Muhammadu Buhari needs a comprehensive, not just military, plan to defeat Boko Haram, experts said on Thursday, after the former army general vowed to crush the Boko Haram militants.
“Military force alone is not enough to annihilate the movement,” Nigeria researcher Marc-Antoine Perouse de Montclos, from the Chatham House international affairs institute in London, said. Boko Haram may be “backed into a corner” but “is not clinically dead”, he added.
The group’s attacks and suicide bombings in northeast Nigeria have claimed more than 13,000 lives since 2009, with the insurgency — and the government’s handling of it, a key election issue. Boko Haram has moved beyond northeast Nigeria, attacking Cameroon and Niger, which were for long considered operating bases, giving the impression of an unstoppable force.
But the involvement of both countries, and notably Chad, in Nigerian border areas south of Lake Chad, alongside Nigerian troops operating further inside the northeast, seems to have stopped their advance.
WIN PEACE
Nigeria has taken back the strategic town of Baga, Chadian troops Gamboru and Dikwa near Cameroon, while Chadian and Nigerien forces have recaptured Malam Fatori and Fotokol on the Niger border. The most symbolic loss for Boko Haram came last Friday, on the eve of elections the heavily armed militants vowed to disrupt.
Nigeria’s army, on the offensive after being regularly outgunned and outmanoeuvred, seized the group’s headquarters in Gwoza, from where leader Abubakar Shekau proclaimed a caliphate last year. Former military ruler Buhari on Wednesday declared war on Boko Haram, vowing they “will soon know the strength of our collective will and committment to rid this nation of terror and bring back peace”.
