{"id":30614,"date":"2021-01-12T10:20:05","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T09:20:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=30614"},"modified":"2021-01-12T10:20:05","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T09:20:05","slug":"revisited-six-queries-on-the-kidnap-and-release-of-the-kankara-schoolboys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/?p=30614","title":{"rendered":"Revisited: Six Queries on the Kidnap and Release of the Kankara Schoolboys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Farooq A. Kperogi<\/strong>, Ph.D.
(Twitter:\u00a0@farooqkperogi)

When it emerged on Thursday that the hundreds of schoolboys that were abducted from Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, were released, I was so relieved that I gave the Buhari regime an unusual pat in the back in my social media updates.

\u201cThe release of the #KankaraBoys\u2014I don’t care at what cost\u2014is one of the few bright spots of the Buhari regime,\u201d I wrote. \u201cIt shows at least that the regime has learned from GEJ’s lethargy and callousness when the Chibok kidnap happened. Instead of rescuing the girls, Jonathan and his officials quibbled over whether the kidnap actually took place\u2014and helped fertilize unhealthy and unhelpful conspiracy theories. Some of the girls are still missing.\u201d

But after my euphoria, I\u2019ve been grappling with several troubling questions. I will highlight just six here:

1. Who really kidnapped the boys?\u00a0Was it Boko Haram or so-called Fulani bandits? The initial suspicion was that they were kidnapped by the ever-present, nihilistic, and mercenary \u201cbandits\u201d who have been tormenting the northwest in the last few years\u2014and who don\u2019t seem to be animated by any overt religious ideology.

But Boko Haram, whose operations had been mostly limited to the northeast in the last five years,\u00a0claimed responsibility\u00a0for the kidnap. As Boko Haram experts have pointed out, it is rare for the group to claim responsibility for acts it didn\u2019t commit. In fact, Boko Haram actually takes umbrage at being falsely associated with acts it didn\u2019t commit.

The fact that the schoolkids appeared in\u00a0a video pleading\u00a0with the government to not deploy the military to find them and to discourage western education redounded to the evidence that they were in Boko Haram\u2019s captivity, although some of the boys later told newsmen that \u201cbandits\u201d had told them to lie on camera that they were in Boko Haram\u2019s captivity in order to aggrandize the abduction.

Or have \u201cFulani bandits\u201d and \u201cKanuri Boko Haramists\u201d merged? If so, that would be at once frighteningly ominous and socio-historically curious. It\u2019s ominous because it would mean that the northwest and the northeast\u2014and perhaps even parts of the northcentral\u2014would be overwhelmed by unexampled terrorism in the coming months and years.

It would be socio-historically curious because the Kanuri and the Fulani are not only completely different people, they are\u2014or used to be\u2014 \u201chistorical enemies.\u201d Kanuris resisted Usman Dan Fodio’s 19th-century Jihad because they said there was nothing about their Islam, which they’d embraced since at least the 9th century before even the Fulani, that needed Dan Fodio’s “reform.”

The tensile stress that the Kanem-Borno Empire\u2019s repudiation of Dan Fodio\u2019s jihad actuated has been somewhat resolved through a ritualized joking relationship between the Kanuri and the Fulani who now call each other “slaves” in lighthearted jest.\u00a0

But although Muslim northern Nigeria is emerging as an ethnogenesis, i.e., a new ethnic identity forged from a mishmash of multiple identities, Kanuri people still take pride in having a political identity that is independent of the Fulani-inflected caliphate. A fusion of \u201cbandits\u201d and Boko Haram would unleash a game-changing terroristic blitz on Nigeria.

2. How many students were kidnapped?\u00a0News stories about the release of the boys quoted Governor Bello Masari as saying that 344 boys had been released. But earlier reports had said the abducted students numbered a little over 500. One of the students who escaped from his captors also said more than 500 of them had been captured. He even said some of them had been murdered by their captors.\u00a0So what\u2019s the truth?

3. Who rescued the boys?\u00a0The Katsina State government said their rescue was\u00a0facilitated by Miyetti Allah.\u00a0But the Nigerian military on Friday contradicted the Katsina State government and insisted that the Defence Headquarters\u2019 \u201cOperation Hadarin Daji\u201d was\u00a0singularly responsible\u00a0for the release of the boys. Since both claims can\u2019t be simultaneously true, one is a lie.

But note that Miyetti Allah appears have officially accepted that its members are responsible for the progressive deterioration of security in the country,\u00a0according to the\u00a0Vanguard\u00a0of December 15, which quoted the group\u2019s president, Muhammadu Kirowa, as saying, \u201cWe cannot continue to wallow in denial when it is a fact that majority of criminals arrested across the country are from within us, our kith and kin [who] have gone into this circle because of our sheer negligence.\u201d

If the abductors are \u201cFulani bandits,\u201d it would make sense that Miyetti Allah would be more helpful in facilitating the release of the boys than the military, which is notorious for being harder on peaceful protesters than on terrorists.

4. Was ransom paid before the boys were released?\u00a0The Katsina State government said no ransom was paid. It said it used moral suasion to persuade the kidnappers to release the boys. But in a rare moment of clarity on NTA on December 18, Muhammadu Buhari talked of the\u00a0\u201csettlement of the abductors.\u201d\u00a0

We all know that \u201csettlement\u201d means under-the-table payment in Nigerian English. I have read online rumor mills that said the abductors were \u201csettled\u201d with up to $4 million. While the figure may not be accurate, the government has a history of giving enormous financial war chests to terrorists.\u00a0

On May 6, 2017, for instance, the\u00a0Wall Street Journal\u00a0reported\u00a0that the Buhari regime delivered \u201ca black duffel bag containing \u20ac2 million in plastic-wrapped cash\u201d to Boko Haram for the release of 82 of the Chibok girls that were abducted in 2014.

Since ransom payment is a counterproductive and unsustainable security strategy, what is the government doing to ensure that this doesn\u2019t happen again?\u00a0\u00a0

5. If the government can identify, negotiate with, and pay abductors, why can\u2019t it apprehend them?\u00a0If Miyetti Allah has admitted that its members are responsible for the mounting insecurity in the country and has even assisted with negotiations for the release of the abducted schoolboys, why is the group not treated, at the very least, like a \u201cgroup of interest\u201d by security forces?

\u00a0Why are #EndSARS protesters, supporters, organizers, and financiers the victims of murder, bank account freezes, and continual harassment by the government while terrorists, abductors, and a self-identified association that facilitates the work of abductors featherbedded?\u00a0

6. Finally, in the Kankara abduction saga, agents of government emerged as the most vicious purveyors of transparently fake news.\u00a0Garba Shehu, Buhari\u2019s spokesman, said on December 15 that \u201ccontrary to all the fake rumors [so even rumors can be \u201cfake\u201d?] flying around, only 10 students were kidnapped from the school in Kankara.\u201d\u00a0

Abike Dabiri also prematurely said on her verified Twitter handle that the kidnapped boys had been released. When she was called out, she lied that her Twitter and Instagram handles had been hacked, implying that it was a hacker who posted the false update.

But anyone who is malicious enough to hack anyone\u2019s social media account won\u2019t post from the same device and location as the original account owner and would post something more vicious than sterile government propaganda.\u00a0

Since the regime, particularly its chief lying officer Lai Mohammed, is obsessed with stamping out \u201cfake news,\u201d\u00a0what is the punishment for its agents that shared literal fake news, although Garba Shehu has apologized for his?\u00a0

The absence of unambiguous answers to these queries is the biggest driver of conspiracy theories about the abduction. People who disagreed with my initial social media update claimed that the abduction was contrived to lend unearned veneer of competence to the Buhari regime.
This is, of course, silly conspiratorial reasoning. Had the regime been unable to rescue the boys,\n Buhari would have been justifiably excoriated for incompetence and insensitivity, which are his trademarks. In fact, he was accused precisely of that in the six days that the boys were in captivity. But having rescued them, the regime is now being accused of staging the kidnap.\u00a0

Praiseworthy as the saving of the boys from captivity is\u2014from the perspective of a parent\u2014the fact that questions and mutually contradictory claims from the same government linger on after their rescue is more evidence of incompetence than a conspiracy.\u00a0

Postscript<\/strong>

A commenter on this blog by the name of Mohammed Bello called my attention to the fact I misheard Buhari when I transcribed what he said in his NTA interview as “settlement.” He insisted that what Buhari actually said was “encirclement.”

\u00a0I watched the video again and listened more attentively and found out that he was right. I think I was predisposed to hear “settlement” instead of “encirclement” for two reasons. One, “encirclement” is an unusual word for Buhari given his well-known limited vocabulary. Second, the story I linked to in the article, which quoted him as saying “settled,” primed me to hear “settlement.”

Farooq A. Kperogi\u00a0at\u00a012:00 AM

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By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.(Twitter:\u00a0@farooqkperogi) When it emerged on Thursday that the hundreds of schoolboys that were abducted from Government Science Secondary School, Kankara, were released, I was so relieved that I gave the Buhari regime an unusual pat in the back in my social media updates. \u201cThe release of the #KankaraBoys\u2014I don’t care at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":30615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5782],"tags":[2694,2242,2756],"class_list":["post-30614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-opinion","tag-kankara","tag-miyetti-allah","tag-queries"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everyday.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}