Though many had suspected that some political leaders and the elite of the North are complicit in various ways, both in the emergence and subsequent deadly activities of the Boko Haram sect, none would have imagined it to be at the scale being suggested by the sect. Just four days after the Kano blasts, the most devastating so far since the sect turned inconsolably bloody-minded, it has been reported that some Northern governors are actually bankrolling the group.
According to a report in major newspapers recently, which was culled from an online publication, 247ureports.com, a senior official of Boko Haram allegedly granted an interview detailing how the sect had been on the payroll of a few governors of the North. The unnamed official had claimed that the stoppage of the financial support by the new government in Kano had warranted the massive bomb attacks on the state. “Most of them pay us monthly to leave their state alone,” he was quoted to have said.
The two state governments specifically mentioned in the report (Kano and Bauchi) have however, denied the allegation. The spokesman of the Bauchi State governor described it as a “very, very strange allegation because, Isa Yuguda (the governor) cannot be involved in such… we in Bauchi have been living in peace. We are not involved in that.” His Kano counterpart spoke in the same vein.
However, the Boko Haram official let on that way back in 2004, the sect reached an agreement with former Kano State governor, Ibrahim Shekarau’s government to receive a monthly payment of N5 million which was later increased to N10 million in 2009. The agreement, just as in the one reached in Bauchi State, also included ‘infrastructural support’. However, both agreements were said to have been broken by the state governors in 2011 and the payments were stopped. This, according to the sect’s spokesman, warranted the recent bombings in the two states.
These allegations are in line with the long-held opinion of security operatives and keen watchers of the emergent situation that the Boko Haram was the creation of politicians, especially some governors who needed them to win elections, to intimidate opponents, score political points and extract relevance at the national level. These groups, over time, became larger, unwieldy and difficult to control by their sponsors. In fact, it had become an open secret that the former governors of Borno and Yobe states who held sway in the Northwest zone for eight years were the grand conspirators in the Boko Haram saga.
Sometime last year, these two governors had to tender unreserved public apologies to members of the Boko Haram sect, and they have since remained largely in hiding in Abuja, not venturing into their states for fear of being harmed. Such was the level of open admittance of guilt and complicity by politicians at such high levels. It would therefore, not be surprising if there are other governors and politicians who have been secretly funneling state and private funds to the Boko Haram sect or a coterie of other sects in the North.
A sitting Senator of the Federal Republic is currently undergoing trial for allegedly funding the group; so is a high court judge. Recently, the alleged mastermind of the Christmas Day Madalla Catholic Church bombing, Kabiru Sokoto, took refuge in his state’s Abuja Governor’s Lodge en route to escaping abroad. A serving Air Force officer was featured in the plot to spirit him abroad and when he was finally arrested, his escape from police detention in very suspicious circumstances has presented Nigerians with a classic case of official collusion of a most dirigible kind albeit, traceable high up the police hierarchy .
All these evidences, though largely circumstantial, point clearly to the fact that the Boko Haram sect is a Frankenstein monster created by some elite of the North. As we have said on this space many times before, there is an urgent need for a concerted effort by the leaders of the North to arrest this monster and put him out for good, lest it gets completely out of hand.
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