Soldiers in a Nigerian state at the heart of an Islamist revolt shut down all venues preparing to screen live World Cup matches on Wednesday, hoping to stave off the kind of attacks that have killed more than 20 people in the past two weeks.
The Nigerian government also advised residents of Abuja to avoid public viewing centres as the 2014 World Cup kicks off in Brazil in case of attacks.
Nigeria has seen an increasingly bold series of assaults over the past five years by the Islamist militant group Boko Haram, including the kidnapping of more than 200 schoolgirls in April.
Since then, militants have set off a car bomb that killed 18 people watching a game on television at a centre in the settlement of Gavan, in the northeastern state of Adamawa, on June 1.
A week before, a suicide bomber set out for an open-air screening of a match in Nigeria’s central city of Jos. His car blew up on the way, killing three people.
Such assaults on often-ramshackle television viewing centres across Africa have raised fears militant groups will target supporters gathering to cheer on the global soccer contest.
“Our action is not to stop Nigerians … watching the World Cup. It is to protect their lives,” Brigadier-General Nicholas Rogers said on Wednesday in Yola, the capital of Adamawa state, which has been hit regularly by Boko Haram raids.
Many fans had been relying on the viewing centres – often open-sided structures with televisions set up in shops and side streets – to watch live coverage of their national squad, the “Super Eagles” – seen by many as Africa’s main champion in the contest.
The Nigerian team ahead of their international friendly soccer match against Scotland at Craven Cottage in London on May 28 2014. (Pic: Reuters)
Minister Bala Mohamed issued a directive for Abuju ordering high vigilance in places such as motor parks, restaurants, markets, supermarkets, shopping malls, banks, churches, mosques, hotels, viewing centres and hospitals.
“Apart from installing separate close circuit televisions (CCTVs), they are required to liaise with appropriate security agencies and engage well trained uniformed security personnel who shall be equipped with bomb detectors,” the minister said.
The shutdown in the impoverished regional state bordering Cameroon came a day before the tournament’s opening ceremony and first match between Brazil and Croatia.
But vegetable-seller Mary Toba said she welcomed the decision, especially after the Gavan blast.
“I had told my husband and children they would have to kill me before I let them go out to watch football. I have dreams about the danger … I thank the military for their action,” she told Reuters.
Boko Haram has declared war on all signs of what it sees as corrupting Western influence.
Security experts have said the viewing centres’ combination of soccer and, sometimes, alcohol made them a target.
Authorities have issued warnings about going to the venues in Kenya, Nigeria, and in Uganda, where memories are still fresh of bomb attacks on two centres that killed at least 74 people watching the last World Cup final.
“We’re here!” This is what is embodied in the statement that African nations, in particular West African ones, made when they declared war on Boko Haram at the conclusion of a security summit in Paris. Nigeria and neighbouring countries are to share intelligence and border surveillance in order to track the group’s movements.
African states have finally come to the party – they’re late but at least they have arrived. It was already discouraging that it took this long for our leaders to heed the call. How could Britain’s plan to tackle Boko Haram be released with more force and precision than an African one?
Technically, the fight against Boko Haram should be a Nigerian-led, African-supported initiative with the West providing a helping hand. This was the idea that emerged from the summit – the European Union, the UK and the United States would support the regional effort. When little British girls go missing in Portugal we don’t have Ghana stepping up to the United Kingdom, saying “Steady back, we got this”. When the Malaysian Airlines plane went missing we did not have anyone calling Tanzania’s president, saying “See, thing is we have this little Boeing 77-200ER that seems to have vanished…”
Your problem, your rodeo.
But alas it is not the case here.
The deputy chairperson of the African Union has called for a united international force, citing terrorism as a new phenomenon and one that needs a multi-lateral approach. This is in fact code for “USA and UK, let us borrow some soldiers and technology”.
US troops and intelligence officers have been sent to Nigeria to aid in the search for the missing girls and it is Americans who are analysing the video released by Boko Haram. They have also sent manned planes and drones within the area. The British plan consists of sending military advisors.
It seems that even before this new plan, countries outside Africa were giving a little bit more than ‘support’.
This was the decision taken during a summit held in Paris by French President Francoise Hollande (the same country siphoning extraordinary amounts of resources from its ex-colonies).
Niger’s President Mahamadou Issoufou, Chad’s President Idriss Deby Itno, Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, France’s President Francois Hollande, Cameroon’s President Paul Biya, and Benin’s President Thomas Boni Yayi pose for a photo during an African security summit to discuss the threat of Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram to regional stability, at the Elysee Palace in Paris on May 17 2014. (Pic: AFP)
The United Kingdom is to host the follow-up meeting to review the action plan.
So Africa is to lead the endeavour when we could not even organise the venue and snacks to come up with the plan? Why was this meeting not held at the African Union headquarters or somewhere else on the continent?
Again, we are in that precarious position where we want to be the life of the party but end up just turning up late, slightly drunk and dancing awkwardly in the middle of the room.
The Nigerian army has gone from blunder to blunder since the start of this debacle, initially claiming that the girls had been returned when they hadn’t and then having to recant the statement. Even western allies have expressed reservations, saying there is a concern surrounding the Nigerian state’s inability to provide decisive leadership to the military. The Nigerian government has also previously stated that they will not use force to get the girls back, and also backed out of talks to have some of the girls released.
Reservations about Nigeria’s efficiency are also shared within the country. Senator Ahmed Zanna of Boko, in a television interview with Al Jazeera, said he was disappointed in the Nigerian government who, despite having been given 1.2-trillion Lira since 2012 and having a lot of resources, has handled the situation badly.
In light of all this we now have the Global North stepping in. But the question is: do we really need this level of hand-holding?
South Africa has advanced weapons (this is a country that used to have a nuclear weapons programme), Ecowas has boots on the ground, Nigeria’s force includes 20 000 troops and aircrafts. Kenya is fast-gaining knowledge on counter-terrorism due to its own hot mess called al-Shabab.
I am pretty sure we can cobble something solid together if we put our minds to it and the West can simply add a little flavour to an already complete meal, not provide all the ingredients.
This should have been the conversation at the African Union HQ at the beginning of the crisis in April:
Goodluck Jonathan: “We have lost some girls, this is a travesty! It cannot be allowed.”
Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma: “Let me rally the troops.”
Other members: “We are on it.”
Paul Kagame would slowly swap his glasses for prescription aviators, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf would tie her bandana tighter, someone else would cock a gun while Miriam Makeba played in the background.
Yes, it sounds like a script from a Justice League comic but the truth is we need superheroes and not sidekicks when we face situations like this. The above conversation between African leaders unfortunately didn’t take place, and what has happened is far too little a bit too late.
As a continent we cannot keep being late to our own party, feigning incompetence and coming up with half-baked resolutions. When situations like this arise on the continent, we need to say “We got this, thank you”, not sit back and depend on outside help when we have the capabilities. There are more than 200 girls still missing. We need to stop being reactive and be proactive. Having summits in Paris and meetings in London and releasing the odd statement is clearly not working to curb Boko Haram and bring our girls back.
Kagure Mugo is a freelance writer and co-founder and curator of holaafrica.org, a Pan-Africanist queer women’s collective which engages in activism and awareness-building around issues of African women’s identity, experiences and sexuality. Connect with her on Twitter: @tiffmugo
Earlier this week, I was in Twitter conversation with Dr Britney Cooper and others. Cooper and I were conflicted about US military intervention but hoping something good could come of President Obama getting involved in responding to the abduction. Others in the conversation cited recent instances where concern about women and girls was used as a pretext for military invasion. I noted that when President Bush invaded Afghanistan, it was an obvious sham because he and the conservatives backing the invasion were notorious for their opposition to policies for women’s rights, both domestically and internationally. Cooper cited the “the political dangers of US imperialism” and the “need [for] a moral schema that allows us to protect Black women and girls” concluding that “we must hold these things in tension”.
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
He’s gotta be sure, he’s gotta be soon
And he’s gotta be larger than life, larger than life
US President Barack Obama. (Pic: Reuters)
I want to believe Obama is different. Isn’t he black enough, Kenyan enough, progressive enough? And I opposed US military intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and Pakistan and Syria and Korea… but maybe it could be different this time. I could not accept that hundreds of young Nigerian girls could just be carted away. One leader of a Nigerian elders group spoke out against Nigeria’s own military inaction: “The free movement of the kidnappers in a huge convoy with their captives for two weeks…is unbelievable.”
I need a hero I’m holding out for a hero ’til the morning light
Obama has a black wife, black schoolgirl daughters, a Kenyan grandmother. Can’t we trust our Soul Brother commander-in-chief to rescue the damsels and not slip in Shell oil slicks? Isn’t it possible that the same US military with an epidemic history of rape problems could somehow be a rape solution in Africa?
I need a hero
I’m holding out for a hero ’til the end of the night
He’s gotta be strong, he’s gotta be fast
And he’s gotta be fresh from the fight
I should know better. I’m Puerto Rican, a daughter of the US’s eyesore present day colony since 1898. So before I could take a definitive position, I turned to my friend and trusted colleague, Kenyan poet and playwright Shailja Patel. She sent me this article from Compare Afrique, titled ‘Dear Americans, Your Hashtags Won’t #BringBackOurGirls. You Might Actually Be Making Things Worse‘. I could clearly see that my perspective had been skewed by a lifetime of conditioning to see the US as a potential rescuer. This, in spite of my opposition to all the military intervention in my lifetime, Vietnam, Guinea-Bissau, Chile, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq…
We progressives in the US, particularly those of African heritage, can be swayed by Obama’s public stances and record of improvement in various domestic social issues. However, progressive social policies at home do not correlate in any way with anti-colonial foreign policy.
Yet I had wanted to believe. I envisioned a Blaxploitation remake of Rambo that would bring Obama striding home against a backdrop of flames, fiery red bomb blast turning to smoke behind him, fainted schoolgirl limp in his arms (saved!). But I need to remember black girls will never be the Lois Lane of this tired movie. The story of black women and sexual violence has not been a tale of rescue. Ain’t nobody gonna spin the world backwards, restore our hymen, return the blood to the capillaries in an unlacerated vulva. Our story is of endurance, and survival, and healing.
To remix Audre Lorde: the coloniser’s army will never dismantle the legacy of the coloniser’s brutality. Perhaps all of us Afro diasporans in the US, hearing about the abduction and violence against African girls, wanted something other than silence, other than business as usual. We have nightmares of our own, from the recent outrage with R. Kelly’s Black Panties album, and the latest in-depth revelation of his one-man sexual violence crusade against black girls in US, we are desperate for someone in a position of influence to notice and intervene. We want someone powerful to #BringBackOurGirls. If only it were that simple.
“I and two other girls were close together [cooking], speaking softly, and we came up with a plan.” The girls told the gunmen they needed to relieve themselves…. “As soon as we were out of sight of the gunmen, we fled…” Eventually, the three stumbled across a group of Fulani herders, who rescued them.
The Fulani herders didn’t rescue them. Those girls rescued themselves when they decided to run. I claim Nigerian schoolgirls – scared teenagers who jump off buses, who stick together and plot escape while cooking for their captors, who stand up to and outwit grown men with AK-47s – as the heroes of this story.
I just hope that if one day one of them is in a position to be the first woman president of Nigeria, and proposes economic measures that would uplift her people – at the expense of US and multinational corporations – that whoever is president of the US doesn’t send the military in to assassinate her.
Aya de Leon (@ayadeleon) is on the faculty of the Afro Diaspora Studies Department at UC Berkeley. She writes, blogs, and tweets frequently about issues related to race, gender and colonisation at ayadeleon.wordpress.com. This post was first published on Rise Africa, a blog written by a group of individuals who seek to create an atmosphere that encourages conversation between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Connect with them on Twitter: @riseafrica
I watched the first lady of my country, Nigeria, shed tears for the abducted Chibok girls over two weeks after they went missing. I didn’t actually see the tears fall: she covered her face with a large tissue.
Her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, went on a political rally in the northern city of Kano two days after the girls were abducted. The 2015 elections are, after all, only a year away. Issues such as addressing the nation over the schoolgirl abductions, and the bomb blast in Abuja days later, which killed 70 people, are obviously less pressing in nature.
Yet on national television last Sunday, the president promised Nigeria: “Wherever these girls are, we’ll surely get them out.” It’s amazing what a little international scrutiny will do. We have discovered the power of the hashtag over the last week. The simple, emphatic demand #BringBackOurGirls has moved across the Twitter timelines of the famous and the unknown, uniting Nigerian housewives and the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton. Protests have spread from Abuja to Lagos, London and Washington; CNN, the BBC, al-Jazeera and other international media organisations have flocked to the protest sites, building momentum. And now Barack Obama has called for the world to act against Boko Haram, the terror organisation that kidnapped the girls.
Protesters hold signs during a demonstration on May 6 2014 outside the Nigerian embassy in Washington, DC. (Pic: AFP)
And yet, as elated as I am over the overdue coverage this issue is finally receiving, I cannot help but wonder what comes next. When the girls are released, will they be returned to a country where they are not at risk of being abducted again? Will they be released to families that are safe from the threat of Boko Haram attacks? Will they come home to a Nigeria where the money meant for their education, their health and their future is not siphoned off into accounts around the globe?
Viewing the events surrounding the Chibok abductions, I am reminded of the Occupy Nigeria protest of January 2012, when thousands demonstrated over the sudden removal of a national petrol subsidy, causing fuel prices to double overnight. Like the #BringBackOurGirls movement, Occupy Nigeria migrated from Twitter through street protests to international coverage. The government was forced to the negotiation table. As the world looked on, causing our leaders to squirm, it was the time for us to call for the Nigeria we wanted, to demand transparency, education and better infrastructure.
But the negotiators were blinkered. They could ask for only one thing: a restoration of the subsidy. And when the petrol pump price was reduced, although not to former levels, it was as if a small victory had been won.
What victory, when our legislators were still the highest paid in the world? When our children were still some of the most illiterate in the world? When our youths suffered one of the highest levels of unemployment in the world? None of these issues had been addressed, not even when the world was watching and our government, unembarrassed by the plight of its citizens, was shamed under the vast lens of the international media.
We cannot let this opportunity pass a second time, for who knows what even greater tragedy will cause the world’s attention to return to Nigeria? Now is the time for us to widen our protest; now is the time to ask what country these girls will be returned to.
What happened to the trial of Senator Ali Ndume, alleged sponsor of Boko Haram insurgents? Why, despite the billions allocated to defence, are the insurgents reportedly better equipped than our soldiers? Why do Nigerian girls remain among the most uneducated in the world? Why has polio not been eradicated in Nigeria? Where is the $20bn that our central bank governor discovered was missing from our treasury this year? And, of course: where are our girls?
This Friday I will join hundreds of people in front of the Nigerian high commission in London to protest at the abduction of our girls and the abduction of our country. Mr President, it’s not too late for you to become the leader we elected you to be. Take your eyes off the 2015 elections and focus on the matter at hand. Bring back our girls. Bring back our money. Bring back our country.
Hundreds of parents in Nigeria, many dressed in red, held a day of desperate protest on Thursday in the town where the kidnapping of scores of schoolgirls by Islamists has left families lurching from fury to despair.
The parents began their march outside the residence of a local chief in Chibok, the town in Borno state where suspected Boko Haram insurgents stormed into a school and abducted the girls at gunpoint over a fortnight ago.
The mothers and fathers – some wailing, some chanting angrily – marched towards the scene of the kidnapping, carrying placards reading “Find Our Daughters”, before holding a prayer ceremony at the school gates.
“We want our daughters back. We want the United Nations to come and assist in rescuing our daughters. Through this march, we want to tell the whole world that we need their help to secure the release of our daughters,” Enoch Mark, whose daughter and two nieces were abducted, told AFP.
Fidelis Olubukola, a member of the Civil Society, Women Advocate Research and Documentation Centre, chants slogans for the release of the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram during a workers’ rally in Lagos on May 1 2014. (Pic: AFP)
One father drew a damning parallel with recent international efforts to find the missing Malaysia Airlines plane.
“Imagine 25 countries joining hands in a search for a missing aircraft in Malaysia whose passengers are presumed dead. Here we are talking of scores of living girls abducted by people known to have no mercy, but the government doesn’t seem to care much,” said a tearful Yakubu Maina.
The Borno government says 129 girls were taken and that 52 have since escaped.
But locals, including the principal at the targeted Government Girls Secondary School, say 230 students were taken and 187 are still missing.
The leader of Chibok’s elders forum, Pogu Bitrus, told AFP he had received information that the girls were trafficked into neighbouring Cameroon and Chad and sold as brides to insurgents for 2 000 naira ($12).
The report has not been confirmed.
“Death is preferable to this life of misery we have been living since their abduction,” said one mother at the protest, without giving his name. “We call on our government to sit up and rescue our girls.”
Criticism of government Anger at the government’s ineffectual response has fuelled protests across the country.
Police fired teargas to disperse a group of protesters on Thursday in central Lagos, local media reported, a day after hundreds rallied in the capital Abuja.
Speaking at a separate May Day rally in Abuja, the head of the Nigeria Labour Congress, Abdulwahed Omar, said: “Our hearts bleed and we pray for their safe release.
“The war on terrorism does not seem to be going well at the moment. We demand better initiatives and more commitment,” he told a crowd that included President Goodluck Jonathan, who has faced harsh criticism over the government’s response.
The mass kidnapping is one of the most shocking attacks in Boko Haram’s five-year extremist uprising, which has killed thousands across the north and centre of the country, including 1,500 people this year alone.
A delegation from the Senate in Abuja met with Jonathan on Wednesday to discuss the rescue operation, Senate spokesman Eyinnaya Abaribe told AFP on Thursday, but he declined to give details.
