of Al Qaeda, Taliban and other Islamic fanatics.  It is all wrong. It will be a stupid girl or person to follow you after the trauma he or she passes through by your senseless killing, rape, depriving them from preparing for their future through education and rampage. Even the Arabs who were stoics and did not allow their children to be educated in the Western ways are relaxing that hard-line. Boko Haram drives away jobs and makes the Hausa and Fulani man to be dreaded or looked at suspiciously as the hooded Muslim women in Western streets. It is common sense to avoid them as many have used the hooded clothes to carry bombs, dangerous weapons during the French wars with the Algerians and Moroccans in the past. This is still used today as concealing lethal carriages.

Why the homeland of Boko Haram is relatively below par. When western civilization was penetrating the region then known as Aquinadea or Western Ethiopia or Guinea as variously written on Portuguese 'portolan' charts from the coastal region, Atlantic Ocean, then known as Ethiopian Ocean or Black Sea, the Africans abutting the Sahara were also having contacts with the Arabs from North Africa and the Middle East. The contact was further intensified by the coming to West Africa in the region to be eventually called Northern Nigeria by Usman Dan Fodio, a Muslim Fulani missionary. He was out to implant Islam with impunity. The rule of the day was you either accepted the new philosophy, Islam and be free or you deny it, be captured tortured and even killed or sold into slavery. Prior to that, the Hausa had their own traditional beliefs most of which had been brushed aside. If Christianity had come in here before as what was happening in the coastal region of Western Africa, and he region of Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, the inhabitants would have been converted to Christianity. So if an African stands before you and states that he is a Muslim, Christians, Hindu or he belongs to so and so foreign faith or philosophy, it would be due to his geographical location and the first foreign religion that came to his land. Therefore he was not given a choice as in some other localities in some other parts of the world. In this case, there is no podium upon which an African can stand on to state that the foreign belief he had adopted is better than the other and go to the extent of killing his neighbor who does not sympathize with him. A witty African should ask why it is that they were deprived of their ways of life, worships they had known since time immemorial. On average, foreign beliefs have only been one hundred years in Africa and Africans should reason and stop being fervently euphoric about them.

The Hausa were among the first in Guinea or Western Ethiopia to have had such contacts with the Islamic invaders. Many accepted it and others were dragged into slavery and ended up in Ottoman Empire (Turkey), Iran, North Africa and the Middle East as slaves in harems.  In Islamization or Arabicization, the harbinger did not come to implant his religion and left.  He settled with the locals, introduced his ways of life, clothing, trade, and basic technology but all was centered around religion, Koran that could only be deciphered in Arabic. They had to learn Arabic and master its scripts the prime aim of which was to recite the Koranic verses until they were part and parcel of them. In consequence, Africans were assimilated into the Arabic ways by force. Many of them will inveigh this fact for they have all been brainwashed.


In Northern Nigeria, as in most of the areas abutting the Sahara, they Arabs won the battle. As we saw, prior to that, Africans who were classified as pagans had their traditional beliefs. The Arab made them understand that their beliefs were paganism. Owing to the brutal ways in which the newcomers imposed their ways of life, the traditional Africans ways of beliefs were virtually wiped out from what was named Northern Nigeria by the first colonial Governor of that region Sir Frederick Lugard in 1914. Lugard had worked for the British Government in India before being transferred to Uganda. From Uganda he was translated to Northern Nigeria while the wars of subjugation were still going on. Owing to the fact that Islam had made the Northerners who were not all that Bantoid but Hematite to have a different perspective of life than the Southerners of what was then being called British Nigeria, Lord Lugard objected when the British Colonial Government wanted to amalgamate the Northern and the Southern parts of Nigeria to form the federation.

Fig: Lord Frederic Lugard, First Colonial Governor of Northern Nigera (1858-1945)   He never entertained the idea of the Northern Nigeria being joined to Southern Nigeria

Beef Eaters and demand for spices: Whereas the Arabs had had contact with the Hausas of Northern Nigeria around the 15^th Century, the Europeans had their contact in earnest with Africans of the coastal area in the 16^th century when Queen Elizabeth I the spinster queen was ruling England. and Queen Mary Stuart was ruling the Kingdom of Scotland. Europeans had trade with the Far East, India and China we will soon know was triggered by the search for spices. It was not any European who could head there and buy the required goods to go and retail. There where the Turkish, Greek, Arabic and Italian intermediaries. They bought goods brought by the Arabs and retailed them at exorbitant prices. The northern European countries were left out. Even if they wanted to trade directly with the Arabs of the Middle East they were not allowed. They were not strong enough to derail this monopoly of the Arabs and the Italians. The Spanish and Portuguese who were at the forefront of seafaring in those days but were not fully into that trade. Northern Europeans as the kingdoms of Scotland, England and the Low Countries were stronger in boroughs and not as entities and they could not garner enough power to push their way forward. The boroughs were ruled by powerful landowners who ate plenty of beef. It should be remembered that there was no electricity, thus fridges you take for granted today and the only way to store meat for the aristocracies, lords, kings, queens, reeves, Burgess, regents and even the rank and file was by smoking and putting on plenty of spices. Had fridges been invented to store meat, spices would have not been sought after by the beef-eaters and the history of the world would have been shaped differently. Let us see.

The only route through which spices could come was from the Middle East and the monopoly as we saw was in the hands of the Italians, Arabs and Turks.  As such the Portuguese and Spaniards who were earlier seafarers set out to look for alternative places and route where they could get spices. It should be remembered that the religion of the day was a deterrent to scientific discoveries. If you discovered or said certain things that were not fathomed by the church and the authorities, you could be destroyed or taken for inquisition. Let us remember that when George Stephenson invented the steam engine, rocket for the train, horse breeders were not all that happy as it soon threw them out of their profession. Remember too that when the computer came in the 1970s in earnest many were thrown out of business but they soon acclimatized. So people had to conform for the sake of their lives.


The belief was that the world was round like a plate and if one ventured too far, one was likely to fall into some bottomless abyss. They did not ask how the seas could not go without drying up or emptying into such abyss. We tend to ask how long man had stayed that way irrespective of the fact that scientific evidence show that the first man and woman were from Africa. Then if a parents did not narrate their history to their children, particularly those of today who know more of PlayStation and video-games than the history of their families or their prime ministers, they were likely to forget for they found what was being learned irrelevant. Moreover, there was no writing we take for granted today to document what was going one. No chronicles were kept. If the parents died without chronicling their lives, that vanished into thin air.

Technology and sea trade: With this lucrative trade in spices and the Portuguese itching to have a share of it. They set out to look for alternative routes to the Far East where they could also go and buy spices, minerals and other goodies themselves thereby bypassing the middle man. They could have gone out earlier but sea technology was still primitive. The galleons that had sails took a long time to be invented or perfected. There were also deterrents as rumors that if one passed beyond the South Sea Bubbles one was to fall into a bottomless abyss or melt owing to excessive heat. This was the area south of Canary Islands where the surfacing of fish at certain times of the year and the convergence of the sea current caused frightening bubbles to inexperienced seafarers. They had boats and oars and no sails and dared not venture into such unknown choppy waters.

Myths about the Sahara and Africa: The Portuguese and other Europeans could have crossed over Africa and trekked but there was another drawback. The Arabs wanted to be the intermediaries too in Africa. They had established trade caravans that crisscrossed the Sahara and did not also want rivals.  The question was how to establish links in the south to have other treasures and spices that took months if not years to be shipped from Western Africa to North Africa and eventually being sold to Europeans. Improvement in seafaring and technology of ship building were to bring about dramatic changes that were to change man’s perspective of the world and expand his trading grounds. We will see how that was to affect the forefathers of the notorious Boko Haram in Western Africa.  Henry the Navigator of Portugal (1394-1460) was to establish school for navigators and that was to make Portugal a leading sailing country in the world in the 15th century.

With sails and the new ships, the Portuguese and others were to venture beyond the South Seas Bubbles. They discovered that it was not as dangerous as some chroniclers had put it and many deterring myths were gradually being dismissed. They brought in sizable spices and gold and other minerals that were in high demand in Europe.  It should be recalled that information about Africa was falsified by the go-between, the Arabs and Turks as their way of deterring Europeans from competing away their trade. As such the first 'portolans' charts that included Africa whose interior were filled with ogres and ogresses, and other dreadful creatures that would scare away would-be adventurers. It was not only 

the physically images of man and beast, but they wrote with exaggerations frightening literature of women giving birth without pains, and many more.

 King Henry the Navigator.of Portugal (1394-1460)

With modern boats, the Portuguese and even the Carthaginians could sail along the coast of Africa and did some charting giving names to where they could not get information from the locals. They brought spices that were called Guinea from Guinea coast as Western Ethiopia of Acquinadea was then known. The British benefited too even though they were not advanced in sailing as the Portuguese and Spaniards that they gave the name or 31 shillings be on Guinea, valuable spices. The search for spices did not only end in pepper and more but in ebony, ivory tusks that were used for the making of piano keyboards, assorted hardwoods, gold, and other minerals in demand in Europe. In return, they paid Africans with spirits, rum, whiskies, clothes, shoes, bars of salt, mirrors, Dane guns, and use of Marie Theresa, cowries and metal bars that were used as currencies.

General Mosquito: In want of better coverage of the region some early Europeans settled in fortified castles that are dotted all over Western Africa as was their tradition in their homeland, Europe. Although trade had brought them to Africa, they had to bring along their tradition and customs. They brought Christianity and did convert locals who were baptized as Christians. These missionaries, traders, and adventurers could have had a bigger impact but they were being killed mercilessly not by Africans fighting invaders, but by mosquitoes some African writers now call general mosquito.

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus who sailed with three ships to the new world in 1492

The training of seafarers by Henry the Navigator and the improvement in ship building by the Portuguese led to the discovery of America. We are likely to state that America had long been discovered by the ancient man but because the causeway that joined Alaska to Asia was cut off and those who came never passed information to their offspring or they did and it was not chronicled, we tend to write that America was discovered by the Portuguese. We are ever wrong to be right. We have to remember Gondwanaland when all the continents were together before they disintegrated. A lot happened and inter continental distribution of species, vegetation, animals and many more took place.

America discovered and the effect on the Civilization of Africa: These possibilities of sailing and new ships let to the discovery of America by Christopher Columbus in 1492. It was attempt by the Portuguese to have their foot in the spices’ trade and overcome the middleman who was charging exorbitant prices. As Nicolae Copernicus in the 15^th century supported what Pythagoras had stated that the world was round like a ball and added that it was revolving around the sun instead of the sun revolving around the earth, (a fact that nearly cost him his life). Hence the Portuguese thought that by moving westward, they were to arrive in the east and they were not far from the truth. It is for that reason that they called the land they had discovered West Indies. They brought in minerals and samples of what they could find there of trade benefit to the Portuguese. The people they found were the First Nation Peoples whom they called the red Indians because of the ocher paste they had smeared on themselves. 

The report of Columbus was like that of the Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon on 20 July 1969. Had he and his followers brought in silver and gold more and more countries would have been scrambling to go and colonize the moon. In the future when technology would be improved, man might be able to go to other planets and come home to earth with minerals that would entice others to explore more and colonize some planets. There will not be shortages of candidates as many are lining up to go to Mars.  The Portuguese explored the Caribbean (a name that stemmed from cannibals), a name given because its prima occupantis were ogres or ogresses. They found minerals, sugar and other crops as potatoes we learned were taken back to Europe.  Subsequent voyages were there to get more of the wanted resources, silver, gold and new species of plants. The exploitation of all these necessitated the recruitment of the natives, Indians. They were employed in mines and plantations where sugar that was also highly demanded in Europe was produced. Other nationals were following up development in Portugal. Neighboring Spain, England, France and others were to follow the footsteps of the pioneers. Many of us will remember the voyages of Sir Francis Drake and the role played by Elizabeth I the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII played in pirating the Spanish galleons returning from the Americas. The demand for foreign minerals and sugar was high and productivity was law. More was expected from the West Indians who were not used to such manual labor.  In consequent, many were dying in high number and also from diseases as syphilis, and others that were not inherent in their communities but brought in by Europeans. Out of sympathy, a Spanish missionary, Bishop Bartolome De las Casas (1544) suggested that Africans could replace the Indians who were dying in droves as one African could do the work of eight Indians and several Europeans. One, they were immune to malaria attack whose cure was not yet is sight. However American Indians had been using cinchona to cure this but this was not known by Europeans who also were victims of malaria. If Africans could replace native Indians, the crucial question was how to get Africans to come to America.

The Slave Triangle: With modernization of shipping and the use of trade winds, it was possible to take raw materials produced in the Americas to Europe, sell them, buy manufactured goods that were wanted by Africans in Western Africa and then exchange them for African human cargo. Where Africans could not be cajoled to part with their beloved ones they were coerced. Inter-tribal wars were triggered as the vanquished had to surrender and hand over people who were then shipped under crammed invidious conditions to the Americas and some to Europe. They set on journeys of no return. Dealers in slaves gave cooperating tribes Dane guns and aqualungs that were novelties and far efficient in warfare than the old assegais, or machetes, slings, clubs and spears.  Coastal kings demanded these fancy things in return for slaves who could be recalcitrant citizens of their kingdoms or captives from neighboring kingdoms. The trade was lucrative and banks like Barclay funded slave trade expeditions or insured the human cargoes and ships. News of this lucrative trade spread like wild fire and more and more Europeans stepped in. This caused hardship and depletion of African population. Many died on board ships for want of food, freshwater, diseases, crammed conditions, and other committed suicide rather than comply. What happened next?


 It was not long before some human right activists trumpeted the pains and the appalling conditions the Europeans and the Arabs where subjecting their fellow men, Africans, their cousins for earthly gains. Slavery and slave trade were abolished by the British (1833) who had achieved relative advantage in this trade own to their advances in seafaring technologies. Sadly we still have pockets of hidden slavery and slave trade particularly among women where they are still sold in countries like India and in a good number of West African states in the guise of dowry or bride price and some obscured arranged labor supplies in Mauritania, Mali, Niger and even Nigeria our concerned country.  It should be known that once money is exchanged for man by another, that man is equated to good and is treated as such. Therefore, we as civilized men should not in the 21^st century accept any form of human trafficking because it is not in our vicinity. If one’s daughter is brought in by a suitor, it is opportune for one to support the two persons who want to marry so that they could have a better standard of living. One should not state that he sired and brought up a daughter and it is appropriate that one gets money or property in return for her. That will be downright trading in a human being. The buyer would want to exploit her as interest from his property. You would not like to see your daughter being used as a nigger in the 21st century? The bride and groom should be on equal footing and there should not be a feeling that the bridegroom purchased the bride. Those who have this in their primitive culture advance all sorts of excuses. Sadly some women as those of Boko Haram, ISIS, Al Shabaab, Al Qaeda,  and others with a backward faction of Islam naively defend their men for subjugating them and putting them in subordinated position in matrimony. That is wrong. Men are all women’s children and they should do all to protect women and not close their eyes when they are being exploited or treated as second class people, be they of any three prototype of man on earth and wherever they are in the world and for whatever reasons.

From Slavery to colonization and Christianity and why coastal Africans were the first to be westernized: With the abolition of slavery and slave trade act in England in 1833 and Civil War in America  (1861-1865)to stamp out slavery and slave trade, Europeans who had also been buying raw materials sought for ways to covet vast territories that they called their plantations or trade concessions. From those vast territories they exploited minerals, raw materials and even recruited local labor that was needed in the exploitation and development of plantations and affiliated industries. They had to educate the locals to do the tasks they wanted and that led to formal education of the natives. They also realized that some of the ways were uncouth and they brought in the missionaries to Christianize them. The coastal inhabitants were the first to benefit from this sort of influence. The forerunners of these were trading firms and not the colonial government of the day. They carved out their concessions and ran them as mini or vast states as the case with India where the British East Indian Company occupied almost the entire sub-continent and had to drive away the Portuguese, the French and Dutch who were also interested. This was the case with Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe (Dzimbabwe) whose colonization was under the aegis of Sir Cecil Rhodes then governor of South Africa and many others in Eastern Africa. They brought in the concern of the British Government when they demonstrated that it was to be to the mutual benefit of England if they were supported. Other alien interested stakeholders were driven away militarily. We got to know now where men like Lesley Arthur, the Duke of Wellington got his field training before he eventually confronted Napoleon Bonaparte, the French Emperor who had been terrorizing Europe at the Battle of Waterloo, Holland and before in Spain and Portugal (Interested readers could read, Sir Charles Petrie, BT’s work published in 1956, Wellington, A Reassessment. London: James Barrie, 278.).

Similarly Europeans got Africa as they did the Americas and divided it among themselves. This led to the breaking and bandying of tribes or kingdoms that were at peace with each other before the new states or what were called overseas possessions or colonies made them to look at each other as enemies even hitherto.

Europeans knew that the interior of Africa was hostile from stories of people like Henry Mortimer Stanley, Dr. David Livingstone, Barth, the Landers brothers, de Brazza, an Italian who was colonizing what we now call Congo Brazzaville for the French, and so on. The best alternative was to start from the coast where they had been having props and had had contacts with tribal chiefs and kings. The Arabs and the Barbars where having a stronghold of the interior of Africa and penetrating was still a hard nut to crack. Conditions of traversing it were treacherous and Spartan. The Arab continued to have a monopoly of the Trans-Saharan trade including Eastern and Southern Africa. As the climate in Southern Africa was not all that inclement, that is temperate a sizable population of Europeans running away from banditry, religious and political persecutions found their way in the new colonies Europeans had created. Culprits who were literally abandoned after the Napoleonic wars ,1799-1815, as there were no long room in the prisons were dumped there. 1820s saw shortages of food and extreme poverty in England and crime rate was so high. Prisons were full and the government of the day took drastic measures to resolve these. Culprits from the UK were dumped in Australia, South Africa and New Zealand. Some sought revenge by wiping out aborigines as the Black Fellows of Tasmania. Some colony was created in Sierra Leone where free women (whores) were rounded up from cities in the UK and dumped and others Europeans from Nova Scotia went their of their freewill. That did not materialized as the death rate from malaria sketched above was frightening. That is an entirely different story but it is adumbrated to show how life was in those days and the circumstances that led to European peopling of coastal Africa and other continents.

Scrambling for Africa: Penetration or what was known as scrambling for Africa was leading to fighting of European cousins, that is the French, Germans, Prussians, Italian, Portuguese, English, Danes, and Spanish were fighting for the larger share of the cake among themselves. Smaller states like Belgium were also interested. Some as Germany had seen that most of their citizens who immigrated to America were being absorbed in the American societies and that signaled the death of their culture and the German language. Many Germans had vanished in Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and the USA. The reasoning was that if they had their own territories of overseas, they would be settled and their culture and languages would not be lost. Leaders like King Kaiser of Germany could have had larger shares but they were bent on expansion in Europe but were to enter the race of colonialism a bit late. The King of Belgium Leopold II suggested the Congress of Berlin (1884-1885) to be held during which Africa was partitioned. Surprisingly the Americans who had shocked off colonialism of the British through bitter war and had fought among themselves to stamp out slavery in Southern USA were there as observers. (America declared independence from the UK on July 4, 1776).  Ideally, they should have fought for a united Africa with one capital. Come to think of it, they had been made up of semi-independent states and might have seen nothing wrong in allowing states with isolated ideologies or governance to blossom with the hope that they were to be amalgamated as the USA in due course of time.

On the scramble for Africa, the first European to sign treaties with the local kings in the coastal areas and map was to own the territories they designated on their maps. While the Conference of Berlin we earlier mentioned was still going on, the battle for ownership on the ground was taking place that by the time it was coming to an end in 1885 almost everyone knew where everyone was except for the interior whose subjugation lasted till 1915 in some parts of the continent of Africa.

European brought along their norms and technology: As earlier stated, Europeans coming to settle in the coastal region brought along too their tradition, trade, their rigorous planning, cleanliness and many more that made them to confront natives who objected to changing their ways of live. Force had to be employed in some cases to inculcate upon their natives what they wanted, orderly presentation of buildings, hygiene and shaking off superstitious beliefs. They introduced Christianity that was like the harbinger of Europeans in some coastal locals. They opened schools as they needed to give command in their languages as they could not or it would have taken them time to master the multitude of Africans variegated languages. Initially English, Pidgin English that was bastardized English was used in Western Africa as the lingua franca. Each time one speaks that language one is reminded of the tool used by all Europeans to buys and sell slaves in Western Africa. It had been a wedge towards the introduction of proper English in certain parts of Western Africa. Perhaps with time it would stay as birth to a new language, a conglomerate of African, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch languages. In the Spanish, Portuguese and above all French territories, attempts were seriously made to transform the man of African into a European African, culturally and mentally. That is what we call assimilation which was so thorough that it had been difficult for the French and English speaking Africans to forge a sensible unity government as the classic case of British Cameroons (West Cameroon State) and Cameroon Republic. Another had been the experiment of Gambia and Senegal to form Senegambia. Although they were of Wolof tribe the cultural differences were so acute that unity could not be forged. Why? The French-speaking African ever felt that they were culturally and mentally superior to Africans who were under the British Colonial Regime. Let us leave that for a next topic.

Interior penetration was not all that rosy as in some coastal areas of people who had tasted the value of European civilization. Even then, some coastal kingdoms did not like the Europeans to bypass them and inter the hinterland to trade with what they call the backward peoples. [You will recall what the Arab did in North Africa. They would not let in Europeans to enter the Sahara to meet Africans and trade with them.]  As such they had to fight with Europeans with whom they had lived as friends or trading partners. However, with Europeans superior fire power and battle intelligence, and ordinance, they were able to subjugate all the coastal inhabitants and headed adroit to the hinterland. These were known as wars of subjugation most colonized people of the world experienced.


In the case we are studying, that is Nigeria that had been covered in several text books by historians and travelogues this will be skipped but we would like to mention the case of British expedition to Benin city in 1897, mid-western region of Nigeria. The invading British parties were ambushed and massacred and the British came back well prepared. Benin was defeated and vast treasures looted some of which are stashed in warehouses or museums in Britain. Coming to mind are elaborately made bronze works of art that depicted events in that country. It was like their diary of visiting dignitaries and memorable events.  The tradition is still kept hitherto. The British continued their inland march to those areas that had not had any European influence through trading companies. The march continued to the north. Where there was resistance it was crushed with brute force. Counter insurgency led to men like Lord Frederick Lugard to be called from Uganda to Northern Nigeria to oversee the wars of subjugation and to introduce Indirect Rule, a sort of government handed over to the local rulers who were subordinate to the colonial authorities. This had worked remarkably in India and Uganda.[This was not what the French, Portuguese and Spanish colonialists believed. They taught and governed Africans themselves and if the colonized accepted them and imitated them in all aspects of life, that is being assimilated, they were awarded the coveted mother country's citizenship. A White was 'superior'to the African or Indian, and if an Indian or African had acquired the White man's ways and knowledge unlike his other brother he was superior to that his brother. Now you see the seed of differences of the so-called Anglophones, Lusophones and Anglophones. The British did not have the luxury of the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonialists and were not out to make an Englishman of an African or Indian or whoever they colonized] Prior to being in Uganda he was translated from India where he had learned of Indirect Rule that was necessary if a small country like Britain was to govern a continental nation like India.

Northern Nigeria different from Southerners by virtue of their religious beliefs: The northerners were generally uncouth as they had not had any direct contact with Europeans as the southerners where Europeans traders had had concessions and even set up schools and trading posts, factories where Africans were educated in the Western ways of life. The reverse was true of Northerners mostly made up of Hausa and Fulani or Mbororos. As aforementioned, they had had Arabic influence and many of them were of Islamic faith. Now in the Islamic faith it is a common belief that a non-Islamic person is a pagan (infidel) whether he is a Hindu, Buddhist, Christians, Jew and so on. So the Europeans and their southern boys that is how they called servants in those days were pagans. It was a known fact that if a faithful killed a non-believer he or she went straight to heaven and was welcomed by twelve virgins who were to be his wives forever. All those were awry and mumbo-jumbo. Sadly that was what Iranian, and those who wear human bombs to penetrate and destroy aliens are made to believe this doctrine and still do hitherto. That also meant Europeans invaders in the Northern Nigeria had to fight harder too, as they were considered as pagan invaders. Lord Lugard inherited the subjugation from his predecessors and won for Britain Northern Nigeria. He found a people who were different in many ways from their fellow Africans of the coastal areas we now call Southerners. Their Islam faith, their communication is Arabic (Haematites), and visit to Mecca in the Middle East gave them some relative advantage. They had all yielded to the Arabic influence and what was left of them of Africanism was minimal or adulterated. They traded with Arabs from Cyrenaica, the present day Libya, Morocco, Egypt, Sudan then under the Turks (Ottoman Empire) and the Barbary States. If there was alphabetization, it was geared towards the inculcation of the Koranic verses that was for religious purposes. Imagine people learning Latin with the sole aim of digesting the Holy Bible and nothing else. At least the Romans spread Christianity with their modest technology they had gleaned from the Greek and the Greek from the Egyptians, advanced Africans. Justly learning Arabic enabled us to learn basic algebra and the Arabic script instead of the cumbersome Roman numerals the Arabs invented. That is fine but it is not the raison d’etre of our passage on earth.

General Mosquito: Meanwhile the southerners, that is the predominantly Christians of Southern Nigeria were fluent in English established during the days of slavery and slave trade. That language formed the basis of colonialism and enriched the present day Nigerian cultures.  The missionaries used to establish elementary schools where the local were taught the Western ways that were relatively more advanced than those of traditional Africans that were often prostituted by superstitions. Graduates from these schools were absorbed in European run factories, plantations, administrations and church missions. Companies like John Holt, Kings Way, and the United African Company (UAC). The Europeans had hoped that they were to live in Africa for good had it not been for ‘General Mosquito’ most could have settled in Western Africa. The picture painted was bleak in the 1900 AD. If ten Britons arrived from Liverpool port city or Portsmouth in January by the end of December only four were left and were never as fit as fiddles to do any work.  They had succumbed to malaria, 'bad air' and that was a bad designation, a misnomer whose cause was not known. Had it been known they could have used simple nets and complete cover of the skin, venture out only during the day when anopheles mosquitoes were inactive and would have survived their stay in Africa. As such, the government prohibited the stay of Britishers in that part of Africa that had gained the sobriquet of the ‘white man’s grave.’ However, those who came were not even allowed to bring along their spouses as a way of reducing excessive death rate.  Then why call the inhibiting mosquito general? With the bad treatment of Africans in Southern Africa as mongrels or sub humans, Africans conjectured that if Europeans had succeeded in staying for good in West Africa there would have had similar maltreatment of their kinds and they concluded that that insect might had done then a favor by expelling Europeans.

The Northerners were modestly educated in Arabic and did not see the need for Western sort of education and that was grossly misleading. The colonial government could have brought about a positive change but there was drastic shortage of manpower. We have seen that they resolved to govern through Indirect Rule. In which case, they left the colonized in tack with their traditional mentality unlike the French, Portuguese and Spaniards who ensured that the African was transformed to an African- European. The nearest thing was the way slaves were transformed to Europeans even though they were denied proper education in Southern USA before the American Civil War. You will remember that the only book they were allowed to own was the Holy Bible. (Read my write up Who is African American? Crossing Racial Barriers (2009) by www.baico.ca)

The more one was educated the better be it in Latin, Sosa, Greek, Lamnso, Ewondo, Hausa, Wolof, Yoruba, Bali, Arabic, Chinese or Swahili. As stated the modicum of education, that is reading and writing was to enable the Hausa and Fulani learn or cram Koranic verses. At this juncture, it should be stated that not all Arabic education in Africa was mediocre. Africans had had their share of university education in the antiquities as indicated by the ruins of universities in Arabic in Timbuktu, Goa, and main staging trade caravan areas in central Africa. The Northerners had been taught that the purpose of life was to live charitably, marry many wives, and sire as many children and to defend the teachings of Mohammed their prophet. This sort of education was not good enough for the implantation of Western type of governance and industrial development. Where it was imperative for Hausa and Fulani of the North had to learn this, they only sent along boys to schools and denied women who were given to marriage at very tender age of sometimes nine. They did not know that the bulk of education of children was carried out by women when their husbands were engaged in some drudgeries in the fields or as itinerant-traders as was common with the Hausa.  It meant that the mistresses or their bevies of concubines were left at homes and their female children were kept in the dark.  The boys lacked motivation before the independence of Nigeria as was already in the minds of Southerners spurred by missionaries and British traders. This picture so far gives us the scenario of the North and Southern Nigeria from the global perspective.

The merits of Western Education: When it came to employing those who were qualified to deliver the goods, so to say, the Europeans went for the educated Igbos, Yoruba, Kalabari and others who had welcome Western civilization. [In the 1980s when there was acute unemployment among the African British who preferred to be addressed as Blacks as that differentiated them from pure Africans who were never enslaved, most British went on the radio to state that even if they were employed to engage in less esoteric tasks, their English was not even passable]. That was fine. Then there was a mistake being committed by Igbos in particular. The Holy Ghost Fathers and the Protestant missionaries had taught some of them and they were closer to the Europeans. They dressed like Europeans and some of them wrote and spoke English fluently. Others even studied in England and the famous University College of Ibandan that was set on the bases of the University of London, UK.  In a way, the educated Africans had master what had made the white person superior to the African. When posted to work in Northern Nigeria they were like the new colonialists. They were arrogant, vainglorious and downtrodden the Hausa and Fulani natives on the least opportunity as a way of making their present felt or toe the line.  They should have been sympathetic as strictly speaking, the cause of the inferiority of the Northerners or their lack of Western education they are striving to have now was not of their making as we are now seeing. The Southerners controlled civil servant posts and government offices, industries or factories as they were known in those days and were in the armed forces. Some of their attitudes towards the Northerners engendered bitter feelings. The only way out of the fiasco was for the Northerners to learn the White man’s ways as many of them including the adopted girls by Boko Haram thugs are now doing. Then their priority was not Westernization but to be Arabophiles and master Arabic as to read the Koran so as to reach 'Allah' as God is called in Arabic. Had Islamic faith been taught in English a global language, it could have helped. There are still many Northern Nigerians who would not speak English today in spite of the fact that Nigeria was a British possession. Now race back to the part played by assimilation of the French and you will understand.  Arabic education was inculcated in them, above all their religion and not industrialization from the West that was  not extant and that was and is still myopic.


Religious fundamentalism blocked  proper reasoning of some Northerners including Boko Haram. They had forgotten that all invaders or colonialists have economic motive. If the colonized land is fertile, if they accept the  ways the colonialists, as pilgrimages to Mecca each year, it is economically beneficial to Saudi Arabia in due course of time. It is income guaranteed for life. The revenues Arabs get from Hadji or pilgrimage to Mecca surpass what a bigger nation state like France gets from tourism each year. It is no doubt that all measures are used by Saudi Arabia and others to foster this lucrative business. The Arab states are in the position to broker peace but decide to play it cool as it is to their benefit if Boko Haram could impose Sharia laws on all of Nigeria, if not the entire world. 

Methinks the Arabs accepted Westernization even though there were some stoics who purported to believe that Arabicisation was superior to Westernization. The Arabs and Africans were all colonized by Europeans. Let us reiterate Africans were thoroughly colonized and assimilated to the extent that most of their old values were wiped out. Instead of being ashamed and trying to revert to what they could have salvaged from the past traditions and beliefs, they are fighting to implant by force what is aliens, Arabic cultures to their kinds.


European colonialists were doing what they learned from the Romans and the cycle was ever rotating. Will Africans colonize Europe and America some day??The Arabs suffered double colonialism in that their neighbor the Ottoman Empire, present day Turkey equally colonized them and could have still been sitting on top of them had they not made the blunder of supporting the naughty child of Europe, Emperor Kaiser of Germany during the First World War. They were defeated by the Allied Forces and their possessions seized and divided among the Allies. This lead to the creation of states we earlier saw were one, so we have Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Palestine, Libya, Lebanon and Egypt to name a few. They would have formed a formidable state that would have been mono-culture and uni-lingual by virtue of their identical history but history brought about that change. Abdul Nassar tried with the hope of flushing out Israel from the Middle East but failed. Ghadafi toyed with it and the idea of a united Africa too.  If they had one vast nation state as the USA, they would not have allowed one dictator and wanton suffering they are all having today.

Therefore, the once colonized were in a way colonizing Northern Nigeria in the name of Islam. A nation that is founded on religion does not necessarily stand solid but falters. We have seen what happens as in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia where the government of the day wants to form states based on religious principles, sharia law. We cannot count the number of victims in Northern Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan and Somalia owing to religious fundamentalism. Where such a state raises its head, it should be made to toe the line according to the democratic principles. We are seeing what that ideology is doing to Nigeria. It is dragging it back from the economic bandwagon. It will drag the rest of mankind backward. That gangrene must be expunged. 

The northerners were a hard nut to be cracked. One must state that where Islam is implanted itself it was difficult to be removed. It is not the aim of all and sundry but for them to respect their neighbors and to be tolerant. One, they did not accept apostates and still do not at the time of writing. A Muslim damsel is to be killed for having fallen in love and married a Christian in Sudan. This is outrageous. The punishment for those who defected was fatwa, summary death by stoning or decapitation. The Hammurabi law of an eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth prevail. That scared away would-be apostates and even when they defected and remained in that community they faked religious worshiping and had to don in gaudy Arabic gowns as an outward sign of being faithful to Mohammed. Are they really faithful?

The break of the federation and forming of the unitary government: With simmering hostilities stemming from differences in culture and religions, and opportunity arose in 1967 when there was a military coup d’état in which leading Northerners in the First Government of Independent Nigeria were assassinated and some Southerners were culprits. Innocent Igbo traders and a few Yoruba’s were slaughtered and those who managed to escaped returned to their native homes in what was then known as Eastern Nigeria with the capital at Enugu. The military leader of the Eastern region General Odamegu Ojukwu declared independence from the Federation of Nigeria and named his country the Republic of Biafra. That led to a protracted internecine civil war with the Federal Government led by General Yacubu Gawon from a minority tribe sandwiched in Northern Nigeria. The slogan was that ‘to keep Nigeria one was a task that must be achieved’. The Eastern Nigerian who took over after the killing of the first Nigerian Prime Minister Sir Abubaka Tafawa Balewa and the Premier of Northern Nigeria Ahmadu Bello were all assassinated.


1st from the left is Sir Abubaka Tafawa Balewa, First P.M. of Independent Nigerian Federation.

In return General Aguiyi Ironsi an Easterner of Igbo extraction who took over the reign of the Government was assassinated. Dark clouds of war loomed over Nigeria. The bitter war of revenge by the Northerners supported by the Yoruba and other minority tribes lasted from 1967 to 1972. War ended when General Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, the president of Biafra Republic sought sanctuary in Ivory Coast, thanks to President Felix Houphet-Boigny and the French Government. He was eventually called back and lived to die in Nigeria in 2011 as a way to atone for the massacre of the Igbos. Although the predominantly Christians Igbo traders returned to Northern Nigeria after, Nigeria had never been the same. They are still targeted by Boko Haram in their Christian Churches or market places. 

General Yakubu Gowon deemed it fitting to create 12 states out of the original four. Today (2014) there are 36 States.

The civil war further strained relationships with the Igbos. That was the beginning of things to happen. Murtala Ramat Muhammed, a Fulani took over from General Yakubu Gowon by a coup d’état when he attended a congress of Head of States at Addis Ababa in 1975. Murtala was subsequently assassinated on the crowded streets of Lagos then the capital of Nigeria in 1976. The next person to hold the reign of power was General Obasanjo a person from south western Nigeria. Since then all successive head of states had ever come from Northern Nigeria,viz. Shehu Shagari, Ibrahim Babangida, Sani Obacha, Bhuhari, and Yara Adua who died in the office. It was then when an opportunity came for the vice president Dr. Goodluck Jonathan to take over the governing of the country.

Jonathan is ever been critiqued by Northerners, even some naïve Southerners and some armchair journalists from the West as being very corrupt. The allegation is like calling P. M. Steve Harper of Canada as being a rogue because some persons have been apprehended within SNC Lavalin in Quebec for money laundering and corruption. Jonathan is a man who inherited corruption and had been trying to clean it as a Christian. Remember that as a Christian in a country dominated by Muslims, you are still called behind closed doors as a pagan  no matter how good and had you try to reconcile and bring all together. If he kissed the ring of the Holy Father of Rome, Pope Francis at Rome he is scathingly criticized for being dovish and that he should have only offered his hand.


To satisfy some perpetually complaining and people in some developing country is impossible. Nigeria typifies this case. At this rate Nigeria could never have a Nelson Mandela or an Obama as some have set impossible standards for them to be attained and you are disdained before you are even born because you are of Christian parentage. It is like some persons discriminate against an African American because they are born with dark pigmentation and to hate a Caucasian he or she is scarlet.  The impression a good number of Northerners have is that a non-Muslim cannot even rule properly. It is the same mentality in areas where French speaking and English speaking Africans find themselves in one country as Cameroon Republic and the Former British Cameroons. To a francophone from the Cameroon Republic, no element of British Cameroons [U.N.O. Cameroon as variously called now] is competent enough to rule or perform any task in the government of Cameroon Republic and they have been together for 53 years. As such no president will ever come from British Cameroons. This scenario is not only unique to British Cameroons and Cameroon Republic. We earlier saw the case of Gambia that made up its mind to unite with Senegal. The marriage did not last for long as Senegalese were patronizing the Gambians. Gambia opted out. The case of British Cameroons where Boko Haram is using its northernmost part in Borno, Adamawa and Tabara as its bases to launch attacks in Nigeria and Cameroon Republic will only end in a sad way if the international communities do not intervene.

Following this line of argument, a non-Muslim leader to most Islamic believers in Northern Nigeria is a failure before he or she even holds the rein of power and that is very myopic and not a proper way of reasoning.  Given opportunities all the Northerner would adopt sharia law to be part and parcel of the Nigerian constitution. Following debates that are occasionally acrimonious on Nigerian Internet one is of the impression that Nigerians want to fragment to shimmering and that is hallucinating.There are many calling for the return of the Federal system as opposed to the unity government they have now as a way forward. That is they are still out to perpetuate regional or state boundaries by tribal frontiers. The Northerners according to Boko Haram would want to impose Islam even on Christians and non-Christians and that is no democracy or civility. Even the greatest democracy in the world as India could not fathom such as it would fragment the state and make the country ungovernable. The Northerners ever have the feeling that since they form the bulk of the population, they should ever have the president from the Hausaland, my Hausastan. Witness their insistence on institution of the sharia law, suppression of their women and restricting Christian practices from their milieus. 

Creation of states: General Gowon had sensed that the sentiment of the Hausa or tribalism could be curtailed by creating more states of the type one has in the USA. A look at the map tells the reader that something was awry in their drawing of the states' boundaries. They followed tribal boundaries instead of being quadrangles as those of states and provinces in Canada, USA, and Australia where particular ethnic groups were not confined in particular states. In this case the Ibibio, Tivs, Yuroba, Igbos, Hausas, Ijaw and so on were still grouped together instead of drawing convenient lines. They are not looking at country that does not think of tribes first and foremost in the time to come.  Gowon's creation meant that the old tribalism was still enforced. The exercise created more civil servants, governors that rule in the Soviet style replication of services no doubt empty the federal budget and everyone cries as to where the oil revenues were going to. That was not well thought of. The fact that Benue State had to cross R. Benue to the northern banks tells us that the planners wanted the ethnic group here to be lumped together. They did not take cost of governing into consideration.

Political map of Nigeria after Wilkipedia 2014

We saw that General Gowon left office after another military coup d’etat by Mutalla Muhammed when he was attending the Organization of African Union (OAU) submit at Addis Ababa he created twelve states. Tribalism did not stop. More and more states had since been created and at the time of writing (Thursday, May-15-14) there are 36 states and more yet to be created. Their creation has not helped in neighbors trying to know one another or travelling to other parts of the country as would be done in developed nations. It had meant more glorified posts created where the government spend and gets no positive returns. 36 states created call for a similar number of capitals, governors and you can see once more where the talk-about oil revenues are buried.  

The creation of states did not do away with the old boundaries separating the North and Southern Nigeria. This is marked by religion and tribal groups. As such tension ever seethed between the North and South. Endeavors were made by those who really wanted to forge unity as President Murtala Mohammed by a promulgation moving the capital from Lagos to Abuja (1976) in Northern Nigeria. It is centrally located as Brasilia in Brazil and Yamoussoukuro in Ivory Coast.  It was anticipated that this move would pacify the Northerners who constantly want to get away and from their own independent state with Islamic underpinnings. Separation of the North from the South could have been possible had oil not been discovered in vast quantities in the South where the bulk of the stakeholders are Northerners. The Southerners have been yielding. Apart from the capital having been transferred to the North and Northerners ruling, by virtue of their population, it will be pointed out that although oil is extracted in the south most of the oil refineries are located in Kaduna, a town in the northern Hausa heart. A good number of military defense projects, researches are located in the north.  Now when the Northerners talk of independence from the South, the question posed is how they would run their affairs without oil. That had been echoed since 1964 and there was a time when the Northerners believed that they could use the then British Cameroons to have access to the Atlantic Ocean through the port city of Victoria. It could have materialized had Nigerian oil not been discovered. If they left, they would have not had the benefit of the old, therefore they stayed. They have stayed as is ever the stormy relation of British Cameroons aka UNO Cameroon with Cameroon Republic. The point is oil that fuels the Cameroon Republic's economy comes from the former British Cameroons hence Cameroon Republic is only waiting to leave when the old wells are all drained out in spite of perpetual complains by elements of British Cameroons that they are being cheated because of their shaky union with Cameroon Republic since 1961.

Economic Growth: Will the Northern Nigeria leave the Southern Nigeria when the oil in the south has depleted? It is true that they can survive on peanuts, cotton production and dairy farming. The fact that the majority are still catching up with education unlike the Southerners owning to the old fashioned attitude of their men dreading Westernization, “turanchi,” means that there is no qualified manpower to handle industries. In the 1970s the French Peugeot Company established an assembly line at Kaduna. There is potential for economic growth in Nigeria with a population of circa.175 million inhabitants. The economy is grown at a fantastic rate, perhaps one of the fastest growing economies in Africa and is soon to overtake South Africa that used to be leading in Africa. The oil revenue if well channeled and invested could make Nigeria a developed economy by 2037. This is all being equal. If there are no terrorists treats and sabotage by religious fundamentalists as the Boko Haram, Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta (MEND) of the littoral fighting for the control of oil, sea pirating that are doing the copycatting from Somalia, Egypt, Yemen, Pakistan, Algeria, Libya, and  Algeria.

Lord Lugard disdained the union of Southern and Northern Nigeria: Lord Frederick Lugard in 1914 foresaw the differences of the ethnic groups and vehemently objected the fact that Northern Nigeria that was ruled as a separate entity from Southern Nigeria should be amalgamated for cultural and religious reasons was earlier saw.  The main economy of the northerners was the export of cotton and peanuts. There were light manufacturing industries and they had a hug market in the country. If the North were to get out of the Federation, it would have meant curtailment of their market. True they were surrounded by glorified French states but their population combined was not up to the population of even Western Nigeria. Again, a nation was never pivoted on religion alone. We are not going to enter Israeli that often put Judaism forward and leading to the nervousness of Arab-Israelis and other nationals who are not stricto senso Jews but are Israelis. (Let me spell it out here, the name Israeli is Arabic and not even Judaic or Aramaic.)[Read Disreali by Robert Blake (1966), New York.

We are not against Hausaland (Hausastan)-Haramites- being Arabic or following stoically Islam. However, where it is to the detriment of the unity of their country Nigeria and world peace, one wonders therefore if there is brotherly love in Islamism as in Christianity and other religions in that country? Nigeria can borrow a leaf from multiracial or multi-tribal countries like Switzerland and Belgium in the heart of Europe. There, the French and Germans are giants but they dare not say or do things that would exclude the Italian-Swiss and other newly-arrived immigrants who are in a minority. All are equal and have a say in the running of their countries be they of whatever religious denomination or ethnic origin. That is consideration and democracy.  Christians want to live peacefully next door to Islamic Arabs or Hausas as many of them are in Kano, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Abuja, Zaria and Sokoto to make their contribution in the running of their states and catering to their families.

Westerners open their doors to Islamic communities to come settle and worship in Christian countries. Britain is essentially a Christian country and the leader of their faith, the Anglican Church is Her Majesty Queen  Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. Methinks Christians have been so tolerant in the West than Muslim believers. They have even sold them land to build their mosques and minarets. It is not because Westerns are dumpy or put money before God as some are likely to think.  Islamic believers live amicably in all Western capitals and have even bought abandoned Christian churches to convert as Mosques in Germany. When Constantinople in Turkey fell from the rule of the Christians, the Muslims converted their churches to Mosques and changed its name to Istanbul. I do not see anywhere in Christian or non-Christian countries where Islamic believers are denied land and places of worship. Their mosques have never been bombed by Christians to the best of my knowledge in the modern era, yet Christians in Northern Nigeria, Lebanon, Malaysia, and Pakistan fear congregating in their churches to worship for fear of being killed by rattle-headed impostors, Boko Haram, Taliban and Al Qaeda. There is no Christian church in Mecca. The Saudis refuse to give or sell land for Christian churches to be built. Now the crucial question is who are more religious in this world, the Christians or the Muslims? Who were the bombers of the Twin Towers in New York (11 September 2001)? Who were those responsible for the bombing of marathon runners in Boston (15 April 2013)? Do the Muslims sincerely believe that Westerners or Christians are too weak to fight back when they bomb them and destroy their properties? No. They turn their left jaws to be beaten and if Muslims have heads they should stop the senseless killing of Christians. If Christians took up arms to revenge, which is an un-Christian thing to do, no one would be safe and Nigeria could be another hell on earth or another Lebanon in the making.

Let me reiterate that Southerners were the first to have western sort of education. The Hausas of the North had Islamic education and all head to Mecca to see were the founder of their faith was buried of where he once worship. That is fine and good for the tourism of the Middle East. They return from their pilgrimage to Mecca and Jidda with Hadji, Aladji and so on attached to their Arabic names. The prefixes before their names have not been helpful as they are more stupefied as demonstrated by Boko Haram, Taliban and Al Qaeda. Boko Haram enslaving and traumatizing both Christians and Islamic girls and looking at them in the old fashion way as sex objects is preposterous and unacceptable by any civilized society in the 21^st century.

Causes of discrepancies in Education: It should be underlined that to educate women is to educate the world. How would Nigeria in toto be educated when the backbone of Nigerian education is destroyed by mindless group of disgruntled men? They view Southerners as pagans and that is not true. The irony is that Western education and Western products as guns, bullets, communication devices and armored vehicles Boko Haram use are from Westerners. How do you eat the meat and disdain the bones? Also some Boko Haram elements have been trained in the West, Europe and America and some in Western institutions of learning in Nigeria and Egypt.  Northerners are either not in control or they ignore what these bunches of men are doing to their society to their detriment.


When it comes to marrying, educated northern men of worth prefer southern girls or women because of their Western education. This was what used to happen in Saudi Arabia. The men there restricted their girls from attending Western Education and when it came to marrying, they did all they could to marry Western educated Egyptian girls. Many of them head now to Bahrain and other fast westernized Arab states. 

With this attitude, although the North has a relatively higher population than the Christian Southern Nigeria, the proportion of educated persons is far low vis-à-vis southerners and that is the cardinal cause of this contention of the Boko Haram. With their sale-inflicted  inferiority, they dread to be addressed the right way by educated girls. That makes them so nervous and they believe that if allowed to continue men who are superior in the society and are supposed to be adored by women as inscribed in the Koran would soon kowtow to the women. In the Islamic world the man may have sex with his bevy of concubines at any time he wanted. If she refused she is inflicted capital punishment. Dare she voice this out to the public; she could be stoned to death after prayers on Friday. To Westerners and liberated women in the West some of whom decide to be what they want, clad or go about in their birthday suit in the public as their liberty, scare Islamic fundamentalists.

Imprisoned school girls shrouded in Bokahs by the terrorist group in Nigeria, Boko Haram (12/05/14) at a location supposed to be in Borno State, former British Northern Cameroons (UNO Cameroon). The abducted Nigerian School Girls used by Boko Haram for their propaganda.



Some of the faces of the girls abducted by Boko Haram. [After mrs_journalist@yahoo.com posted on 20/06/2014 and www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2664044...). Still missing.

The seed of erudite had to be planted in the home and nurtured in school and colleges: If the women are educated, by virtue of their freedom, their children are educated and the entire world follows. They may argue that they are educated in the Arabic sense when their parents were not or are not educated. The point is that they are dilettantes. When one accesses northerners and most southerners, one sees the true fighting intellectual spirit of the two communities emerging. In the past, the Northerner was generally weaker as we tend to have First Nation Peoples in Northern America, Latinos and African Americans. [This is a generalization that can be substantiated statistically] It is not that they cannot study and outdistance Caucasian children or other ethnic groups supposed to be leading in academics. Give all the true feeds and opportunities and opportune conditions and all will move forward with amazing intellectual vivacity. The seed of erudite had to be planted in the home and nurtured in school and colleges. If there is not fertile ground for nourishment where this could be implanted, there is no blossom in due course of time. The consequences are the sort of actions we see in disgruntled Boko Haram copycatting Al Qaeda, Isis and others.


You are now seeing the point of Boko Haram that Western education should be boycotted and people revert to traditional values, they mean another alien philosophy, Islam in the African world. Should we sympathize with them? If one sympathizes with them one got to understand that there is no longer any traditional man in the world or in Africa. Pockets of them that we see are those that are found in the Ituri Forest, the Baka of the rain forest in southern Cameroon, and First Nation People of the Amazon in Brazil.  A certain priest pioneer priest from Germany who came to German Cameroons in the 1910s remarked with remorse that they the Whites had come to change the African free and simple ways of life with the sophisticated ones of Europeans in the belief that it was superior and would make Africans better off. He observed that African was not worried about pipe borne water, clothes, banking, sophisticated governance and a thousand and one things that made Europeans live under pressure daily. He had no taxation, and was happy with the few possessions. Yet aliens, Europeans came in to enforce their ways of life on them and caused untold hardship. If Boko Haram was thinking as this young priest one would sympathize with them. Contrarily, they  are thinking with a rider in that they want to impose Arabic customs at the expense of Western civilization already ingrained in the African psyche and not necessarily Africanisms the young priests was concerned with that Europeans had come to wipe out. Should Africans throw away all imposed or adopted foreign civilizations and revert to what they used to be prior to the coming of the Arabs and European imperialists because of senseless reaction from elements like Boko Haram? 

The economic bandwagon of Nigeria cannot progress without Northern Nigeria on board: The crucial point is that Northern Nigeria is got almost half of Nigerian population on its side. Therefore Nigeria cannot move forward when the north is going backward. They will drag the rest the country backward. Remember that the West could not move forward with Africans being left behind. Sooner or later they will be dragging them back. It therefore makes sense to carry them along. So they abolished slavery, colonialism and are coming in with globalization. They are still not through as thousands have been drowning crossing the Mediterranean Sea year in year out to have a modicum of Western ways, ironically with with Muslim Africans.

The plain truth is that Northern Nigerians are moving backwards because of unemployment of the youths and Boko Haram activities are fanned by it. They are unemployed because they are not educated in the Western ways, yet they stand on shoddy philosophy to disdain Western education. Even when educated they are not following the right path and their perpetual bickering scares away would-be investors. Where they come to invest they do so grudgingly. It is true that Middle Easterners and Chinese have been filling the vacuum. Then do beggars have to make choice of whom they beg from when they are really famished? China is looking at Africa as their next darling, the continent of the future. Of course, Africa should and it is beneficial for a giant in African like Nigeria to take the advantage. There is no serious company in developed countries that would not look into Nigeria, South Africa, and Democratic Republic of the Congo before looking at other countries of Africa for investments. It is because there are huge potentials in the future Africa.


If China comes to establish a network of railways that it plans would surpass the Cairo to Cape Town that Sir Cecil Rhodes and many in the colonial days envisaged, by linking all the capital cities of African countries irrespective of their sizes and geographical locations that would be a huge investment. No matter how grand China is now, as one of the fastest growing economies in the 21^st century, they would need to have qualified labor supply. Even after the laying of the railways the Europeans had dreamed of, they would still need the maintenance of the network. Africans would need to come in here as engineers or operators. Would Northern Nigerians following Boko Haram have a place with this attitude? We do not think so. The answer is to be educated in the Western ways but still keep their faith. Read my lips, we are not against Islam but we are against its fanatics who are on our ways and put us in harm's way.


We earlier saw that when the Japanese welcomed Western technology they did not change from being Japanese and they have all the respect of the Westerners and you Africans if you are level-headed. We have adumbrated that the lack of Western education to compete with the fewer available jobs lead to this violent manifestation that is uncalled-for. We also saw that if educated the standards are still mediocre as compared to most of the Southerners. This is a statement many may like to contest but the facts are crystal clear.  The solution therefore is simple. Allow the government to improve upon the schools and colleges. Teach both sexes and make the Internet available in all homes. Liberate the woman and you liberate yourself. Teach all and sundry of the North.  A time could come when Northerners could dominate not only Nigeria but all of Africa and why not they would send their educational tentacles to the rest of the world. Remember that the Hausa had had the tendency to move out and colonize or settle and trade as they are found throughout Western Africa. Imagine that they are all educated and move out as Europeans to other parts of Africa it would be beneficial. Additionally, in the 1960s Japanese goods were mediocre and like the One or Two Dollar Store products or what the Chinese dump now in Africa. Today, Japanese good rank among the best in the world, from automobiles to electronic goods.

When I visited the UN offices in Geneva in as a volunteer 2007 I observed that lots of top positions were held by Nigerians of Igbo and Yoruba extractions. Where were the Yoruba, Hausas and Fulani?  They being there was not because they were sinecures. It was through merits. Similarly, a country like Ghana had Muslims and their education is thorough and the envy of many in Africa. It all started in the days of President Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to President Jerry Rawlings and the present head of states where education was considered as the pivot of all development in the society. Give the people that basic education and all good things will follow, health, industrial developments and so on.

When people are poor and hungry often times religious beliefs and where they get genuine education are irrelevant.  Should they be scapegoats? I do not see any religion that restricts the amassing of wealth for the mutual benefit of the society. The Muslims believe in tithes, this is annual or even a daily offering to the needy in their societies. There are professional beggars in Northern Nigeria not of their making. Some have been crippled by polio, river blindness, malaria and many more diseases not of their making except for polio where some naïve members of their communities restrict their children from being vaccinated as CIA ways of curtailing their population. There is no underpinning. However where poverty is not of their  making we have to help not only once but always till they die should we have the means. Then if we educate them properly, they could take care of themselves and even avoid some of the diseases that plague the society out of ignorance and lack of basic hygiene and education. You will realize that there was a time this very Boko Haram was against the vaccination of children in Northern Nigeria to stamp our polio as the Taliban in Pakistan.


Their actions and those of Al Qaeda and others camouflaging in our midst bring Islam a very bad name. Only a buffoon will endanger the lives of his children by restricting them from having vaccination as a Western concocted plan to reduce the population Nigeria. Only one would restrict children from being educated. They make Africans laughing stocks in the eyes of the rest of the continents that are advancing economically and technologically faster and Africa is regressing. The preposterous idea of halting vaccination had also popped up in Cameroon and some back ward areas in Western Africa. Imagine a world where vaccination of air borne diseases is not allowed because of ignorance for religious sentiments. Boko Haram should look at a Sister Muslim state like Malaysia with the highest Muslim population in the world. Education there is thorough and Internet in all household is mandatory. The girls there attend schools and head adroit to universities. That is what would make Westerners envious of their Spartan development. They have subways, and could be classed as developed in certain ways except for the handling of their Flight 370 that vanished in thin air 70 days ago. In that most populous Islamic country in the world and we do not see all the brouhaha that is plagued Northern Nigeria. Could Nigerian of Boko Haram extraction get a leaf from their book of Islam and fundamental development? They have Christians in their midst and that is no wedge to their Islamism.

Africans were innately not destructive peoples and they have been blessed because of that their pacifism. If Africans are engaged in internecine wars as the case with Rwanda, Nigeria of the 1960s, Congo Democratic Republic, Southern Sudan and Central African Republic they are copy catting. When you look at the African inter-tribal wars of the past they were skirmishes and not the mass killing that Napoleon Bonaparte would face in Italy, Portugal and Spain and the Battle of Waterloo. During one of the battles in 12,000 casualties were counted in Quatre Bas with Wellington and Marshall Ney of the French troops in the field in 1815. Those casualties were minimal compared to what happened at Basra when the Americans entered Iraq to teach Sadam Hussein his deserved lesson.

It does not pay engaging in destructive wars and holding innocent girls captives since April 14 2014 to make your point. In the modern set up there is room for debate as often happens on the Internet. Then with the ignoramuses demonstrated, the impression is that the Boko Haram are uneducated and would not turn on the Internet to even send and receive messages. We have seen them making crude but sophisticated bombs in the unsettled land that used to be Northern British Cameroons, presently parts of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States where Boko Haram has bases. They are able to operate sophisticated modern weaponry some of which have come all the way from Libya via the porous Niger, Chad and Cameroon with the tacit support of disgruntled retired Northern civil servants. Light arms are easily imported into Nigeria from China and elsewhere. Should having them meant that they should be used on the innocent or on any body as is now a daily occurrence in Nigeria.  Unconfirmed sources state that they are on the pay rule of some of these northern grandees and that is sad. At least some of them are able to read and get the technology of ordinance from the Internet or manuals that come with the guns. The question is posed as to where they get the knowledge of arms. Field instruments as walkie-talkies, the cell phones, night visions equipment to the armored vehicles they have, the camouflaged clothing, and bullets are easily obtained in Nigeria. Light weaponry and bullets imported from China are easily bought and sold on the street unlike in North America where background checks are often conducted before such transactions. All these can be checked of there are road blocks and checks as in Cameroon and Benin Republic next door.  Boko Haram should know that without scientific research, education they are denying their children most of what they use for their wars cannot simply be conjured. Therefore to stand on quick sand and start abusing outcrops of granite is immaterial.

They lack managerial skills: The people who will lost are the stoics are those in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemenis, Afghans,Sudanese who still want to revert to the days of darkness and live in caves when the world is already on the verge of leaving the electronic age. The world belongs to all irrespective of their religious beliefs but if for whatever reason, they set out to destroy others as Boko Haram followers are doing. It cannot be accepted. Do you know that Africans cannot be allowed to revert to the Dark Continent that is one that is whose knowledge of its people and its interior is not known? That is why the smart Chinese are also augural and see Africa as the continent of the future. It still has ample land and minerals. Mineral resources are still untapped and what the need are the managerial skills. Do you know that if the River Niger and Benue are rightly channeled they could provide free hydroelectricity to all Nigerians and all its neighbors and the constant shortage of electricity would be things of yesteryear? The Kainji, Shiroro and Jebba and those in Tabara used to be helpful but they are not good enough. Do you also know that if the River Congo if tapped, it could pump not only fresh water that could turn the entire Sahara into a modern Garden of Eden and supply all Africans with electricity and excess would still be exported to Europe, and a good part of SE Asia? Instead of studying what has made the White man, your cousin more intelligent you are instead dissociating yourself from him and that is sad. You attitude brings back Africa a hundred years backwards instead of the phenomenal leap forward of African economy. They cannot watch you destroy it for spurious religious reasons.

Nigerian troops returning from Gwoza after chasing Boko Haram out. 27/03/2015. Internecine wars is one way Africans under-develop themselves. 

Know that the people you destroy who have done nothing wrong to you are innocent. You could be like Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, Gadhafi of Libya, and other dictators we earlier referred to and claim that all you are doing are in the name of Allah as you do. You could want to immolate the Lord Resistance Army in Uganda, you could want to give birth to Asama Bin Laden in Nigeria, you could want to get Al Qaeda and Taliban worshiped but all they and you are doing are destroying Islam slowly but surely. Only a devil would allow his name to be used to inflict punishment on others and not your prophet Mohammed. When you stand before the global television and claim that you are killing innocent in the name of Allah, know that it is your Allah/God and not the one that authorized Mohammed to bring forth Islam. I am partly pleading with you to come to the drawing table as the Governor of Borno, Kashim Shattima is asking Jonathan to do with you and have parley without delay. You will save your face. Look at the anguish, the humanitarian hardship and other banned organization have caused.

End notes and France hosting of the summit on Boko Haram: Finally, extreme violence, lawlessness and intimidation are no solutions to you lack of knowledge, unemployment that you have made to plague Northern Nigeria. Look at Japan. Their government assisted them by giving those loans to graduates for tools and raw materials. With their humble beginning they created jobs and there were resounding multiplier effects. Others start manufacturing in their backyards and garages. How do you with your intimidation support them or you are looking at establishing a banana republic? They did not use violence and their standard of living is pretty high comparable with anything you will have in North America, Germany, Great Britain and the EEC in general. They have not only invested in Japan but in the hearts of known developed economies. They do not go about trumpeting their existence but it is their products that talk the loudest. It is a fact that eight out of every ten cars that pass along the streets Chibok, Kano, Abuja, Lagos, Enugu, Benin City, Ibadan, Port Harcourt and Kaduna and Jos are Japanese. Even the ones that the Boko Haram psychopaths ferried the girls there to their supposed hideout in Sambisa Forest Reserve were Japanese trucks. Last week the Japanese assembly line in Nigeria turned out its first fleet of Nissan Ex-Trail, sturdy trucks that are useful and could be exported to other parts of the world. Are they not following the footsteps of Peugeot, Vox Wagon, Mercedes Benz, etc.? The manufacture of goods highly demanded in Nigeria and neighboring countries is promising. There is nothing that Nigerians cannot manufacture given the tools and raw materials. Their yearn to be developed can be seen in the progress made by some individuals and some of your governors. When you look at the Heineken brewery in that country, it is perhaps the first computerized chain production and the largest in the world. Why did the Dutch choose but Nigeria? A population of circa 175 million that is ever tasty for beer and other beverages is perhaps the best location. These vital industries create jobs and fuel its coveted economy that that is the envy of many. Nigeria has the know-how to even build nuclear power stations to make up for the discrepancies in electricity supply in their fast growing cities. What of satellites in the orbit to ease their communication problems? But could one allow the Boko Haram to control a nuclear power station then one could allow the Iranians to do so for “peaceful purposes.” With excess energy you; Nigeria would pump drinking water to all cities and rural settlements. It is a shame that in the 21^st century some Nigerians have never drank treated water pipe borne water in their villages. You are not learning from me where children and even adults get all those water borne diseases although some of you swim in brackish lakes to be cured miraculously. Many still draw well water and water diseases still kill many. Boko Haram do not care as death of a person means nothing them but their selfish interests take priority. Of what good is a man who only lives and dies for himself? He has to ask why he was born in the first place.

Owing to what Boko Haram is doing, Nigerians of the areas of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe States and those areas where they do not even operate are dragged backwards. White tourists venturing to Waza Game Reserve in northern Cameroon Republic risk being abducted by Boko Haram for ransom. This is one way they have been generating their income. Some taxi drivers in neighboring Cameroon had for long been printing the phrase ‘Boko Haram’ in Arabic on their taxis and no one has questioned them to find out if they are operatives associated with this despicable group. The hawkish corrupt Cameroon gendarmes and police have no clue as must do not read Arabic scripts and all they want when manning road blocks is to collect bribe from taxi men who overload their vehicles. Perhaps their Rapid Interventions Brigade (BIR/RIB) trained by the Israeli Government now deployed in Extreme North Cameroon Republic could help with the assistant of the French intelligence on the ground. The truth is that some of them are still too young and inexperienced in spite being praised by some foreign armchair journalists. Some are returning home in coffins as in this picture where 39 were killed in February trying to flush them out of the Far North Region of Cameroon. Their match in by and by will be the Chadians or the combined forces with mercenaries from
Southern Africa.

Here lie some gallant Camerounian troops (Feb. 2015)gunned down in the morning of their lives by Boko Haram and none there to do them reverence. 

The French summit of West African head of states in Paris on Boko Haram could end up being wildcatting as it might already be a regional thing not confined to Nigeria. Whatever, Boko Haram operatives are not in the position to pay for the psychological stress the adopted children will suffer till death. We cannot count of those that are killed senselessly. Many had dependents who will die fatherless and motherless without achieving their worldly goals God or your Allah had set them. You will see now how we are responsible for the 99% of what happens in our lives. Had you reasoned, demonstrated or decide to set up firms and ask for funds no one would have been thinking of you as evil persons. For the last 15 years that you have been operating, it is not only the Christians who feared you but you have Christians, modest Muslims and the law enforcement officers in your country. Your president would not visit Chibok for fear of your bombs. Nigeria is divided because of your activities.  Some gurus in your army sympathetic to your cause have divided loyalties. If the Israelis, Americans, and EEC members come to help you, you will turn round to put them at harm’s way as you have the mentality of the Afghan and Iraqi impostors who pretend to be with the West when they are still supporting murderous Al Qaeda. Does it surprise us that the Nigerian peace keeping troops did well in Liberia and Sierra Leone yet cannot face the ragtag army of Boko Haram at home?  Now, most Nigerians even of the North do not only hate but dread Boko Haram and there is no indefinite hideout for you. We are not sure that Boko Haram is fulfilling the tasks that God set for you on earth.  Now you can see how Africans under-develop themselves and levy the blame on past history.

Dr. Viban Ngo, PhD.

[While we recommend that you share this draft, we strongly advice that you acknowledge it if being cited in your write up or research].

Addendum:
And some theories concerning the disappearance of the Chibok school girls as cited by

Today at 9:54 AM

THE TRUTHS ABOUT CHIBOK GIRLS

No Chibok girl was kidnapped, Below are simple truths that surrounded the circumstances of the 'arrangee' chibok girls kidnap.

Truth 1 - Federal Government closed down schools in the chibok area because it was not safe to run schools there; The governor ask the school to reopen.

Truth 2 - WAEC refused to conduct exams because it was not safe for school to be on at that time. The governor gave a guarantee in a letter to WAEC that he has adequate security for the school. Why Guarantee only one school. What happened to other schools in the area. 

Truth 3 - Chibok school is a mixed boy & girls school. But on the stated day of kidnap, there was no boys on campus and no mention of boys at all. - So where were the boys?

Truth 4 - The Principal and other teachers live in the school compound, they had children who also attend classes in the same school; But on that day, all the teachers children, the principal and their children were not in the hostel and school compound - So where were they, why was none of them not kidnapped.

Truth 5 - The governor guaranteed WAEC that there will be adequate security for the school; But on that day, there was only 1 unarmed gate-man at the gate. - So where were the governors security team?

Truth 6 - We are made to understand that all the 200 girls were kidnapped. Is there any boarding school where children live a lone without a house master or principal or a house mistress.

Truth 7 - 200 girls would have about 400 parents or something close. Their daughters were kidnapped, and for days, none of the parents showed up or made any noise or issue about it; Can this ever happen in Nigeria.

Truth 8 - When eventually some people were 'arranged' to speak as parents to CNN, all of them at different times and at different interviews chorused then same teachable tone "....and the federal government did nothing" Even the body language of the governor of the state, whose primary responsibility is to secure the girls, was also singing the same chorus, and pointing accusing fingers at the Jonathan government.

Truth 9 - When the kidnap news broke out, the first Lady of the Federation invited the first Lady of the affected state to a joint meeting to find solutions to the missing girls. (Remember dere is God-o, dere is God-o) The governor's wife refuse to attend the meeting. Her reason was that ....'Patience wanted to humiliate her...'; Receiving humiliation and finding the kidnap girls, which one should have been more important to the first lady of the governor.

Truth 10 - Uptill now, no chibok girl has been found. If the girls have actually been kidnapped, at least one person would have been found out of 200. The story of someone jumping out of a moving vehicle or escaping from the boko haram camp to the LGA chairman's house are all deceits, because these never happened. 

Brethren, When you read above truths, and still believe the 'Chibok girls' story as honest and true, then you need to examine your belief system.

Chris Udoh M'Enin ESD

Chris Udoh udoh.chris@yahoo.com