By Bukola Afeni

The executive director of CITAD Mallam Ya’u said a large number of boko haram members are initiated due to poverty and socioeconomic factors in the country .
The executive director gave the indication at a public presentation of a book on community resilience on Boko haram in Abuja Mallam Ya’u is also urging communities to access information on what can be done to remain security conscious in the environment where they reside.
“It is not only about bringing arms and ammunitions around the community ,but by maintaining security ”

“Communities need to come together to protect itself from unnecessary violence acts in the society”
“Violence provides a framework of operation ,and we need to research and find out the modalities behind the insurgent activities “he noted.
The executive director is therefore urging all Nigerians to be united in eliminating the boko haram activities in the country .
“When the people are unified in fighting insurgent activities,the country can make progress in terms of security “he added.

He also disclosed that the government should seek for means of eliminating poverty from the country ,by creating employment opportunities to the teeming youth .
According to Mallam Yau when Boko haram first gained prominence in the country ,some of the members attested to the fact that they were initiated into the group, because it will provide a means of livelihood for them.
“While some joined the group because they don’t have vision in life ,and lost hope of excelling in life”he noted.
In the same vein ,the executive director noted that Borno state is the centre of movement in the North east ,and hence become the centre of Boko haram in the country ..
Speaking further ,the lead researcher ,professor Jibrin Ibrahim said there is an urgent need for community and religious leaders to engage in advocacy to bring people together in fighting insurgency in the country.
According to Professor Jibrin ,the boko haram ideology has created a radical extremism that infiltrates the religious movement.
While noting that the religion that is meant for peace and tranquility has resulted in violent religion .
He further noted that the group has developed an ideological framework to work with religious leaders who understand the people in different communities. “The society is meant to have an alarm bell that identifies deviants in the society ,and put an end to the activities ,no matter the statistics “he added.
Professor Jibrin stressed that the core problem with public education is that the standard has fallen drastically .
“The level of graduates we have now is not encouraging ,majority of the graduates are illiterates ”
The declining quality of education is more important ,and there should be an urgent need to address it .
Reacting to the high number of almajiris in the North east,he said there has been a fundamental transformation of religious activities into activism in the country .
“The religious activities had made some of the youth to engage in beliefs that is inimical to the growth of the country ”
“The youth need to reconnect from.some of the erroneous beliefs for the communities to move forward “he added.
The director MacArthur foundation ,Dr kole Shettima said there has been an indictment on the education system because people have lost confidence in it .
“We are perpetrating a lot of inequality in the society ,the wide between the rich and the poor is so wide ”
“The elite do not send their children and wards to the public school facilities .
Citing Lagos state as an example ,he said the state has fewer public schools ,compared to the North which has a large number of public facilities .
In addressing the issue of insurgency ,extreme inequality is one of the triggers ,which has to be nipped in the bud .
Government should provide skilled jobs that youths can venture into,and serve as source of empowerment.
There is an urgent need to criminalise hate speech ,and preachers that practice such should be severely dealt with .

Arguably, the first of such book to have rolled out of the press in Nigeria entered the national market today along with the controversy as to the very nature of Islam in relation to violence. This question turned out to be the most substantive one in the discussion that followed a background and content review of book at its presentation in Abuja attended mostly by journalists, academics and civil society activists. The 432 page book titled Understanding Community Resilience in the Context of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria concluded that Nigeria as a whole is nowhere when it comes to the capacity of communities to resist criminality, terrorism, militancy or ruptures, in short and that the study of resilience in six states cutting across the northeast and the northwest by the research in the context of Boko Haram provides the mechanisms by which communities could and should protect themselves.

One of the questions asked in the aftermath of the briefing is whether Islam is not inherently violent in relation to other religions. This attracted three comments, two of them from professors of Political Science while the third is a co-editor of the new book. Of the two professors, one is a Christian while the other is a Muslim. All three cautioned against such claim if not in historical context of militancy or violence.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim who spoke last but who offered the most elaborate clarification said a lot of social and political factors come into play when we talk about religion and violence broadly, adding that what is most crucial in the case of Nigeria is that both Islam and Christianity have been undergoing internal transformation since the mid 1970s.

While this has taken the form of Pentecostal factionalisation in Christianity, it assumed the Izala challenge to Sufism in Islam, he said. “We are, therefore, living in a time when there have been transformation and religion has been the most active arena for activism”, Professor Ibrahim, an Anglican, said, pointing out how religion has become very crucial area for social mobility, from educational provisioning to employment. Noting how this is also happening at a time of state withdrawal from social services provisioning, Professor Ibrahim added how all these affect socialisation because young people who move out of mainstream Christianity or Islam almost always end up replacing the authority and wisdom of their parents with the wisdom and authority of their new religious faction or group and hence the possibility of their being directed along certain lines. Citing just two of such, he mentioned the tendency among certain Christians to reject medical attention or blood transfusion, concluding that the Nigerian society has allowed “the minority to take the upper hand on interpretation of religion”. He, therefore, called for spending more time on the Sociology of religion.

Professor Nuhu Yaqub, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Abuja and immediate past Vice-Chancellor of Sokoto State University who also intervened in answering the question as to why Islam appears to be more violent argued against starting to compare which of Islam or Christianity is more violent. There is none of the two that preaches violence, he maintained, backing the statement up by saying that Islam which insists that God is with the person who is patient could not be a violent religion.

Contending that militancy in Islam should be placed squarely in their historical context, Professor Yaqub noted Muslims’ sense of being submerged by the West’s relationship with Islam. Like the Chinese, some Islamic civilisations such as Iran consider theirs to be old and resistant to impositions by looking for evidence of such, he pointed out, arguing that “some people use their frustration to react to what is happening around them”.

In his comment on the question, Mallam Y Z Y’au, Executive Director of the Centre for Information Technology and Development, (CITAD), the publishers of the book said the matter should be seen from the point that violence would always find a framework and the framework could be religion. But that, he said, does not mean that the religion which provides violence a framework is violent. He recalled a study by the United States Institute of Peace on why those who joined Boko Haram did so. The result showed that over 70 % of those who joined did so in terms of socio-economic reasons.

His explanation connects with one of the policy recommendations of the book in the content review he presented before the discussion session. That is the challenge of “people teaching what is not the religion at all” in schools partly because any Christopher Daniel in Nigeria is assumed to be capable of teaching Christianity just as any Garba Mohammed is also assumed to be competent to teach Islam. “Beyond regulating how people teach and practice religion, there must be scrutinising of what is taught”, he submitted.

Cardinal Onaiyekan

Cardinal John Onaiyekan, the Catholic Archbishop of Abuja would most likely agree with the immediate point above, having called attention to the problem of no one knowing the content of what multiples of religious leaders might be dishing out in the villages at a time all manner of people claim the status of religious leadership. Onaiyekan was speaking on June 13^th, 2017 at the Conference on Protection of Holy Sites organised by the peacebuilding INGO, Search for Common Ground, (SFCG).

Similarly, Ignatius Kaigama, the Bishop of Jos and President of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria would most likely agree with Professor Jibrin Ibrahim in the light of his memorable warning at the Catholic Bishop’s Conference at Our Lady Queen of Nigeria Pro-Cathedral in February 2015. Insisting on avoidance of flamboyant spirituality and noisy liturgy in favour of “teaching the people values of internalised prayers from the heart” Bishop Kaigama warned against “market place prophecies and visions, charismatic display of talents and material salvation”. Emphasising sober Christianity without tricks, rhetoric, fanfare and the craze for social media publicity, the Bishop put the conquest of poverty and narrowing of the yawning gap between the rich and the poor as the core challenge for Christianity.

The categorical nature of his intervention as reported by the News Agency of Nigeria, (NAN) speaks to the factionalisation Professor Ibrahim talked about in the case of Christianity. In the case of Islam, there might exist no better account than the documentation in Where I Stand, the joint autobiography of the late Sheikh Abubakar Gumi with Professor Ismaila Tsiga, published by Spectrum Books in 1992. Chapter Eleven of the book has been interpreted by some as a prediction of Boko Haram.

Even if only to the extent of the recommendation on checkmating the lack of centre of authority in religious teaching and practice, Understanding Community Resilience in the Context of Boko Haram Insurgency in Nigeria might have done its duty to the Nigerian State and humanity as far as use of religion by any violent group to legitimise violence is concerned. There are about six more such recommendations on building up resilience in the communities in the book.

Beyond the policy arena, the book provides the conceptual, theoretical and methodological jump off points for students of resilience in the social sciences in Nigeria as well as an African case study of resilience in the wider world. Resilience is, at the moment, a hotly contested concept in critical security studies where it has been dubbed the structural adjustment version of security provisioning – pushing that responsibility from the state to the people by naturalising such transfer in popular psychology. That is the debate this book might trigger in the Nigerian context where it is certain to be the first of such published material on the subject. It is published by CITAD, the Kano based knowledge NGO which has already published highly successful titles recently.

By Rita Michael, Bauchi

The Centre for Information Technology and Development, (CITAD) with support of the United State Institute for Peace (USIP) has made a presentation of a book on Community Resilence in the context of Boko Haram insurgency research as a key security strategy for the nation.

The research of the book, according to CITAD, was conducted in over 16 communities across six states of Adamawa, Bauchi, Borno, Kano and Jigawa .

The objective of the book was to understand what factors make communities more resilient to violent action and atrocities perpetrated by terrorists in the Northeast part of the country as well as enhancing communities capacity to bounce back from devastation.

While making a formal presentation of the book at the NUJ Press Centre in Bauchi on Thursday, the Head of Department of the Faculty of Arts of the Bauchi State University,  Dr Asabe Sadiya Mohammed, described community resilience as the ability of communities to rebound, maintain and strengthen thier functionality during and after a disturbance or to cope successfully in the face of extreme adversity or shock.

She said, “In this research, we focused on factors that make some communities able to resist, repel and recover from penetration by insurgents and their actions, involving the destruction and decimation of communities.

“In doing this, we looked at community agencies in the context of Boko Haram insurgency and attempt to answer key questions such as ” how do communities act in ways that build thier resilience to insurgency.”

Also, CITAD Research and Communication Assistant, Hamza Ibrahim Chinade, who spoke on outcomes of the research, explained that community resilence prospers when there is a robust community platform for active citizen participation and democratic decision-making which when absent breeds activities of insurgents.

He said, “Addressing challenges of unemployment and poverty, building a credible and acceptable leadership, strengthening community governance , addressing extreme social inequality, encouraging community policing were recommendations of the research to strengthen community resilience to Boko Haram.