We in the North are responsible for Boko Haram (Opinion)

By George Onmonya Daniel

When other parts of Nigeria, the South West and South East, are thriving to grow and progress, the North is holding them back. All the killings going on in Nigeria since 1999 has been in Northern Nigeria. It started from the North agitating for Sharia Law. Despite the population of Christians in the North, the utter disrespect and disregard for them, as the North goes about its Sharia Law implementation would result to rioting where over 5,000 to 10,000 people were killed in Kaduna, Kano, Plateau, even before Boko Haram.

Sometime in 2014, I, Kwamared Baban Shareek Gumel, Murtala Ibrahim, Abdulaziz Abdulaziz and one other gentleman who worked then with the presidency, all of us representatives of Bayero University Kano, Alumni, went to see the then Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr. Nurudeen Mohammad. I still remember what the very honest young Minister told us in his office. He looked at Kwamared Baban Shareek Gumel and asked what he told him a decade ago when we were in the University. He reminded Baban Shareek that he told him that with the growing religious extremism in the North, he wouldn’t be surprised if soon the North starts to witness suicide bombings. “Today, are we not experiencing suicide bombing?”

Dr. Nuruddeen Muhammad has always been a very straight forward and honest person when discussing Nigeria. He has no time for sentiments and pettiness that has beclouded the judgement of most intellectuals in Nigeria.

The signs that resulted to Boko Haram before Boko Haram were clear. We watched this growing extremism and did nothing about. In fact extremism was even promoted by our universities. The Muslim brotherhood (Uztaz) became so strong on some campuses they made laws and enforce laws by violence. I still remember how Habiba Bature and her English Department group were attack in Unimaid for organizing a show by these gangs of extremists.

It was most of these Uztaz elements who joined Boko Haram and tore their certificates when Sheikh Muhammad Yusuf, CEO of Boko Haram, started his sermon that would lead to the biggest jihad that’s Boko Haram. Any sensible person, living in the North, like the Minister, obviously saw it coming.

When the Northern governments started Sharia, just to appeal to the sentiment of the crowd and get votes, they started fertilizing the grounds for Boko Haram. In 1999, after the political Sharia has failed, group like Boko Haram started to get appealing to the disappointed crowd of Muslims who were shortchanged. Since 1999 they have been fighting to get real Sharia Law or rather a Sharia State.

And what did the politicians who fertilized the ground do? They denied everything and look for outsider to blame. They blamed the US for planning to divide Nigeria and take Nigeria’s oil. They blame Israel and told their people it’s a Zionist conspiracy. They blamed Christians Association of Nigeria (CAN), at least I heard Sheikh Ojobi inside Al-Nur Mosque, Wuse 2, Abuja, making such false allegation.

Today millions and billions of naira, oil money, money that would have been used to educate the Nigerian child, is being spent and looted in the North East for rebuilding and rehabilitation.