by Mike Smith
Later that day as I reflected on what I had seen, I began to think that I needed to return. I had admittedly not moved off the sidewalk into the dirt to get a closer look at the bodies. From where I stood, I could not tell what types of wounds had been inflicted on them. I had been reluctant for a combination of reasons, including the smell, the fear of being kicked off the property or even arrested, not to mention the disturbing thought of walking between scattered corpses and studying them up close. I had not been able to speak with morgue attendants, either, since no one was there. As awful as it may be, I had to at least attempt to find out how these people died.
The next morning, a Saturday, our first stop was back at the hospital. My Nigerian colleague who was helping out as my guide and translator during my stay in Maiduguri parked his car out front and said he would wait there, unwilling to participate in the gruesome task ahead. I understood, of course, and began walking straight back toward the morgue, not wanting to waste any time and hoping not to be stopped. As the morgue came within view, I could make out some of the bodies, still lying on the ground, and I pushed on reluctantly towards them. I would not, however, get much further. A yell – ‘hey!’ – punctured the air and I knew it was for me. At first I tried to ignore it and keep walking, but I heard it again a couple seconds later and decided I should turn and see who it was. As I spun around, I saw a guard holding his rifle – a soldier not in full uniform, I believe – angrily yelling at me to stop as he moved toward me. I now had no choice.
I had learned through experience in such situations that it is best to seek to defuse the tension rather than appear confrontational, and I tried to do just that. When the guard, a young man who actually appeared more nervous than angry when we met face to face, asked me where I was going, I told him in a conciliatory voice that I was a journalist and wanted to speak with the morgue workers. When he asked why, I said that I was hoping to get information about what happened in Benisheik. The explanation was reasonably truthful, as I had been told that the bodies were from there and I did want to speak with morgue workers, though I was of course also wondering if some of the dead had been killed by the military. He relaxed almost instantly, possibly because it was the insurgents who were accused of horrific acts in Benisheik and not the military, then told me calmly that the morgue attendants were not there today. As we spoke, however, a middle-aged man in civilian clothes approached with a stern look, unhappy about my presence. He too asked me what I was doing, then told me I had to leave. He said I was not allowed to simply show up at the hospital and wander around. ‘Can you do that in your own country?’, he asked. He said that if I wanted any information, I had to speak with the state commissioner of health. I asked whether there was anyone at the hospital I could speak with, and he said no. Out of options, I turned and walked back to the car.9
The sight of the corpses symbolised so much of the Boko Haram conflict for me – bodies brutally dumped, nameless people dead for unclear reasons, the lack of even a working morgue to store them in. It was not only the sight of the bodies themselves that was so troubling, but also the grim combination of circumstances that led to them being there and the question of whether such a spiral of killing and neglect could ever be brought to an end.
Yet at the same time, it was certainly true that Maiduguri itself had changed. With the sharp decrease in attacks inside the city after the deployment of additional soldiers and the formation of vigilante groups, life had begun to regain some semblance of normality. Markets that had been burnt down – either by soldiers or insurgents – were being rebuilt and reopened. The roads were busy, and the curfew had been relaxed.
It was tempting to see all of this as a ray of hope, and to a certain degree it was, but there was also the feeling that it was a mirage. There were regular instances of mayhem not far outside the city gates, while in Maiduguri, reminders of the conflict were everywhere. Rubble remained amid the overgrown weeds at the site of Mohammed Yusuf’s former mosque, destroyed by the military more than four years earlier. Burnt cars and buildings could still be seen in neighbourhoods badly hit by insurgent attacks and the military’s heavy-handed raids.
There were also members of the ‘Civilian JTF’, the vigilantes who gathered along the roadsides near military posts or who set up checkpoints, sometimes wearing masks. One young man who positioned himself in the middle of a busy street as two-way traffic meandered past him wore a gold-coloured carnival-type mask covering the area around the eyes. They were dressed in street clothes – mainly jeans and T-shirts. Some looked especially young, but vigilantes themselves insisted they recruited no one under 18. I cannot say I was convinced. They could be rowdy and menacing at times, peering into cars as they passed while holding pipes or bows and arrows fashioned from scrap wood and metal. At one point around the middle of the day during my stay in October 2013, a group gave chase on to the grounds of a courthouse in pursuit of someone they wanted to arrest as a crowd gathered around them. The commotion eventually subsided, the man apparently being taken to the military.
One group of around 20 vigilantes waited near a military post, saying they were to be taken for a raid into ‘the bush’ around the town of Damboa because they had been told that Boko Haram members were hiding out there, causing trouble for the farmers. When a convoy of cars pulled up later, apparently returning from such a raid, the crowd that had been waiting began to cheer them and ran toward the vehicles. Some followed them on foot as they pulled into the security post guarded out front by soldiers. One man told me that sometimes they kill their suspects if they have to, at other times they capture them. It was easy to see how the vigilantes’ raids could end up turning community against community, unleashing a new demon in a region with too many. The same pattern continued in the months after my visit to Maiduguri. There was another school massacre, and an attack on the infamous Giwa military barracks led to allegations of vigilantes helping round up hundreds of escaped detainees who were then executed by the military.10
One young man I met in October 2013, a raggedly dressed 21-year-old named Umar Mustapha, described himself as chairman of one ‘sector’ of the Civilian JTF. He held a sword that was about waist-high in length and showed me small leather amulets he said were given to him by the chief imam of Borno state. The amulets had supernatural powers and would protect him from injury, he insisted. They would stop weapons from firing. ‘Any AK-47 or any gun, you will not use it’, he said. ‘They want to shoot us and the gun refuses to work.’
6
‘Our Girls Were Kidnapped and They Did Not Do Anything’
The man dressed in a pearly white outfit wanted to speak with me. I knew this because one of his hangers-on insistently sought to direct me toward him, as if I were being summoned. His card, with a green and white background, Nigeria’s national colours, provided his name as ‘Hon. Amb. Jude Tabai’. The abbreviations stood for honourable ambassador, a title he said had been granted to him by the first lady.1 Underneath his name was written ‘director’ and ‘strategic team’, while in the top left corner of the card was a picture of President Goodluck Jonathan’s face.
‘So you’re working for the president, his team?’, I asked him.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah’, he said.
‘So what do you do for them, for him?’
‘Well, that’s undercover actually. So more like security […]’.
We had met nearby just a few minutes earlier, across from Nigeria’s Unity Fountain in the capital Abuja, where a counter-protest was gathering for a second day. The counter-protest had drawn heavy criticism because it appeared to have been a paid-for crowd designed to disrupt another peaceful demonstration being held in the same location. The original protests had been occurring daily for nearly a month, demanding that the government and military take action over an issue that had suddenly brought Nigeria into the world spotlight: the abduction of nearly 300 girls from their school in the north-eastern town of Chibok. The original protests were not large – dozens of peop
le – but it seemed that the government, or at least supporters of the government, were rattled by them. The campaign under the banner of Bring Back Our Girls had by then gained traction globally, helped along by social media. Moral support had come from a long list of famous names, including Michelle Obama, the American first lady, who tweeted a sad-faced picture of herself while holding a sign with the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag.
When I first met Tabai earlier, he had been seated among organisers of the counter-protest, the one in support of the government. We were now standing in the afternoon heat next to a car parked in the grass, a handful of young men next to us. He told me that he was not an organiser of the counter-protest and had simply been passing by, saw the crowd and decided to stop. ‘If I am involved, I will tell you’, he said, ‘I am not in that business.’ At one point while we were speaking, one of the young men said something to someone else, and Tabai turned on him, telling him sharply, ‘my friend, keep your mouth shut’. The young man listened, a shamed look on his face. Besides claiming to hold some unspecified ‘security’ role for the president, Tabai, who looked to be in his fifties, also explained to me that he held the title of king of the youths in the Niger Delta, President Jonathan’s home region.2 There were many people like him in Nigeria who laid claim to such titles. The local media had also at times referred to him in that way, though his true influence would remain a mystery to me. He had also worked as an adviser in Bayelsa, President Jonathan’s home state.
‘But this protest, it seems sponsored, to be honest’, I said, referring to the counter-demonstrators.
‘That’s what you think?’ he asked me.
‘It looks that way, yes.’
‘OK, if you say “seems sponsored”, I don’t know from what angle, because these protests have been going on for like two, three weeks now’, Tabai said, apparently hoping that I would not know the difference between the two separate demonstrations. He spoke clearly and articulately.
‘Well, it’s been the other people who’ve been protesting’, I said.
He had taken his chance and failed, but he was undaunted. He changed tack and moved on to other arguments. It would turn out to be a lengthy conversation, filled with the kind of conspiracy theories one hears often in Nigeria. The gist of Tabai’s argument was that the Boko Haram insurgency was political, backed by Jonathan’s enemies and geared toward 2015 elections. But he did not stop there.
‘As I speak to you, those girls have been released’, he declared about midway through our conversation, referring to the students kidnapped in Chibok.
‘You think they’ve been released?’
‘Yes.’
‘By who?’
‘Their collaborators and co-sponsors have released those girls. Ask me why.’
* * *
Stories have varied and a precise account of what happened will probably never be unravelled, but there are common threads that run through the descriptions provided by parents, school officials and girls who escaped. They have described an attack that began like many others before it. At close to midnight, deep in the savannah scrubland of north-eastern Nigeria, dozens of armed men, at least some in military uniforms, arrived in pick-up trucks and motorcycles and opened fire, battling a handful of overwhelmed soldiers and targeting government buildings. As gunfire crackled and fires set by the attackers raged, residents fled through the darkness and took cover in the scrubland surrounding the town of Chibok. Armed men then stormed their way toward a boarding school, where several hundred teenage girls had turned in for the night. ‘We are sleeping’, an 18-year-old girl who was there at the time told me. ‘We hear when they shoot their guns in Chibok. We thought they were playing with guns.’ Over the next several weeks, what had started as the kind of insurgent raid Nigerians had sadly grown accustomed to hearing about would set the world on edge.
In the north-east of Nigeria, where Islam is by far the dominant faith, Chibok stands out as an anomaly.3 It is mostly Christian, though it includes a large number of Muslims as well. Its Christian heritage involves missionaries from the Church of the Brethren, a Protestant denomination, who began arriving in Nigeria in 1923.4 Its population is largely people from the Kibaku ethnic group, separate from their rivals the Kanuris, who dominate the region. Gerald Neher, an American who lived in Chibok as a missionary between 1954 and 1957, in 1959–60, then again in 1968, remembered the town being isolated at the time, its dirt roads leading to the outside world cut off by streams in the rainy season. He worked with farmers using oxen and ploughs, while his wife taught, her students writing in the dirt with sticks. Religious education and conversion were of course part of the missionaries’ activities as well, and many Chibok residents slowly embraced Christianity in place of their ancient beliefs – on the surface, anyway, since the two would likely have existed side by side. Such conversions would strike many today as objectionable given the paternalism it implies, but Neher, now in his eighties, makes no apologies for it. He told me he firmly believes he helped improve lives in Chibok and remains proud of his work, including its religious aspect. Travelling Muslim teachers also made their way to Chibok and sought to convert residents, gathering students under trees to teach the Qur’an, Neher remembered. Girls did not go to school at the thatched mud-brick classrooms when Neher was first there in the 1950s, but when he returned a decade later, some had begun attending. Today, its people are mainly farmers, its population estimated at around 70,000.5
In March 2014, about a month before the students were awakened by gunfire coming from outside their dormitory, Borno state, where Chibok is located, announced that it would be forced to close its secondary schools until further notice after repeated attacks.6 The assaults that prompted the closures were far more deadly than what would occur later in Chibok, but they had not received sustained attention from the outside world. They included two massacres of dozens of boys at boarding schools in neighbouring Yobe state. School officials in Chibok would suggest later that their institution had simply closed for vacation, but they appear to have been telling only part of the story. As one government official I interviewed, as well as parents, explained, the closure was a forced vacation since no one wanted to see any other students killed.
While the reason for the closures may have been noble, the decision nonetheless drew concerns. Education is badly lacking in north-eastern Nigeria, and the situation is even worse for girls. About one in ten females aged six and older are considered literate in Borno state. That compares to a nationwide rate of 47.7 per cent and a rate in Lagos of 92 per cent. Shutting down schools would obviously threaten any progress made toward addressing the problem.7 The school where the girls were taken had previously been called Government Girls Secondary School Chibok, and it was run by the Borno state government. Its name had recently changed, dropping the word ‘girls’ after it began accepting boys. The boys, originally from around Chibok, had been relocated from their schools in particularly dangerous areas of Borno state. They attended school in Chibok during the day and were not boarding students, unlike the girls. A total of 530 students were enrolled, 135 boys and 395 girls, according to the principal, Asabe Kwambula.
Though the schools had been closed in March, administrators and government officials faced a dilemma about what to do with the students in their final year, who were set to take their examinations and move on. According to a government official I spoke with, discussions were held with the Nigerian ministry of education and the West African Examinations Council, which administers the final exams, about how to proceed. The official told me that it was decided through the discussions that a number of schools in Borno state would be allowed to serve as examination centres, including the secondary school in Chibok, and that they would call back final-year students to complete the tests. Before that could be done, however, officials were to petition the authorities to provide proper security for the schools to ensure they would be as safe as possible. The story from that point on becomes increasingly murky.
Borno state and school officials say they met with the police and delivered a letter to the state police commissioner requesting additional security for the examinations period. Afterwards, according to one school official, four policemen were sent, but they were only to be on duty during daytime hours, when the exams were being taken. There would be no additional security at night. The military presence in the town itself was also light, with a contingent of 17 soldiers said to have been stationed there.8 It would not be nearly enough, and the debate over whose fault it was that more security was not provided would later become an intense, politically charged dispute. There were also allegations that the students should not have been called back at all given the potential danger. The federal government blamed state officials in Borno, which is run by an opposition party, while the state said the opposite. It should be noted, however, that while the state-run school and Borno’s government should have taken far more precautions, both the police and the military are federal institutions beyond their direct control. ‘This thing happened due to the lack of proper security’, the school official who did not want to be named to avoid antagonising the federal government told me. ‘If there is proper security, I think this thing would not happen. But, you know, the security is not in the hands of the school.’ There were also allegations, however, that the state had refused requests to relocate the exams to Maiduguri and that it had guaranteed that adequate security would be provided.9