CITAD Trains Journalists on Internet Safety and Security

The Center for Information Technology and Development (CITAD) held the second round of an internet safety and security workshop series in March 2017. The workshop, held at the NISTF Hall, Kano, was attended by 55 people including journalists, civil society activists, teachers and leaders of students for peace clubs supported by CITAD in tertiary institutions. Explaining the objectives of the workshop, Abdulganiyyu Rufai, programmes associate at CITAD, said that it had become necessary to raise awareness about internet safety and security as many people were increasingly falling prey to cybercrime through identity and personality theft, while many had experienced terrible confidentiality breaches.

Cross-section of participants at the workshop

Cross-section of participants at the workshop

The workshop was conducted in three sessions. The first session, entitled University Internet Safety and Security, was facilitated by Y. Z. Ya’u, the executive director of CITAD. He started by noting that given that the internet had become an indispensable part of our daily life, it was only logical that we insist that governments must accord it a formal recognition as a right. As a right and tool that we use daily, we must be able to navigate the various perils that could put as at risk, he added.

He observed that often safety and security are confused because they are related, and some use them interchangeably, but as they have evolved, they are actually used differently. Y. Z. Ya'u facilitating the first session                                                                 Y. Z. Ya’u facilitating the first session

Internet security, he said, “refers to the protection of the internet as a system – its functions, its databases, etc.” Internet safety, on the other hand, relates to the protection of the individual users from harm. He sees insecurity itself as a threat to internet safety.

He then took the participants through the various points of perils, the consequences of safety and security breaches, as well as the various dimensions and manifestations of insecurity online. The session also drew attention to privacy issues, including the right to forget and the possible implications of the Internet of Things to privacy, and concluded by looking at emerging issues such as zero rating and net neutrality. He pointed out that Nigeria has no position on zero rating, which some mobile companies are currently providing, and activists needed to respond to this emerging “digital apartheid”.

The second session, on managing cybersecurity and privacy issues, was led by Abdulganiyu Rufai, who explained some common threats and their consequences, such as viruses, spyware, etc. He looked at different types of attacks on networks and their countermeasures. He said such attacks were usually aimed at affecting either one or a combination of confidentiality, authenticity, integrity and system availability. He discussed how these attacks can occur, including interruption, which affects availability; interception, which undermines confidentiality of transactions; modification, which leads to lack of system integrity; and fabrication, which attacks system authenticity.

He concluded by imploring participants to implement seven cybersafety procedures that will “protect yourself, others, and your computer from many common threats.” These seven safety measures include regularly updating software, running anti-virus always, taking precautions to avoid identity theft, and turning on personal firewalls. The others were avoiding spyware/adware, protecting passwords, and backing up important files.

In the final session, Kamal Umar, technical officer at CITAD, demonstrated various tips on how to surf the internet safely. Talking on the topic of “General Online Safety Tips”, Umar started by drawing the attention of participants to the fact that learning to browse privately, a special feature of most browsers, was the foundation of safety online. He demonstrated how this can be done.

Another view of participants with Abdulganiyu Rufai facilitating

Another view of participants with Abdulganiyu Rufai facilitating

He also explained the various security features of the browsers which users needed to pay attention to. He advised on installing add-ons that can steer you away from threats, and took participants through steps that help in protecting systems while downloading documents online.

He also discussed key safety and security assurance features that those doing online shopping should look for. For example, he drew attention to the difference between the Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS) and the regular Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) as something to look for. He said it was also important to look at the website’s Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Certificate, which is like a digital ID card that tells you that the website or web page is genuine.

He reinforced some of the safety measures discussed earlier, such as taking precautions for protecting your computer or mobile device, not conducting overly private activities when using public Wi-Fi, not allowing other people to use your computer/mobile phone, and making sure you format or delete computer/mobile phone content before selling a device or giving it away as a gift. He also gave tips on how to stay safe on social media sites.

At the end of the questions and answers session, a participant recommended that CITAD should mainstream internet safety and security in its regular training programmes. Responding, the training coordinator of CITAD, Malam Ahmad A. Yakasai, said that the suggestion was taken and that CITAD would look into how to implement it.

The following round of the workshop on internet safety and security was held in April for government officials. The first workshop in the series, which was meant for CITAD staff and associates, was held on 21 January 2017.

Group Charges Stakeholders on Hate, Dangerous Speech

By Akpeji Charles.

The need for stakeholders in Nigeria to work together to combat the generation and spread of hate and dangerous speech in the country, have become a source of concern to the leadership of Centre for Information Technology and Development
The leadership of the organization who recently engaged different ethnic groups, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), students and youths on a public sensitization on Hate and Dangerously Speech in Jalingo, the state capital of Taraba, observed that ” the convergence of ethnicity-based and religious hate speech is an explosive mix for the country.”
In his presentation, the Senior Progaammes Officer- Peace and Conflict Management of the International organization, Isah Garba, noticed that religious and ethnicity constitute ” more then 80% of the hate and dangerous speech in Nigeria.”
Citing the 1994 Rwanda genocide which according to him was necessitated by dangerous speech, he noticed that that there is ” increasing circulation of fake materials such as pictures, news etc which are meant to create confusion.”
Pointing out that ” much of the hate speech arises from perceptions associated with the action or inaction of government” the organization further observed that there is ” increasing circulation off fake materials such as pictures, news etc which are meant to create confusion.”
Garba who further expressed dismay at the way and manner people indulge in the acts of exploring all available avenues using social media to create confusion in the country, beckoned at such persons to seek for an alternative ways that would promote peace in the country.
According to the organization “the Facebook in particular appears to be a place for the cooking and spread of fake and false news with pictures taken years back or in other countries circulating as authentication of the manufactured tales.”
He beckoned at the government to always endeavour to step efforts in promoting ” inclusive dialogue with a view to arriving at national consensus on national issues” adding that government should promote ” transparency and openness in the conduct of government and its officials so that citizens are carried along.”
Also contributing, the Research and Communication Assistant of CITAD, Hamza Ibrahim Chinade, want media practitioners to ” join the campaign against hate speech by providing space to counter hate and dangerous speech” adding that journalists should refrain from “providing space for the promotion of hate and dangerous speech by others.”
He also enjoined all media regulatory agencies and organizations especially the NBC, press council, Guild of editors, NUJ among others to proactively monitor the media and ensure that ” those found spreading hate and dangerous speech are appropriately sanctioned.”

Participants at the event vowed to tread legitimate paths to put and end to speeches that often ignite upheavals especially in the forthcoming general polls slated for 2019.

The Resilience of Nigerians?

By Adagbo Onoja.

As the Coordinator of the “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency”, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim must have developed a certain intellectual intimacy with the data and dynamics of resilience as to be sensitive to bringing all angles to it and avoid a celebratory discourse of the concept. This is the sort of conclusion one is compelled to reach from listening to him and from reading his last synthesis of the research project he superintended, (See “The Resilience of Nigerians”, Daily Trust, May 12th, 2017). As one of the most formidable social scientists in Nigeria today; as one with ex-students spread all over the place; as a columnist and with the prospects of him presiding over the final write-up of the research report, his current engagement with resilience represents a frightening development. It cannot be less in the light of the claim, and belief even, for instance, that Ulrich Beck’s World Risk Society argument is the real paradigm which grounded most recent security practices, particularly in counter-terrorism and Homeland Security. The implication is that Jibo (as he is more popularly known) could end up writing security but from an indigestible mix of subdued nationalism and ‘compassionate’ neoliberalism. It is thus considered important to attempt to tame this temptation before he ends up singing a reality into being through discourse but a reality that would be incongruent with the shared vision of Nigeria that has remained unifying for most activists of the 1980s to date.

Even if taken at the level of the headline alone, Jibo’s column says a lot about his conception of resilience: it is there, the research discovered it and here we are. In other words, Jibo argues that Nigerians have sufficient adaptive skills, inherent in them or acquired in the face of threats. He lists them and the constraints that inhibited their full flight in the confrontation with Boko Haram in the north east. In doing so in the piece, Jibo did not notice when he slipped from analysis to propaganda at the point he wrote of the “remarkable capacity of the people to develop resilience and move on with their lives in spite of adversity”. It is a claim he took seriously enough as to try to bring it down to earth in the assertion towards the end of the piece about how more devastating Boko Haram would have been but for the exploitation of local initiatives in resilience.

The first problem with this representation of the dynamics of resilience to Boko Haram is the applicability of the idea of communities that have moved on or out of entrapment in the assemblage of trauma that Boko Haram has occasioned in the north east region and Nigeria. Many would challenge such a claim with the subsisting degree of human vegetation in IDP camps, the threat of famine, the human waste in weekly bomb blasts in and around Maiduguri, the nightmare of the atrocious practice of strapping young girls with bombs which someone somewhere would be detonating on cue, among others. And this is in spite of the military’s involvement.

But no less problematic is a concept of resilience that does not distinguish between the cultural subjectivity of the people in fighting off Boko Haram and the market discourse of security that resilience is fundamentally about. Without that distinction, resilience came off as such an innocent lexicon in Jibo’s analysis. Resilience is not so much about the culturally specific coping innovations in the face of danger in that piece but a neoliberal discourse of security that might draw on such anthropological constitution of communities or the configuration of same in favour of moving the people from fear of to anticipation and adaptation to danger, including the confidence and happiness in relying on learnt adaptive skills to provide for their own safety. So, resilience thus has to do with indoctrination about coming to grips with the ‘post-secure’ world in which “the danger is disorder”. That is the disruption in the language of resilience analysis or the ‘risk society’ argument which 9/11 has been cited as the most significant confirmation. So, from posting risks, the unthinkable or complex uncertainty as the most key building block of post 9/11 world, resilience seeks individualization of the task of turning insecurity into opportunities rather than apprehension of it. The question then is if that conscious coming to terms with insecurity as opportunity was what the study saw in the north east and north west.

It is doubtful that any communities in predominantly peasant Africa would have been manifesting such attributes when the communities in Katrina in industrialised United States of America did not. Not when it has been claims of alienation from disqualification and denial against the post-disaster management of Hurricane Katrina because “the neoliberal post recovery required survivors to become ‘entrepreneurs’ and ‘empowered consumers” who are called customers, clients and consumers rather than citizens.  One of the most detailed studies of Katrina disaster management showed the complete neoliberal take-over of the terms of managing the Katrina disaster to the point where “contracts for various services were so numerous and complex that ‘FEMA, (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) even had to hire a contractor to award contracts to contractors”.

Warisu O. Alli, Professor of International Relations at Nigeria’s University of Jos was @ the conference on resilience

Attahiru Jega, Professor of Political Science at Bayero University, Kano – Nigeria also attended

Prof Kathleen Tierney, the leading authority on resilience based at the University of Colorado has done an indicative listing of the leading drivers of resilience globally. They include The Baseline Resilience Indicators for Communities Framework; The Community and Regional Resilience Institute; The Rockefeller Foundation; The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism based at the University of Maryland; The University of North Carolina’s Coastal Hazards Centre and The Centre for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorist Events. Notwithstanding the autonomy of idea and independent mindedness of intellectuals, the funding politics for these centres makes them inherently neoliberal incubation centres without them necessarily becoming supporters of neoliberal lens of the world.

The foregoing suggests the need to be careful in celebrating resilience. It is not an innocent concept. It is important to study the cultural or anthropological sensitivity or make-up of our people, their survivalist instincts in the face of rupture but carefully so in other not to fall prey to the market forces construction of resilience as a question of pushing responsibility for public safety to individuals and communities instead of probing macro structural context of risks. The truth is that our people, from the north to the south, do not have the resilience Jibo proclaims when we consider the nature of catastrophes that define the contemporary era – especially in the realm of global health, climate change, transnational terrorism and migration. How can we talk of resilience in counter-terrorism, for instance, when it is now basically a drone warfare affair? Energy would have topped the list if the United States were still an oil importing country, considering the Nixon and Carter doctrines. As things are today, one shudders to think what would happen when climate change starts manifesting around these shores. Unless magic happens and Nigeria overcomes her current confusion, the likelihood of people dying in thousands is almost a foregone conclusion. Neither our elite/political leaders nor the citizens believe in the threat from climate change, not to talk of anticipating and preparing for it. Yet, it is coming.

The study of resilience to Boko Haram stands at the threshold of breaking grounds in its promise of domesticating resilience in security studies in Nigeria, if not Africa. This is to the extent that it has enough data with which it can reconceptualise resilience as well as promote a discourse of resilience capable of reproducing itself for Nigeria’s national security, (that is to the extent that one could still talk of a national security in the age of globalisation). That way, it brings our engagement with the concept in line with Mohammed Ayoob’s critique of Emancipation paradigm of security. Contrary to Emancipation paradigm’s notion of security as freedom of the people from the constraints of the state, the US based Pakistani Political Scientist argued for positioning of the state as the definitive driver of Emancipation. His reason for saying so is that without state power, people in the ‘Third World’ cannot find their bearing in a world of power which is barren of honest brokers.

CITAD and the United States Institute of Peace which has supported the research on resilience to Boko Haram have simply accepted and even implemented Ayoob’s position, by bringing together young researchers who have also brought their research findings to the table under the gaze of some of Nigeria’s most established social scientists. So, it could be argued that everything needed for this study to make a statement on resilience from this part of the world are on the ground except Jibo’s unit of measurement, otherwise known as Jibogram.

Do Governments, Leaders Worry Nigeria is Trapping Her Future?, Conferees Ask

Senior academics, discussants and researchers at the just ended “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency” wondered if governments and leaders in Nigeria worry about certain practices which they equate with trapping the future. By trapping the future, they were referring to practices with potentials to explode in the future. One of such practices that came up in the course of comments, observations and questions across the sessions is the idea of school children wearing different sets of uniform in one school.  Participants wondered why it is important that children would be conscientised to their religious and cultural differences at such age in such a way that they can hardly outgrow. Warning that “our children are watching our steps”, some discussants expressed surprise that this happens in government owned schools where, in most cases, Christians wear a different set from Muslims. Does this worry the leaders, it was asked.

Intellectuals at a previous session of the conference

Prof Ogoh Alubo, a conference session chair

Similarly, the emergence of different markets for Christians and Muslims in some parts of the country was frowned at. So also is the emergent settlement pattern whereby Christians have their own sections and same for Muslims in many towns, cities and communities. Participants narrated the ordeal of individuals they knew who had to sell off, cheaply and quickly, the only house they managed to complete in order to relocate or risk being killed by youths of the ‘wrong’ community during violent conflicts.

Equally noted is the emergence of a parallel security system in terms of the street gating, high wall gates enveloping each house, neighborhood vigilante system, etc that mark an informal safety system as against the police and other organs that mark the formal system. In some cases, there are different District Heads for different sections of a community.

Although the items on this list emerged at different sessions at the conference, they cohere into the worry list of participants at the end of the day. The puzzle was always why the government or the leaders appear unfazed by any or all of these sorts of practices. Or always out of depth in terms of what alternatives should be the case.

But it was not one-way puzzles and no answers all the way. While no one had any explanation or answer to the cases of settlement patterns reflecting religious differences, the case of different markets was exonerated. According to contrary information, different markets in Jos, for instance, arose as a time-buying arrangement for tempers to cool, never as an official policy. “It was to create space for negotiation, to serve as a ceasefire kind of arrangement”, a participant told the conference. No one countered him on that submission.

Two other worries that got contrary analyses were why some people still believe no girls were abducted from Chibok and why is the abduction mediatised more than that of hundreds of other victims in Boko Haram series of atrocities. The second is what sense does society make from the statement of those who said that Boko Haram were freedom fighters or the tendering of apologies to Boko Haram by some three governors sometimes in the past.

While it was acknowledged that there are still people who are stuck with the conspiracy theory that abduction of the Chibok girls never happened but only something like that, organised to embarrass the government of the day, the question of media privileging of the plight of Chibok girls was related to the key features about it. According to Dr Kole Shettima, the first feature is the paradox in the failure of the idea of government it represents: government is supposed to protect everyone and here is a situation where this did not happen. The second feature is the sensitivity of the identity of the victims – they are all girls and were all students. The third is the way the abduction demonstrates the trend in the use of girls as weapons of war. “All these are situations that people cannot relate to and the media reflects that” and, hence, the demands that people do something about it as in the BBOGs campaign, it was stated.

A more comparative analogy came up in the question of people who described Boko Haram as freedom fighters ever before. What did they mean? Some discussants wanted to know what Boko Haram actually is. Is it a religious, specifically Islamicist movement or a criminal organisation involved in negative accumulation? If it is an Islamicist organisation, why does it attack mosques and kill Muslims also? Why did some scholars declare them freedom fighters when it started initially? Were they thinking it was something comparable to the IRA in Northern Ireland or even the African National Congress, (ANC) all of which started that way? Is it the case that people who made such statements now know better that Boko Haram is nothing of that sort? Questions! Questions!! And questions!!!

When Boko Haram bombed Police Headquarters in Abuja in June 2011

The Nigeria Police was not as lucky as Boko Haram. In spite of the presence of friendly and smiling police officers in uniform throughout the conference, discussants and other conferees descended on them as the case may be. Someone asked why the police collect bribe from both sides of every case. Earlier on, the celebration of Boko Haram in some communities initially when they were attacking only police and people in uniform generally was strongly cited as a bad omen. Such sense of relief that security agents were object of attack signposted pre-existing popular angst against the police and, by implication, the Nigerian State. If no such trust existed, how could there be sustainable resistance against a major disruption such as a murderous insurgency? It is hoped that the Nigerian State takes note as well as the Police Force itself.

Of equal concern was the attitude of the government in never resolving conflict because the government never goes beyond the violence phase. Once violence erupts, the government sends units of the Mobile Police or the army, in certain cases, ‘normalcy’ returns and the government forgets about the rest. Fact finding is never done, interfacing the protagonists and antagonists is never done, confidence building mechanisms are never put in place and the question of compensation is never addressed even in the most glaring cases of unfairness. So, the conflict goes down but not out. At the earliest opportunity, including where a community needs to act together in the face of collective danger, the old divide surfaces and makes this impossible because the old wounds was never well attended. Very few of the communities studied in the research rose above such divides.

Map showing Jigawa State in the Nigerian space

Why Boko Haram was basically absent in Jigawa remained a puzzle throughout the conference. The research report privileged leadership in its analysis. Some people acknowledged leadership but insisted on amending leadership to particular agency in analysing the Jigawa exception. In other words, leadership is too vague to be a useful analytic of the series of deliberate actions taken to keep Boko Haram off. Some people might quarrel with some of the actions but it was a case of what worked. The question of what worked was a constant in the research reports from the different states. In Yobe, when schools were relocated from some rural spaces to the state capital for fear that they could be attacked by Boko Haram, the decision was greeted with uproar. When Chibok girls were abducted from a typical rural school shortly after that, the relocation decision became the most applauded.

For those like this reporter who was on the ground in Jigawa during the time, the idea of giving more space to gubernatorial agency in trying to understand what happened was certainly not objectionable, not minding the devil’s advocate implication of saying so with the subsequent emergence of Sule Lamido as a sort of an elephant in the room. It should be difficult to be anything but a witness of truth for anyone who saw how things worked out. Moreover, it is not about accolades or denial of it to the then governor of Jigawa but about the theory that conflict management has become a disaster in Nigeria because of the crisis of political education and the associated governance tactics of most governors, if you take the state level. It could be said, up to a point that where a governor doesn’t want violent conflict, there would be none or, at worst, very few of such. Peace is a function of governance. And we must have the courage to say this for whoever proved this point, irrespective of personal or public reservations. Of course, there was an interesting analogy by the participant who wondered if the more apt explanation for the Jigawa puzzle in Boko Haram is not because Boko Haram commanders still have no idea that Jigawa and Kano are now two different states.

Governors at work: are they too overwhelmed as leaders?

Against the above background, the question would be: what sort of leadership, individual and collective, would permit school children wearing different uniforms in a same school in a multi-cultural formation as Nigeria; watch and do nothing over breakdown of trust between citizens and security agencies, allow settlement to be determined by one’s religious affiliation and even the market one patronises, among others. Is it that the leaders are not aware or they don’t understand the implications or they do not care. Or are they overwhelmed too? Why might any such possibilities exist? Is it time that would solve the problem or a deliberate choice to be made? By who and when if the solution lies in a deliberate choice? Professor Jibrin Ibrahim who coordinated the “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency” must be right, in this context, to say the study is a potentially important one for a country which has been undergoing shocks, from kidnapping to rural banditry and full scale insurgencies that have tasked the national security establishment. That is if Jibo himself has not been too gleeful in relating to resilience. That would be the last subject on Intervention‘s coverage of the “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency”.

Nigerian Researchers Unpack Resilience to Boko Haram, Downgrades the Poverty Thesis

Researchers in Nigeria studying the nature and pattern of resilience to Boko Haram insurgency have concluded on the note that breakdown of social cohesion, unemployment, leadership at local levels, crisis of trust between the people and security agencies, poverty and geography were the most decisive factors which shaped resilience to the Boko Haram insurgency in the north. At the two-day “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency” which ended today, Friday, May 12th, 2017 in Abuja, the preliminary research report explained how each of these factors worked out in such a way that resilience was low in some places, high in some others and simply indeterminate in yet others in the 20 settlements/communities studied in four states in the north east and Kano and Jigawa in the north west.

But it argued against the analogy that poverty made people align with Boko Haram or undermined resilience, saying that if that were so, then Jigawa State should have been the hub of insurgency rather than Yobe. Both states have basically the same cultural, religious and economic constitution. Or that Kano should not have seen much Boko Haram attacks at all, being the wealthiest of the three states –Kano, Jigawa and Yobe. It didn’t dismiss extreme poverty in the north, both as an instigator of violence and undermining factor of resilience. But it draws attention to how income inequality could be the dangerous dimension, citing how low income inequality gap helped resilience in Gombi contrary to how high income inequality gap undid resilience in Mubi where a few rich people co-existed with the rest.

Relating to unemployment, it said the situation whereby government forces would say that a thousand Boko Haram terrorists had been killed and another thousand turns up the next day spoke to how unemployment undermined resilience. It linked this to the success of Boko Haram’s strategy of loans, motorcycles and underwriting of marriage for those who could not afford it, mainly unemployed elements.

In the case of how communal cohesion favoured or undermined resilience, it cited Bama where historical disaffection between original and new settlers was a factor against community cohesion and Gwoza where Christian/Muslim disunity was at issue.

It gave the example of how geography as a factor worked for resilience for Biu in Borno State whose elevated location denied the insurgents advantage of sneaking into the area unlike Gwoza with its undulating space and hiding places for attackers. While leadership, especially of the Emir of Ningi in Bauchi State and leadership broadly in Gombi was a factor in the successful mobilisation and coordination of the local hunters as well as galvanising the Civilian Joint Task Force, (JTF), it was the opposite in some named towns and communities. It cited as a classic case of community trust crisis the celebration of Boko Haram in Yobe initially when attacks were concentrated on security forces and how the police looked a bit lukewarm when Boko Haram turned the gun on the generality of the people later. The preliminary report mentioned how things developed to a point where who to trust in sharing information about impending danger became a problem as no one trusted anyone, including security elements. This is contrasted to the community trust level which enabled everyone –Christians, Muslims, security operatives, etc in Azare in Bauchi, for example, to confront and overwhelm Boko Haram at great risks.

Making its recommendations, the research singled out incomplete resolution of conflicts as a major threat to community cohesion, stressed the primacy of developing local leadership, undermining hate speeches, strengthening Police –Community relations and entrenching inter-face between groups in the society.

It is a data rich report whose ranges can hardly be captured well very quickly. It had been two days of intense checking and cross-checking of data against conceptual and methodological claims, the end result of which could be a groundbreaking study of resilience in the African setting. In other words, the study of resilience strictly in terms of the subjective propensities of the people in the communities studied, resilience that has been completely outside of the influence of big business or market terms.

The first day saw a lot of attention and reflexivity on the question of when is it resilience, resistance or preventive measures and how might desperation activities be distinguished from the actions of what some scholars of resilience call the autotelic subject: the self-governing individual who has come to grips with the inevitability of disruption or uncertainties definitive of the age of rapid transnationalism and learnt adaptive skills that enables him or her or the community to turn insecurity into self-actualisation and even opportunities. A key question in this regard was, therefore, that posed by Professor Ogoh Alubo of the University of Jos, a session chair, regarding whether there are local terminologies for the concept of resilience.

Other key questions posed along the line includes that of what form of leadership emerged when official leadership abdicated; the gendered character, (women warrior) of ‘resilience’ in certain specific communities in Adamawa State, for example and the whole question of what notion of community the research was dealing with. Other questions included whether resilience is all about community reaction/responses/survival in certain ways and bouncing forward or about how resilience was organised and managed and with what successes or failures? How does resistance fit in if the dominant notion of it in the literature is as a critique of resilience in favour of attention to what some academics of resilience have called the macro-structures that give rise to risks.

A number of empirical questions also attracted attention such as the geography of Boko Haram’s insurgency, why Jigawa State, for instance, recorded very few attacks even though it is within the belt and how did Kano suffer so much losses even as it is not in the North-East. These questions might make the study harmonise or disentangle coping strategies, desperation activities, preventive measures, resilience and resistance.

Prof Jibrin Ibrahim speaking at an earlier session of the research on resilience

Prof Attahiru Jega

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim, the Coordinator of the “National Conference on Community Resilience to Boko Haram Insurgency” who provided an insight at the opening and closing sessions confessed that the study started with k-leg but had made the journey. He said it is a potentially important study for Nigeria which has, in his words, been undergoing shocks, from kidnapping to rural banditry and full scale insurgencies tasking for the national security establishment. He spoke of how sceptical he was about the study initially. That is not so anymore, he said, going further to harp on the differences in coping with the insurgency observable among different communities. While some responded to attacks with different defensive mechanisms, other communities were shattered. The issue is getting at the characteristic features of each pattern of response, with particular reference to the linkage to agency/leadership.

Declaring the conference open yesterday, Professor Attahiru Jega, immediate past Chairman of Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC) and Bayero University, Kano Professor of Political Science stressed the importance of the study. Pointing out how disasters and emergencies, be they Tsunamis, conflicts, have devastated communities, Jega, however, drew attention to how such communities must pick up the pieces and get on with life. For that reason, said Jega, it is of importance to understand how communities cope with such social, economic and political upheavals.

Y Z Y’au, Executive Director of CITAD

Mallam Y Z Y’au, Executive Director of the Centre for Information Technology and Development, (CITAD) which organised the research spoke of how problematic methodology was for the study that the workshop on it had to be repeated. He spoke not just to the question of how to determine and access the information needed for the study but also to what many of the senior academics at the conference regarded as the crisis of methodology in Nigerian scholarship.

Aside from Professors Jibrin Ibrahim and Attahiru Jega, there were Professor Ogoh Alubo of the University of Jos, Professors Sam Egwu and Pam Dung Sha of the Department of Political Science at the University of Jos, Professors Hauwa Biu and Pat Donli, both of the University of Maiduguri,, Asmau Joda, the Yola based gender activist and member of the Presidential Committee on the North East, Dr. Aminu Aliyu of the Department of Economics in Bayero University, Kano, Ene Edeh from Search for Common Ground, (SFCG) and Mallam Yunusa Zakeri Y’au, the Executive Director of the Centre for Information Technology and Development, (CITAD) which is running the resilience research with support from the United States Institute for Peace.