by Mike Smith
Another short-lived attempt at negotiations would occur several months later in March 2012, this time with an Islamic cleric acting as mediator. When word leaked to journalists that talks were moving ahead, the mediator, Ibrahim Datti Ahmad, quit, issuing a statement questioning the government’s sincerity. Some had accused those within the government who were opposed to negotiations of leaking the story to sabotage the talks.
‘To our shock and dismay, no sooner had we started this dialogue, Nigerian newspapers came out with a lot of the details of the meeting held’, Ahmad said in his statement. ‘This development has embarrassed us very much and has created strong doubts in our minds about the sincerity of the government’s side in our discussion as the discussion is supposed to be very confidential to achieve any success. In view of this unfortunate and unhelpful development, we have no option but to withdraw from these early discussions. We sincerely regret that an opportunity to negotiate and terminate this cycle of violence is being missed.’
Asked why members of the security forces and government would want to sabotage a legitimate attempt at ending the insurgency, Sani, the organiser of Obasanjo’s visit, repeated what many others have also said. He named pride among members of the security forces who continue to believe the insurgency can be defeated militarily, but also a factor that comes into play far too often in Nigeria: money. The national security budget would rise to some $6 billion by 2013, or about 20 per cent of the country’s total spending, providing many opportunities for corruption. No one could ever prove whether anyone would go so far as to prefer violence over peace because of the financial benefits, but the way in which that perception spread was telling in itself of how little trust Nigerians placed in those who were supposed to be protecting them.
4
‘That Is How Complex the Situation Is’
The president, apparently attempting to comfort the nation, would end up doing something else entirely. It was January 2012, at the end of a Christmas season that had been so bloody it had led some to again question whether Nigeria was careening toward a second civil war. Boko Haram insurgents had changed tactics and targeted churches in an onslaught of bombings on Christmas Day. In the worst of the attacks, a suicide bomber drove up outside a Catholic church in Madalla, near the capital Abuja, as Christmas morning mass was ending and set off his explosives near the entrance. The force of the blast ripped through the crowd, a combination of churchgoers making their way outside, motorcycle taxi drivers and passersby, killing 44 people. Some who were badly injured ran to the priest for a final blessing. ‘It was really terrible’, Father Christopher Barde told my AFP colleague Ola Awoniyi. ‘People ran towards me, [saying] “Father anoint me.”’1
After at first issuing statements with the usual condemnations and promises to track down the masterminds, President Jonathan made two speeches on New Year’s Eve that would be his most forceful yet related to the insurgency. The first came as he visited the church in Madalla where the bomb attack had occurred. While there, he said Boko Haram ‘started as a harmless group [...] They have now grown cancerous. And Nigeria, being the body, they want to kill it. But nobody will allow them to do that.’2
On the heels of that visit, Jonathan would later in the day give a nationally televised address to announce he was declaring a state of emergency in areas hit particularly hard by the violence. ‘While the search for lasting solutions is ongoing, it has become imperative to take some decisive measures necessary to restore normalcy in the country especially within the affected communities’, he said.3 He provided few details on what exactly the declaration would mean on the ground, and as the days wore on, it seemed that little had actually changed. However, while the announcement may have been light on substance, it provided some relief in the country, since the government seemed to finally acknowledge the dangerous situation it was facing.
That relief would give way to more confusion only a few days later. On 8 January, Jonathan would give a speech that would have been extremely alarming had it not been so baffling. It occurred on Armed Forces Remembrance Day at the National Christian Centre, a cathedral-like structure in the capital Abuja, near the national mosque. It generated little interest beforehand, seeming to be one of the many functions and events a president shows up for, says a few words and departs. Jonathan seemed to speak off-the-cuff, ranging from the recent attacks on churches to corruption, but it was his comments about Boko Haram that were so startling. He suggested that the group had infiltrated the government and security forces, but in such vague terms no one knew what to make of it. ‘The situation we have in our hands is even worse than the civil war that we fought’, Jonathan said. The speech continued: During the civil war, we knew and we could even predict where the enemy was coming from. You can even know the route they are coming from; you can even know what calibre of weapon they will use and so on. But the challenge we have today is more complicated [...] Somebody said that the situation is bad, that even if one’s son is a member, one will not even know. That means that if the person will plant a bomb behind your house, you won’t know.
Some of them are in the executive arm of government, some of them are in the parliamentary-legislative arm of government, while some of them are even in the judiciary. Some are also in the armed forces, the police and other security agencies. Some continue to dip their hands and eat with you and you won’t even know the person who will point a gun at you or plant a bomb behind your house. That is how complex the situation is. 4
The comments were so stunning that when they were sent to me by a journalist who occasionally worked for us in Abuja, I immediately questioned whether they were accurate, even though I knew him to be a solid reporter. I called him to stress the importance of the story and the need to quote the president with absolute precision, telling him that the comments were surely going to cause a stir. He assured me that it would withstand the scrutiny and told me that he had a recording of the remarks which he had double-checked. Satisfied with his assurances, I began trying to write a story that would shed some light on what the president had said. I was not particularly successful. I was flummoxed, and so were my editors in Paris, who were asking me to interpret these remarks against some coherent context. Was he saying the insurgency was political? Did he mean it was a conspiracy by his enemies? Was he simply trying to make exaggerated excuses for why his government had been unable to stop the violence? What could possibly be made of such pronouncements? Above all, and perhaps most frustratingly, they posed a simple question: if Boko Haram members were in the security forces, judiciary and government and the president was aware of it, why had they not been arrested? That question would never be answered, and Jonathan would give no further explanation. Whatever he meant, an attack less than two weeks later would show that Jonathan was at least right to be concerned about the threat Boko Haram now posed.
It seemed clear from the start that the attack on 20 January was going to be like no other Boko Haram violence before it. It occurred in Kano, the largest city in northern Nigeria, an important commercial centre dating back to the Middle Ages and where Frederick Lugard’s men had begun their final conquest of the region for the British. The bomb blasts began to tear through the Friday afternoon bustle and simply kept exploding, one after another, so many that residents lost count. Gunfire rang out and residents in the city of about 3 million people rushed to take cover. Wellington Asiayei, the police officer shot and paralysed at his barracks whom I met in the hospital, was the victim of one of the cruellest individual assaults, the trigger pulled by a man dressed as one of his colleagues, but his story was one of many.
The assault may have been set in motion the month before, in December 2011, when a message purported to be from Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau was addressed to the Kano state government. It claimed that Boko Haram members had been arrested over the previous five months following allegations that they were armed robbers. ‘We are therefore compelled to write this letter to inform Kano residents of this develop
ment so that when we launch attacks in the city as we have been doing in Maiduguri, they should not blame us’, it said.
Kano Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso would later acknowledge having seen the ‘open letter’, but sought to distance himself from any arrests, saying that the state had no policing powers, with the police force a federal agency.5 The police commissioner in Kano state at the time, Ibrahim Idris, would say later that a number of people had been arrested ahead of the January attacks, but he declined to provide any further details, calling it ‘sensitive’.6 Kano up to that point had mostly escaped the kind of serious attacks that had so badly hit Maiduguri and other cities.
The first blast would occur at around five in the afternoon at a regional police administrative office, where a suicide bomber sought to crash into the building. His vehicle exploded outside, ripping off a chunk of the roof. A police corporal who was stationed at the building at the time tried to explain to me what had happened from his hospital bed before trailing off, unable to speak. Corporal Muazzam Aminu, a 37-year-old father of one, his wife seated next to him, spoke briefly in clipped phrases, saying he saw a motorcycle enter the compound first. There was shooting, then an explosion. He was unable to continue any further. According to police, three suicide bombers drove a car on to the grounds of that building, called a zonal headquarters, and detonated a bomb. As security forces arrived to assess the damage, it began to become clear that they were facing an assault far larger than that attack.
‘We rushed there, and based on the assessment we made we discovered that it was a sort of a suicide bomber that drove into that compound’, Idris, the police commissioner, told me and a group of other journalists at Kano police headquarters in the days after the attacks. ‘It was there then that we heard of another two attacks on two of our police stations.’
Even that was an underestimate. In fact, dozens, possibly hundreds, of attackers were swarming through the streets in an incredibly coordinated set of assaults. Many were on motorcycles, while others drove cars loaded with explosives. Their weapons included AK-47 rifles, drink cans transformed into tiny bombs, larger powdered-milk tins also designed to explode and powerful IEDs built with 350-kilogram drums. They would run amok, hitting an immigration office, a nearby police station where detainees were set free, a girls’ secondary school, Kano police headquarters and several others. Part of their strategy included throwing the drink-can bombs at the buildings they were targeting, then opening fire on those who ran away.
‘That’s what started the fire, and the whole place went up in flames’, Idris said of the drink-can bombs. ‘And as people are running helter-skelter, they now come – you know, these terrorists attack now with weapons, and they’re just killing’.
Some wore uniforms resembling those of police or military divisions, and they would approach officers and civilians on the streets and gun them down.
‘Some of our police officers who saw them on the streets, they thought they are their colleagues, and that’s how they now identified them to be police officers, and that’s how they shot – they just shot them in cold blood’, said Idris. ‘And it’s true, we have some of the incidents like that in some locations in the city where [...] they were wearing uniforms resembling that of the mobile police and the military. They used that to deceive the members of the public, and in the process shot some of these civilians and some of our police officers. In fact, like I said, most of the casualties of the police are not killed at the police stations, but they are killed on the street where they saw them.’
At state police headquarters, a bomber who sought to enter crashed into one of the drums used as a security measure outside the gate and his explosives went off, killing at least one policeman on guard and four civilians at shops along the road. Several of the market stalls that line the street outside the headquarters were reduced to piles of splinters. While the bomber was not able to make it past the gates, others penetrated inside and roamed freely, which is what led to Assistant Superintendent Asiayei being shot and paralysed as he sought to lock the door to his room in the barracks before fleeing.
One 29-year-old man who was shot in the leg while on his way home from his job at a tannery told me the four friends who were with him at the time were all killed. He said they had been driving near the Palm Centre police station, one of those targeted by the attackers, and after hearing a bomb explode, everyone began to run.
‘I’m the only one who survived’, Monday Joseph said from his hospital bed. ‘We heard a bomb, but what I felt in my body was a gun [...] Once I’m shot, I’m just down flat.’ He said a friend arrived about 30 minutes later and brought him to the hospital.
The morgue at the city’s largest hospital, Murtala Mohammed Specialist Hospital, filled with bodies piled on top of one another. My colleague Aminu Abubakar was allowed inside and counted at least 80 before stopping.7 At the smaller Aminu Kano Teaching Hospital, the morgue would also fill to capacity. Dr Aminu Zakari Mohammed, chief medical director at Aminu Kano, told me that he went to notify the emergency room when he heard about the first attack.
‘Even before I finished, already I heard another explosion [...] then a second and a third one’, Mohammed said. ‘I felt this was something out of the ordinary. I kept hearing the explosions.’ He and his staff worked until 2 a.m. to treat the victims being brought in. He said one family arrived later in the night after their house collapsed from the force of the blasts.
There were at least five suicide bombers, according to police. The authorities put the death toll at 185, but many people suspected it was higher. Bodies were scattered on roads the next morning, particularly near state police headquarters. Police said they discovered 10 cars with unexploded IEDs along with about 300 drink cans, eight powdered milk tins and eight 350-kilogram drums – all loaded with explosives. Some of my colleagues and I were allowed to see what the police had seized and taken back to headquarters, and the cans and various bomb-making materials were spread out across the floor of a storage room. There was even at least one meant to be a time bomb wired to a conventional wall clock, the kind you might see in a kitchen.
A mobile-phone seller near the immigration office that was attacked, 35-year-old Abdulrazak Murtala, told me, ‘we just heard a bomb blast and people started running. Some people are just shooting, shooting guns [...] Some are on bikes, some are inside cars.’ He was unsure what to make of the people who carried out the attack. ‘We don’t even know what they want’, he said. ‘I don’t think these people are fighting for religion. I just think they are fighting for their own selfish interest.’
Abubakar Shekau would deliver a message posted on YouTube a week later, claiming responsibility for the violence and threatening further attacks. He said security forces were to blame, alleging Boko Haram members had been arrested and tortured, while women and children had also been detained. Perhaps sensing that the group had taken the violence too far, he also falsely claimed that civilians had not been targeted.
‘We attacked the security formations because our members were arrested and tortured’, Shekau said in the audio message played over a picture of him.
Our women and children have also been arrested [...] They should know that they also have wives and children. We can also abduct them. It is not beyond our powers [...] Soldiers raided an Islamic seminary in Maiduguri and desecrated the Qur’an. They should bear in mind that they also have primary and secondary schools and universities, and we can also attack them [...] After we finished our war, policemen stuck around and started killing civilians and later blamed us. We are not fighting civilians, but security forces. We only kill soldiers, policemen and their collaborators. 8
The message was posted as the situation spiralled even further out of control. Another police station in Kano was attacked a few days after the 20 January wave of violence, while a couple of days after that, gunmen kidnapped a German engineer working for a construction firm on the outskirts of the city. The kidnapping signalled that earlier abductions
of a Briton and an Italian from Kebbi in north-western Nigeria were not isolated incidents, with yet another new and different phase of the insurgency ahead. In the case of the German, Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb would at one point claim to be holding him and demand the release of the wife of an Islamist leader in exchange for his freedom, signalling murky links between AQIM and kidnappers in northern Nigeria. He would eventually be killed by his abductors during a raid to free him in Kano.9 There were also more bombings over the following months, including a suicide attack on the Abuja office of one of Nigeria’s most prominent newspapers in April 2012.
* * *
Blood covered the floor of the bathroom in the unguarded and now empty house, its walls pocked with bullet holes, children from the neighbourhood entering and exiting at will. Crowds were still gathering outside on the morning of 9 March 2012, intrigued by what had happened the previous day in the quiet residential neighbourhood of unpaved roads and modest houses in the city of Sokoto, the home of Nigeria’s highest-ranking Muslim spiritual leader and the former capital of Usman Dan Fodio’s caliphate. They spoke of a chaotic raid that sparked a shoot-out, with the men inside refusing to surrender and around 100 Nigerian soldiers, who had been supported by British special forces, surrounding the house. The soldiers were pursuing them because they had been holding two Western hostages, Franco Lamolinara, a 48-year-old Italian, and Chris McManus, who was British and 28. The two men were kidnapped almost a year earlier, in May 2011, while working on a construction project in Kebbi state in north-western Nigeria, near the border with Niger. At one point during the intense gun battle at the house in Sokoto, according to some of the residents, Nigerian soldiers asked people in the neighbourhood to bring them old tyres. When they did, the soldiers set them alight and tossed them over the wall of the complex, a single-storey series of structures with a zinc roof and a courtyard. They wanted to smoke the kidnappers out.10