Boko Haram (12 page)

‘Even myself, I agreed with him – completely', the 41-year-old Adibe, thin and bald-headed with a grey-flecked goatee, told me one afternoon at his bare-bones law office in Abuja, where he moved after the situation became too tense in Maiduguri. As we spoke, there was no electricity in his office thanks to another of Nigeria's repeated power cuts. The windows were open and the sound of horns bleating outside on Abuja's roads occasionally echoed into the building. Adibe, his voice calm but insistent, explained further: ‘Because his preachings were usually against the ruling class, and
you don't need any special kind of education, or even come close to him, to agree with him, particularly when you consider the level of poverty in the land at that time. His preachings were [...] things that people could identify with.'

Kyari Mohammed, who has closely followed Boko Haram as head of the Centre for Peace and Security Studies at Modibbo Adama University in Nigeria, held a similar view. For him, Yusuf's crusade against Western influence resonated in Maiduguri and elsewhere because all many young people in north-eastern Nigeria know of Western-style democracy is what they have been subjected to: elites filling their pockets while the masses of poor struggle to survive.

There were of course other factors that helped feed Yusuf's movement. One was political thuggery, with politicians in the north-east, like their counterparts in the Niger Delta in the south, using local gangs to intimidate opponents and rig elections. Once elections ended and politicians stopped paying them off, the ‘militias', bitter over being abandoned, were said to have joined with Yusuf. One politician who has come under particular scrutiny over the issue is Ali Modu Sheriff, the former governor of Borno state. Ahead of the 2003 elections, he was a member of the Senate, becoming Borno governor after the April 2003 polls and serving for two terms. Sheriff has been accused of using and abandoning thugs who went by the name ECOMOG – co-opting the name of a West African military force – and as a result contributing to the development of Boko Haram. He has repeatedly denied the allegations. A Nigerian government committee appointed to look into the Boko Haram crisis described the problem in detail, as highlighted in a White Paper produced from its findings.

‘The report traced the origin of private militias in Borno state in particular, of which Boko Haram is an offshoot, to politicians who set them up in the run-up to the 2003 general elections', the White Paper drafted by a panel headed by Interior Minister Abba Moro said, according to an account by Nigeria's
Sunday Trust
newspaper.

There have also been allegations that Sheriff promised he would institute strict sharia law in order to gain the backing of Boko Haram followers in the 2003 vote before later reneging.
⁶⁸
In 2014, with elections months away, the ex-governor would again be accused of financing elements of Boko Haram by an Australian mediator seeking the release of more than 200 kidnapped schoolgirls. The mediator, Stephen Davis, also accused a former army chief of staff of sponsoring the insurgents. Both men forcefully denied the accusations.
⁶⁹

Another factor some argue helped supply Yusuf with followers involved the young Qur'anic students known as almajiris, who travel from rural areas to study under Islamic teachers in cities and towns, including Maiduguri. The system has long been in existence and has been described as producing promising students in line with tradition – Usman Dan Fodio was himself a travelling scholar, for example. But it has been criticised more recently as unadapted to the modern world, without enough supervision of schools and their teachers. There have been allegations of families in northern Nigeria too poor to care for their children on their own sending them to live at schools that sometimes amount to little more than shacks, with the students then sent begging on the streets for alms. However, many caution against blaming almajiris for the rise of Boko Haram, and they are correct in saying that no one is sure whether they constituted a significant number of Yusuf's followers. Nevertheless, the government panel on Boko Haram called for the almajiri schooling system to be modernised
since it may be producing young people susceptible to becoming extremists.
⁷⁰

The number of followers Yusuf had has never been authoritatively determined, though a military estimate said there were 4,000 in 2009 at the time of his uprising.
⁷¹
The government White Paper said most members were poor and aimless young people, though the military has claimed that earlier on it included educated adherents such as university professors and civil servants. Borders in the north-east are porous, and it is certainly not out of the question that young men from Chad, Niger or Cameroon were also part of the movement, but attempts by some to blame the problem on foreigners have never been backed up with proof.

‘The sect draws the bulk of its membership from [motorcycle taxi drivers] and the vast army of unemployed youths, school drop-outs, and drug addicts that abound in the affected areas', the government White Paper said. It added that ‘the federal, state and local governments should as a matter of priority, initiate and design appropriate measures for mass economic empowerment. To this end, the federal and state governments should immediately address the issue of unemployment in the face of the large number of jobless youths in northeast zone.'
⁷²

While there were more than enough rudderless young men in Maiduguri and its surroundings for Boko Haram to draw from, Yusuf's movement required more than just members. He also needed money, and determining where he received it from has long been one of Nigeria's great parlour games and the impetus for grand conspiracy theories, including from those who suspected Yusuf of acting on behalf of powerful politicians. It is important to distinguish between Boko Haram under Yusuf and its re-emergence after his death, when such questions would become far more complicated and suspicions over links to foreign groups would deepen.

First, a significant amount of its financing under Yusuf is believed to have come from members themselves, including those encouraged to sell their goods and property and commit to the
cause. It is not unreasonable to suggest that the group also provided some form of welfare assistance to its particularly impoverished members, with the Nigerian state failing to supply any basic level of social programmes or safety net, and that this could have strengthened Yusuf's standing among the poor.
⁷³

One specific instance that has given rise to conspiracy theories involved a high-profile member named Buji Foi, a former Borno state commissioner for religious affairs under Sheriff who later became a Boko Haram member. Foi was suspected of financing the group, and some have sought to link Sheriff, the former Borno governor, to Boko Haram through him, alleging that the governor funnelled money to Yusuf through his commissioner.
⁷⁴
Sheriff, again, has always denied this, and Foi was killed in 2009 following the uprising. A shaky video purportedly showing police summarily executing him was posted online.
⁷⁵
‘Buji Foi was a politician [...] And he was out of my cabinet two years before the Boko Haram crisis and, if I would be held responsible for anything done by anybody who served in my cabinet, then nobody can govern any state in Nigeria', Sheriff told local journalists in 2011.
⁷⁶

Beyond Nigeria, there have been claims of Osama bin Laden supplying seed money to Boko Haram in its early years through intermediaries. It should be stressed, however, that such claims are questionable and no proof has ever been offered for them.
⁷⁷
Bin Laden, however, did in 2003 name Nigeria as one of several countries ready for ‘liberation'.
⁷⁸

In 2012, allegations also emerged in Britain and Nigeria that Boko Haram had benefited from money from a London-based Islamic charity named as the Al-Muntada Trust Fund. An inquiry by Britain's Charity Commission found no organisation by that name, but it did locate an Al Muntada Al-Islami Trust. The commission turned up no evidence of such activity, and the Trust has strongly denied it.
⁷⁹

With or without prominent backing, Yusuf was able to build a formidable movement, with recordings of his sermons
being sold in the markets and circulated among sympathisers. The police repeatedly arrested him, but he does not appear to have ever been convicted of a crime. The government White Paper noted two occasions when a court in Abuja discharged him and followers welcomed him home in celebration. It said that ‘the reception accorded him upon his return to Maiduguri attracted a mammoth crowd that temporarily undermined state authority, and served as an avenue for him to attract additional membership into the sect'.
⁸⁰
He also participated in debates where he defended his beliefs and interpretations of the Qur'an. The academic who studied his recorded sermons quoted him as saying in one such debate: ‘The system of modern education that the Europeans brought to Nigeria contradicts Islamic faith. I am not the first to say so for earlier scholars like Ibn Taymiyyah as well as modern scholars of Islam have also said so.' The academic then paraphrased Yusuf: ‘When asked whether he had studied in schools, he responded that he never even attended primary school, and that he obtained his information about modern subjects from the British encyclopedia.'
⁸¹

Adam became increasingly frustrated with Yusuf and publicly questioned his teachings, seeking to point out what he saw as his former student's hypocrisy. In particularly scathing comments, Adam sought to portray Yusuf as a dilettante misleading his followers with potentially dangerous consequences. He said:

Adam would also paint Yusuf as a hypocrite.

Worries grew over the intentions of Yusuf and his followers, and the intelligence and security agencies would say later that they were keeping an eye on them. A well-known Salafist cleric in Nigeria,
Sheikh Muhammad Awwal Adam Albani, claimed he met with Yusuf to counsel him on his misguided beliefs, while Adam was said to have had a series of meetings with him for the same purpose in addition to their encounter in Saudi Arabia.

‘I was one of those who constantly talked to him about the ideology of Boko Haram', Albani told Nigeria's
Sunday Trust
newspaper in an interview published in January 2012.

In 2007, as Adam led dawn prayers in Kano, gunmen stormed the Dorayi Juma'at Mosque and shot him dead. Suspicions have remained that Yusuf acted against his former master and was behind the murder of the man who once mentored him. There have also been allegations of political motives for the killing as the murder occurred a day before governorship elections, with presidential polls set for the following week. Albani, too, would be murdered along with his wife and son years later in February 2014, with Boko Haram members also suspected.