LL: Lucy Lamble
MB: Muhammadu Buhari
Binta
BT: Benoit Thiry
YSG: Yacouba Soumana Gaoh
AB: Atta Barkindo
IDA: Ini Dele-Adedeji
SJ: Sasha Jesperson
MH: Michel Hulais
YO: Yacouba Oumarou
GL: Giuseppe Loprete
Ali B: Ali Bade
Miriam
AM: Aba Mamadou
HO: Haoua Oumarou
KG: Kaltoum Gani
EJH: EJ Hogendoorn
ED: Elizabeth Donnelly
MB On the issue of terrorism, Nigerians have lived in fear and insecurity for far too long. The human and material costs of the insurgency in my country and to my people are staggering and unacceptable.
BA When Boko Haram actually started, it was almost like a non-violent social religious movement. Nobody ever thought that over time, in a matter of a few years, internally displaced people’s camps will be created, military checkpoints will be all over the place. Shops are going to be closed. Curfews are going to be imposed. Sometimes even mobile networks completely suspended. So a lot of people are affected. Wives are being killed. Children are missing. Girls are being kidnapped. So I think at the moment what I’ve seen is that people are very, very distressed. And people are expecting a lot from the government, from the international community to put an end to this violence.
Binta My name is Binta from Asagar I have seven children. We came here on Saturday. Just as night fell, people from Boko Haram came to Asagar and killed 12 people. We all came from Nigeria. We are refugees. They came. They got everyone together near the mosque and they shot. They fired again and again and killed 12 people.
KG Everything that we’d left, they pillaged, they raped young girls. They say they are Muslims but they killed all the Muslims there.
LL I’m Lucy Lamble. In this Global development podcast we visit the Diffa region of Niger. It’s border with northern Nigeria and its longstanding cultural links means that Niger, like neighbours Chad and Cameroon, is also dealing with Boko Haram activity. We talk to some of those that have been displaced from their homes. We also look at the social and economic impact in the region and investigate the actions that the newly elected president, Buhari, is taking to address the Boko Haram crisis.
BT My name is Benoit Thiry, I am the country director for the World Food Programme in Niger. It’s a very, very complex situation in Diffa now, it’s very difficult to control on the military side. It’s not easy to address.
LL The Diffa region in the south-east of Niger borders the north-western part of Lake Chad as well as north-eastern Nigeria. The town of Diffa itself is 5km from the Nigerian border.
BT Mid last year it was mainly in Nigeria and then it started to spread on to Niger with the attack of Diffa and also on 6 February where it started really to be a military action from Boko Haram into Niger with some movement of people. I think it’s very complex. A lot of people were displaced at the time.
LL In May Niger deployed armed forces to the region. Despite that, Diffa remains a target for Boko Haram. Even as recently as this month there were attacks on the city prison with the aim of releasing insurgents held there. Yacouba Soumana Gaoh is the governor of the Diffa region where communities are actively being encouraged to provide information on those involved.
YSG We know we have information about the whole region of Diffa so if anyone’s involved with Boko Haram then we’re aware of it. And then we ask them to testify, to swear on the Qur’an, and because of that people have begun to tell the truth. And they told us about people who were selling pepper to Boko Haram. But people do not stay in jail if they don’t have links to Boko Haram.
LL Dried fish and peppers are critical to the trade in the region, but following concerns that Boko Haram were extorting taxes on traders, sales of both were banned in the state – to some resentment from residents whose incomes took a hit. Trading in pepper was reinstated this July but motorbikes are still banned, meaning the local population’s movements are restricted.
YSG The measures that were taken are starting to bear fruit and show results. Yes of course those who live in Diffa know that now it’s more peaceful, it’s safer. There have been no terror attacks since we took those decisions. It is because we banned the dried fish business that people from Boko Haram come and steal food here. We’ve seen in some villages that they were even stealing biscuits, cookies in small businesses. It means they were starving, otherwise they were not interested in food because they had enough resources; they had pepper, they had fish and they could send people to buy food for themselves, so it did work. We also stopped the motorbikes, and they were not able to come here and shoot people here in Diffa because they did not have any motorbikes.
LL But despite these measures and the presence of both the military and the national police in the city, residents live under threat. Attacks in the region come every few days. Those who are asked for information can end up being particularly vulnerable.
YSG So they also come here really for reprisals. They target specific villages and they target specific houses. So based on the arrests made against the activism of Boko, those who inform sometimes will have to pay a high price for giving us specific information. The problems are being resolved at the moment, just until the point at which we control the entire region. We have the national forces of Niger in Nigeria, 20km inland in Nigeria, just to ensure that we can finish this problem we have with Boko Haram. So the attacks are shrinking, but there are still attacks in the villages right along the border with Nigeria. But the territory here is vast and you can’t control all the villages.
LL Diffa region borders the north-western part of Lake Chad as well as Borno state in north-east Nigeria. Atta Barkindo, a researcher and PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas) in London explains the deep-rooted links between Niger and Nigeria.
AB Since independence in 1960, when Nigeria was coming on, first the capital was in Lagos, then moved to Abuja. Political and economic power was concentrated in the centre. The fringes were like ungoverned spaces. People had fishing networks, farming networks, people inter-marry, and they speak the same language in this kind of Lake Chad border region. So over the past three decades that kind of culture erupted so much so that a Kanuri man living in Maiduguri and going into Diffa in Niger is probably going to see his in-laws. Boko Haram still has the advantage of the geography, of the language, of this kind of fishing famine, networks and unions that have been formed over the years. And that’s why it has easy access to the place.
LL Ini Dele-Adedeji is also carrying out research at Soas.
IDA I think that you speak to how fluid this identity is in terms of how we think of borders ending at certain points based on how maps are constructed and all that. But to these people who live in these local communities and areas, they don’t see themselves or see these places that way. And so Boko Haram has also taken advantage of that as well. I think Diffa, in particular, plays an important role in that. More often than not after they launch an attack on a particular town they usually just escape across the border into either Chad or Niger or to northern Cameroon.
LL Boko Haram is known for the unpredictability of its attacks, which leaves the communities in the area in a state of fear. Since the election of President Buhari this year, Boko Haram has once again changed the way it operates. Sasha Jesperson is a research analyst with Rusi, the Royal United Services Institute for defence and security studies in London.
SJ I think there’s a lot of fear in the region because we’ve seen a shift towards smaller scale attacks. So before the election there were some much larger attacks, which seemed to respond to political statements that Boko Haram was being quashed by government forces. But since the election it’s changed to a certain extent, and we’ve seen much more small-scale attacks on villages where militants will come in and they’ll kill say a dozen people and then withdraw or suicide bombers.
LL Many people are fleeing from their homes right across the region. The result is a humanitarian crisis with thousands of people displaced. Michel Hulais is the head of the sub-office of the World Food Programme in Diffa.
MH As we’ve seen here in the Diffa region, the number of people we assist is very dynamic. Often people arrive in waves and WFP only assist those that have already been identified. So what I can do is I can give you the numbers of the beneficiaries that we assist plus those that, as you’ve just seen today, arrived in waves. In Gagamari we have in total 634 households, which totals 4,500 beneficiaries. So fighting malnutrition and to ensure that Niger is adequate equipped to face its nutritional crises, WFP needs donor funds. At the moment in 2015 WFP already has a shortfall of $30m. In Diffa, in order to assist 113,000 people, WFP still requires £13m just to take us to the end of December 2015.
LL In Gagamari, to the west of the city of Diffa, I met Yacouba Oumarou from Damasak in Nigeria, 15km away, where hundreds of bodies were discovered in March and April of this year.
YO I came because of what happened in Damasak. The Boko Haram attack send me here without even shoe. I have been here eight months now. I am here with my family. Some here are missing a husband, a wife or their children. Up to today they still do not know where they are or what happened to them. Some have chosen to go back to Damasak because there the Nigerian and Chadian forces are there now. But for me, so long as I don’t have guaranteed security there, I will stay here. I won’t return until what’s happening there is really over.
LL Giuseppe Loprete is head of Niger operations for the International Organisation for Migration.
GL In these villages they don’t feel safe without the army around. I think two days ago there was one example. In one of the villages in Nigeria, when that was not protected any more by the Chadian army, the Nigerian army the village was set on fire and a lot of people killed, I think at least 15. And all the other people in the village fled to the city of Borso, and in that area they remain, in the Lake Chad area. People’s families tried to stay away from the border areas and they tried to go further in the Diffa region. Another situation that is another challenge for us in all these islands of the Lake Chad, there were also other nationalities, for example, Malians and people from Benin. These people have settled down in the islands, these are fishermen, for example, they settled down 30 years ago in these areas and now they are chased by Boko Haram or they are scared. It’s a state of emergency, of course, so they cannot stay any more in these places and they are coming back to Diffa. But if they are Malians, of course they want to be ... they want to go back to Mali.
LL At the Kabalewa camp to the east of Diffa I met people displaced from the Lake Chad basin. Nigerian refugee Ali Bade, from the Malafatori, now separated from the rest of his family, was personally targeted by Boko Haram as he’s the son of the district chief.
Ali B The people from Boko Haram, they sent a letter to say they were going to attack the village. And that’s why we fled. They threaten us by name.
LL Mariam is from Gadira.
Mariam We were sleeping late at night when the assassins arrived and started shooting all over the place. We woke up to this catastrophe. We couldn’t take our things. We could only grab the absolute essentials and our children, and we ran. But where we first landed, we still couldn’t stay safely so we continued. We walked and walked and walked for four days. When we finally got here we were really tired and half-starved, and the children were dehydrated; some were vomiting and some had diarrhoea. Several people died due to fatigue and the lack of water along the way. There were also four women who gave birth during the escape, in very difficult circumstances. Once we got here the babies were looked after with their mothers, and incredibly they’re all still alive today.
LL Aba Mamadou from Niger is a smallholder farmer and fisherman from the islands in Lake Chad.
AM We arrived and people gave us what we need to live on. But we don’t have any clothes to wear or any soap to wash what we have. And we need other things too. We’re here as long as the state requires it. We can’t go back. Before, life was good but now as we’ve attacked the attackers they’ve started to attack us. So we’ve not been at all safe, and that’s why the state told us we need to leave the islands.
LL In Diffa’s urban integrated centre on market day I met lots of young mothers, including Haoua Oumarou.
HO I grew up near here but once married I went to the lake with my husband. But now, due to the insecurity, we’ve come back to my parents in the village. I’m from the lake areas so right now it’s hard to take care of my family. My husband is from Nigeria. Now I’m back home I consider myself Nigerian. Now that I’m back in Niger I get food assistance, cereal. Five kilograms of cereal. Now I share my two bags with my neighbours, who have nothing. I came this morning for Plumpy Sup for my daughter, who has malnutrition.
LL Kaltoum Gani from Damasak and now living in Gagumari plans to stay.
KG I’m fine here. I’ve even been given a hut to stay in. I don’t want to return yet. I’ve been given a field to cultivate here. I’d need to start up all over again there, and I want to be really sure that the situation stabilises over there before moving again.
LL Giuseppe Loprete explains that the region faces very specific challenges.
GL There are many gaps of course for this displaced population that includes refugees, returnees and the internally displaced. It’s important to make these distinction because, of course, they have different needs. Almost nobody coming from Nigeria or living across the border, almost nobody has ID documents, for example. So in a way we don’t even know if they are from Niger or Nigeria when they arrive.
LL Governor Yacouba Soumana Gaoh is well aware that Diffa doesn’t have the resources to cope with the continuous influx of arrivals.
YSG It will be difficult to have a good season in 2015 because the rains are late. When you look at the lean season you can see the drought is significant and many villages don’t have rain. So it’s very difficult for local residents to make a living and help the refugees and internally displaced. That’s why the government of Niger will contribute. When I went to Maiduguri there was a plan to relocate or repatriate people from Nigeria. We have to locate these people coming from Nigeria living now in Niger. It’s quite clear we don’t have enough resources here for them. And so at some point we’ll have to send them back. And I’m sure that at some point they will return, but they have to hear that from Nigeria because they might not believe it otherwise. But they will return. We will see a massive return as soon as the troops make progress.
LL Guiseppe is also concerned that the humanitarian crisis could incite young people to join Boko Haram and affect the stability of both Niger and the entire region.
GL Niger is still a relatively stable country but it’s surrounded by all this unstable situation. So for us it’s very important that Niger keeps its stability. If they remain without assistance, if we cannot do anything for these critical groups there is a high risk that all these young people will be recruited by terrorist groups. In these areas it’s very easy for the terrorist groups to recruit young males. For example, in Diffa, those who have lost their jobs or their livelihood, they can be recruited by Boko Haram, paid $500 and a motorbike. I think Niger and the situation in Niger has to be monitored constantly by the international community because if Niger falls I think the entire region of the Sahel or the entire west Africa will be heavily affected.
LL The fragility of the economy, the lack of opportunities and jobs is a factor that plays straight into Boko Haram’s hands. Governor Yacouba Soumana Gaoh.
YSG When I see young people going to Boko Haram, I think they join them because they want to make a quick buck. To begin with, it was a religious problem because of what some were preaching but now people are just taking the easy road. Sometimes even the parents are pushing their own kids, telling them that they’re not doing anything, telling them to leave. This is really about easy money.
LL Unsurprisingly, the economy in northern Nigeria is not thriving. Development has not been the top priority, with security concerns taking precedence. Sasha from Rusi.
SJ The instability in the region is creating a lot of interest. People who can are moving out, often to southern Nigeria. And this is creating difficulties for the region to develop. Particularly because one of the drivers, at least for low-level militants, is the low socioeconomic development within the region – and this is just making it worse. And so, in a way, it’s creating more drivers for people to get involved in Boko Haram because there are no other opportunities.
EJH My name is EJ Hogendoorn, I’m the deputy programme director for Africa for the International Crisis Group. The region as a whole is facing some pretty significant challenges with lack of effective governance, entrenched corruption and a very significant youth bulge. In northern Nigeria it is those three problems that has really led to an environment in which Boko Haram could grow. Unfortunately, northern Nigeria has been racked by mis-governance, massive corruption and a very bleak socioeconomic environment for its people. And that made the calls of Boko Haram more appealing, and has driven people to join its ranks.
LL It’s unlikely that development activities will start up again until the conflict is stabilised.
EJH Certainly it’s Crisis Group’s position that the first thing that needs to be put in place is security; is that people will need to feel that it is safe for them to return to their homes and to restart their life. And once they do so, for the government to re-establish its authority and to start providing basic services again. After that there will need to be a massive focus on rebuilding infrastructure that has been destroyed either my mis-governance or through Boko Haram attacks. And then ultimately, hopefully, that will translate into generating some economic activity that will then hopefully increase over time.
Mariam The children aren’t going to school here. Even before we had to flee, their schooling had been interrupted. As Boko had declared that white schools were forbidden, and we were frightened that if we sent them people would come and kill them.
LL That’s Mariam again, talking about how Boko Haram has affected her children’s education. Ini Dele-Adedeji from Soas explains.
IDA It’s a shame that the abduction of children, the girls in Chibok, for not just Nigerians but the whole world to sit up and take notice of what Boko Haram is trying to achieve in terms of trying to make it so that secular/western education becomes wholly unattractive to parents and children within northern Nigeria. And I think it also connects, there’s a connection there to, I suppose, a prevailing fear and mindset that people have about secular education.
LL In the camps for refugees and displaced people in Diffa there are thousands of children, many of whom have never had the chance to go to school – one of the more worrying social legacies of the conflict. Lizzie from Chatham House.
ED Already in places where perhaps going to school was a struggle again because of the state of the economy and perhaps it was required that children might need to be kept in fields, for example, to support farming activities rather than to attend school. But in the meantime now, just because of the nature of the threat, it seems that education becomes more almost an unnecessary risk. But it’s not just that, of course, the idea of women and children and others being in the field becomes untenable because of the number of abductions by Boko Haram. And there are other factors here such as internal displacements and the refugee issues. Large numbers of children being moved away from their homes and their communities as a result of this violence. So big gaps in education. But big gaps just in their lives in general in terms of their social family upbringing. So there is no doubt that this will have an impact in the future. So any policy response to this needs to be really thoughtful about how you can start to rebuild the economy in the north-east, but also being cognisant of these gaps that might be coming down the line in terms of skills and capacity, a wider social need.
YSG Boko Haram is about money. It’s about economic interests. It’s along the river, but once you leave the Lake Chad region then there’s no presence of Boko Haram. The zone of influence is along the river where there is pepper, there’s rice, there’s corn and there’s fish. This isn’t about religion, it’s not a war about religion, it’s about economic interest. Where there’s only sand dunes there’s no Boko Haram.
LL Although economics may play a large part in the survival of the group there have been public references made to allegiances to Islamic State. Sasha Jesperson again.
SJ Since the inception of Boko Haram with Muhammad Youssef there has been quite significant shifts in ideology, so there was the original religious ideology that Muhammad Youssef was putting forward. And then we had Abubakar Shekau take over who was much more militant and focused on the attacks. The attacks became much more indiscriminate, so there were attacks against Muslims as well. And now we’ve seen this shift to aligning with Islamic State, even calling themselves Islamic State’s west African province. In terms of their activities, these changes in ideology don’t seem to have that much of an impact. There are definitely other drivers below the surface. So, at the moment, it does seem to be very much driven by economics.
LL At Chatham House Lizzie believes that although there are commonalities, the two groups operate in a very different way.
ED Boko Haram, looking back at Boko Haram video recordings over the years, the group has tended to, let’s say, name drop. Isis is the most visible global terrorist threat at present. It seems almost logical given how effective Boko Haram is with its propaganda that it would make this kind of a nod to Isis. Likely they have, and I must add that this is a likelihood, that there has been some kind of individual-to-individual communication between the two. But in terms of setting up I suppose a more established network for a coordinated effort towards some joint immediate goal, I would be more cautious on that. What will be interesting to watch in terms of this dynamic is what happens in cyberspace and efforts to reach a further audience with their ideological messaging.
MB The government that I lead is committed, and we’ll do whatever it takes to free this area from the menace of terrorism. No matter how long it takes, we will reclaim every inch of Nigerian territory that is under the control of Boko Haram.
LL This year with the election of President Buhari the Nigerian government has come out in defiance of Boko Haram.
IDA The simple fact that we have someone new at the helm of affairs in Nigeria is enough to give us hope when you consider the fact that President Yar’Adua, under whose watch this Boko Haram crisis actually started, underestimated and really did underestimate the sect and allowed it to mushroom into what it is today. Then you had President Goodluck Jonathan, who was quite content to just disregard it as being a northern problem; and under whose watch all the top military honchos just spent and frittered away the budget that was meant to go towards actually prosecuting the battle against Boko Haram properly.
AB Buhari is a very strong man first of all, for me, as a person he’s probably not corrupt. And he has a lot of military experience. Nigeria has another opportunity not just to end this conflict but really to rebuild in all the country the fact that in the past they told us this was just a simple Nigerian problem. Nigeria can deal with it because Nigeria is the biggest country around this region. But with the recent attacks both in Cameroon and in Chad and even in Niger look at, for example, in Chad within the period of one month how many attacks have happened. So they suddenly discovered that look, this is not just a Nigerian problem this is really a regional problem. And if they do not come together it’s going to destroy all of them. And so that level of awareness and the desire and the drive to actually achieve some level of regional, military security cooperation is really very, very important because Boko Haram has been able to function just like any other terrorist organisation. For them to function effectively they must have a territory from which to operate. So if you can nip these territories together you may get them. And so for us to nip Boko Haram we must control this territory. And for us to control this territory we have this regional cooperation. I think for me it’s one important aspect that Buhari has emphasised.
IDA I want to see greater cooperation between Nigeria and Chad, Niger and Cameroon. More importantly than us going to foreign nations to beg for help and for aid, I would like to see more cooperation between these west African countries.
LL President Buhari is reaching out internationally, with a recent visit to Washington to meet President Obama.
ED President Buhari has already taken some steps. He has moved the defence headquarters to the city of Maiduguri, which is the capital city of Borno state, the heartland of Boko Haram. He has also put in place new defence chiefs. So it is certainly hoped that this will make a difference on the ground in the battle against Boko Haram. President Buhari and the All Progressives Congress do have a lot of international goodwill at the moment that they should leverage; but it’s certainly important, first of all, that actually there is deep thinking into how Nigeria’s armed forces can be both reformed and strengthened.
LL EJ from the International Crisis Group.
EJH The Goodluck Jonathan administration was very suspicious of what was happening in the north-east, didn’t really understand what was happening, and saw US reticence to provide it with lethal assistance was a sign of US reluctance to help Goodluck Jonathan rather than the Nigerian government. And that led into a downward spiral of relations between the two governments that ultimately ended in the Nigerian government cancelling a training deployment that had been in place for a Nigerian military unit that was going to be deployed to fight Boko Haram. This will be an attempt to so-called reset the relationship. The United States is looking to resume its training programme with the Nigerian army in an effort to make it more effective in its fight against Boko Haram. It is probably also looking to offer improved intelligence sharing and perhaps some logistical assistance as well.
LL And it looks as if relations are already improving. Since Buhari came to power the US has committed $5m to the fight against Boko Haram. In addition, the World Bank has pledged $2.1bn to help rebuild in north-eastern parts of Nigeria.
EJH There is an increased willingness to try to support a regional response to the Boko Haram insurgency. The problem has always been that there have been tensions between Nigeria and its neighbours. We do think that that is lessening to some degree, both in response to the very successful improvement in cooperation between Nigeria and Chad; but also because Buhari has clearly signalled that he wants to cooperate with his neighbours; and one of his first trips after he was sworn in was to the regional states to try to improve this cooperation.
ED I think that there is an opportunity now to significantly reduce Boko Haram activities and to significantly reduce the size of the territory in which it operates. I think it would be perhaps unrealistic to expect that the group can be wiped out entirely but I think it can be reduced to a more manageable, if troubling, small group or localised network. Not forgetting that as the group exists now in many respects it is something of this loosely put together network of different interests and drivers in belonging to this thing that, yes albeit at its core, has this extremist ideological drive, but has drawn in a wider either membership or number of loosely affiliated actors who find something by belonging to this organisation.
EJH Well I personally am very optimistic. I don’t want to be too optimistic but I do agree with you that this is going to take years rather than months, but certainly there have been significant gains made against Boko Haram. The group certainly doesn’t hold much territory beyond some hideouts in these dense forests on the Nigerian/Cameroonian border. But it is a huge challenge to defeat the group because the area is so large, it’s very rugged, making it easy for Boko Haram to hide, and it is very difficult for security forces to move around and engage with this highly mobile force. That said, Boko Haram is significantly weakened and as we understand is having a much harder time recruiting than it has hitherto.
LL In Diffa, Governor Yacouba Soumana Gaoh is also cautiously optimistic.
YSG The war is not over yet, because we’ll still have a large scale operation in the island area, but we will win it, God willing. We’re just waiting for the operational command from N’Djamena and so they can coordinate the raids on the island’s region. But we will find them, God willing.
IDA We have seen whole towns completely wiped out. I think decades after today we’ll still be talking and we’ll still be counting the losses suffered thanks to Boko Haram, and we’ll be asking if all of this could have been avoided, perhaps by Nigerians coming to the table sooner to discuss where we are as a country and where we’re headed.
LL That’s it for this month’s edition of the Global development podcast. For more on the region go to http://www.theguardian.com/global-development. This podcast is also available on SoundCloud, iTunes and all podcasting apps. My name is Lucy Lamble. The producer is Kary Stewart.
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