Al Jazeera’s Inside Story discussion programme looked at Nigeria’s failures to deal decisively with the terrorism of Boko Haram and it’s affiliates. Many farming communities have been forced to flee their homes, creating both a humanitarian and food insecurity crisis in the north of the country.
Nigeria’s chief of defence staff, Christopher Musa, has proposed building a wall across the country’s vast borders as a solution. He made no mention of funding for the wall or feasibility. It may be beneficial for him to study the US’s struggle to to combat undocumented migration through building a wall in the border areas with Mexico.
Nigeria has been struggling to contain the Boko Haram insurgency for 16 years with minimal success. In the meantime, the root causes of the conflict have been largely ignored. These include poverty, the lack of Western education in the largely Muslim north, the exploitation of Islam for political gain by the northern elite, and corruption by the ruling elite leaving the security agencies ill-equipped to perform the state’s primary function of protecting its people.
One of the panellists, David Otto, touched on a significant factor in government failures in dealing with the violence when he said people feeling that they can’t be protected by government was significant in the terror groups attracting recruits and the continuation of the violence.
