Boko Haram (25 page)

But as the days passed following the summit, there were still no results, and the government seemed to lose patience with the criticism it was facing. Meanwhile, as the fate of the kidnapped girls dominated coverage of the insurgency, more deadly attacks were occurring, including in areas near Chibok.

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What appeared to have been a coordinated effort to strike back began in late May. The problem was that the target was not Boko Haram, but those demanding action from the government. Daily protests of around 100 or so people wearing red had been occurring in Abuja, organised by civil society activists and others, including some with links to the opposition. The demonstrations had been peaceful and restrained, mainly led by Oby Ezekwesili, the former World Bank official and ex-minister whose speech in April was said to have led to the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag. At each of
the gatherings, Ezekwesili would marshal the crowd with a single-minded set of call-and-response chants:

It all appeared well-meaning, but seemed unlikely to start a mass movement among Nigerians. Nevertheless, on 26 May, they would begin to be targeted, and whoever was pulling the strings seemed to be following the crudest and most unsophisticated dirty-tricks playbook. A new group of ‘protesters' would appear, a rowdy collection of young men and women driven to their meeting point aboard buses.
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Many people instantly saw it for what it almost surely was: a paid-for crowd designed to provoke, intimidate and sow confusion. On the first day of their protest, they marched holding placards in support of the military and were greeted by a delegation that included the country's chief of defence staff, Air Marshal Alex Badeh, who used the occasion to make an extraordinary claim. He told a handful of journalists present that he knew where the abducted girls were located, then seemed to indicate that the government would negotiate a deal to free them, contradicting earlier statements that it would not bargain with Boko Haram. ‘The good news for the girls is that we know where they are, but we cannot tell you, OK. We cannot come and tell you military secrets here. Just leave us alone. We are working. We will get the girls back', Badeh said. After referring to the kinds of weapons being seized from the Islamists that he said could not have come from Nigeria's armed forces, he hinted at conspiracies and agreed with President Jonathan's assessment that Boko Haram had become Al-Qaeda in West Africa. ‘There are people from outside fuelling this thing. That's why when Mr President said we have Al-Qaeda in West Africa, I believe it 100 per cent, because I know that people from outside Nigeria are in this war. They are fighting
us. They want to destabilise our country, and some people in this country are standing with the forces of darkness.'
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Addressing the crowd, he said that using force to rescue the girls would put their lives in danger, and the ‘protesters' responded in support of him.

‘We want our girls back. But I can tell you we can do it [...] But where they are held, can we go with force?' Badeh asked. ‘No', the protesters said in response.

‘If we go with force, what will happen?', Badeh asked. On cue, the crowd responded: ‘They will die.'

‘So nobody should come and say the Nigerian military does not know what it is doing', Badeh explained. ‘We can't go and kill our girls in the name of trying to get them back.'

The comments were obviously intended to deflect criticism from the military, but days later, news emerged that an Australian negotiator who had previously helped mediate in the conflict in the Niger Delta was in Nigeria and seeking to broker a deal to free the girls. Stephen Davis told journalists that he had arrived in the country around the beginning of May at President Jonathan's request and had travelled to the north-east. In comments in early June, Davis said he believed that most of the girls had been taken over the border into Cameroon, Chad or Niger and separated into three different groups. He told Britain's Channel 4 that he had come close to negotiating a deal three times, but that ‘vested interests' sabotaged the talks. He did not provide details on whom he meant, and it was also not clear which Boko Haram ‘commanders' Davis had been in touch with.
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Attempting to talk to Boko Haram would be a formidable challenge for anyone. It has never been clear whether anyone can truly represent the group and speak on its behalf given its lack of a clear structure. Davis may have indeed been speaking with someone, but whether they were truly Boko Haram ‘commanders' was another question.

The original Bring Back Our Girls protesters led by Oby Ezekwesili and others pushed ahead with their campaign. However,
the counter-protesters and their backers, whoever they were, began to target them specifically. The site of the protests were the country's Unity Fountain, a monument celebrating the coming together of such a diverse nation. Tellingly, however, the fountain, a series of white columns with Nigeria's states listed on them, did not function, its black hoses strewn across an empty pool. One of Abuja's major centres of power was located just across the street, the heavily secured Transcorp Hilton hotel, where politicians and businessmen hammered out deals in suites on the posh ninth and tenth floors and dined at a private restaurant whose windows overlooked the newly built city below.

The counter-protesters setting up at the Unity Fountain wore red shirts that mimicked the Bring Back Our Girls demonstrators, though with a slight change. The slogan written on the shirts was ‘Release Our Girls' instead of ‘Bring Back Our Girls' – in other words, they were not demanding that the government act; they were directing their plea to Boko Haram or, for the conspiracy-minded among them, to the northern politicians they believed were holding the girls as part of an anti-Jonathan plot. At first, the legitimate protesters sought to continue their rallies at the same location despite the rowdy crowd gathering nearby. One of the protest organisers, a civil society activist and professor named Jibrin Ibrahim, claimed the counter-demonstrators had been paid 3,000 naira ($20) each to attend and questioned who was responsible.
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A counter-protest leader, Abduljalal Dauda, said the demonstration was independent of the government, though he added that participants may have been given 1,000 naira or so by organisers to cover their transport since they lived outside Abuja.

The Bring Back Our Girls leaders urged their followers not to respond to the provocations, remain calm and ignore them as much as possible. It worked at first, but the counter-demonstrators were not going to go away easily, and some of their leaders were spouting badly misinformed conspiracy theories, hinting at a vaguely defined international plot against Nigeria. Dauda made
reference to a widely believed rumour in Nigeria: that the United States predicted the country's break-up by 2015.
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‘The truth of the matter is that even the same people in the United States of America said that Nigeria would disintegrate in 2015', Dauda, chairman of a Nigerian youth council who said the young men at the protests were his ‘constituents', told me. Felicia Sani, head of an organisation of market women, chimed in at that point. I had earlier told her I was American. ‘As we didn't disintegrate, you are trying to disintegrate us', she said. A short while later, Dauda sought to explain in more detail, though I had difficulty following his logic.

‘So what I am trying to tell you is this', he said as we sat in chairs in the grass near the Unity Fountain surrounded by counter-protesters he was supervising:

I first met Jude Tabai, the man who presented himself as working in an unspecified security role for the president's team, while speaking with Abduljalal Dauda and Felicia Sani. It was a short time later, after one of his underlings insistently told me that Tabai wanted to speak with me, that we discussed the situation in more detail. We stood about 20 metres away from the counter-protest organisers, and the more we spoke, the more he seemed to relish explaining to me the sinister forces at work trying to bring down President Jonathan.

‘Why and where are they?', I asked him after he claimed that the girls had been released by ‘collaborators and co-sponsors'. ‘Good', he said, his voice climbing, pleased with the chance to tell the story. ‘Because, you know why they have been released? Because of the force the international community came with. Do you know that all those who never spoke against Boko Haram – the heavyweights, the religious leaders, the emirs who never spoke – all got up and start speaking now, that Boko Haram is this, Boko Haram is that, Boko Haram is this, Boko Haram is that. So it is like, why now? Because they now know the gravity of international community taking over this battle.'

His argument as far as I could tell was that the northern elites pulling the strings had got more than they had bargained for and must now find a way out before the plot is uncovered:

We spoke for about 30 minutes before I left him to talk to the original Bring Back Our Girls protesters. They were outnumbered by the counter-demonstrators, who were about 300 in total compared to the original rally's several dozen. Hadiza Bala Usman, one of the organisers for the Bring Back Our Girls rally, took the high road and sought to keep the focus on the Chibok girls when I asked whether she believed the counter-protesters were sponsored by the government. ‘Well, I'm not aware because I haven't engaged them in any discussion. It's just interesting to note that people are coming out after – this is our twenty-eighth day of protesting, twenty-eighth day of sustained protests, and it is important to know that the girls have been abducted for 47 days now', said Usman, who has been aligned with the opposition in Nigeria and whose late father was a revered northern intellectual. ‘So for people to start protesting two days, 45 days after the abduction of the girls, is quite an interesting thing to note. But I don't know who they are. I don't know where they're coming from. I hear them mentioning the fact that they are protesting for the release of the girls from the abductors.'

She continued as she kept an eye on the Bring Back Our Girls protesters assembling nearby since she was due to start the rally soon: