Boko Haram (4 page)

While it is impossible to know for certain whether it is always the same man in Shekau's video messages, it would also not seem to matter much. Regardless of whether there have been Shekau look-alikes, attacks have continued and even worsened. ‘If in fact he is dead, then it shows that we are in a much worse situation than we thought', the Nigerian official who has followed the situation closely told me. In other words, it showed he could easily be replaced without an interruption in the violence, while the decline of the Nigerian army, largely because of corruption, has left little hope that it can defeat the insurgency. Soldiers ‘would rather go to the Niger Delta to make money', he said, referring to the allegations of members of the army being involved in the lucrative oil theft racket and other crimes in that region. ‘Whoever is doing this knows they can get the Nigerian army involved in a war they cannot win.'

The lack of faith in both the government and the military has remained one of the most important reasons why the insurgency has not been stopped. ‘I don't know that northern populations have a great affinity for Boko Haram or whatever they're advocating, and civilians and moderate Muslims have been the principal
victims along with security forces of course', the Western diplomat said. ‘But there's this sea of indifference in which they are able to operate because you just don't have a lot of loyalty or affinity for a central government which is seen as completely clueless and, more importantly, unresponsive to the legitimate needs and grievances of local populations.'

As for recruitment into Boko Haram, some see a cycle of poverty and lawlessness as a main cause. ‘Religion is the basis of recruitment, so that's why they can get so many people, but the incentive for people to get into it and remain in it is the profit they make from it', Clement Nwankwo, a respected Nigerian civil society activist based in Abuja, told me in June 2014. ‘So if there is money available and these people would ordinarily live a street life, where they don't know what they get for the day, but here somebody's paying their bills, somebody is feeding them, clothing them and giving them some little profit [...] And then there is really very little consequence for their actions. They can get away with it. The military hasn't been able to respond in a way that proves a disincentive for them to continue this path.'

In the meantime, the list of the dead only grows longer, each attack helping push the unrealised potential of such an important nation further out of reach. In the south, in the country's largest city of Lagos, steps have been taken in a bid to begin taming the famously chaotic former capital of some 15 million people, whose hours-long traffic jams and exhausting pace of life have become legendary, leaving even the most resilient souls gasping for air. Lagos, along with the rest of the south, has been mainly spared the violence, though there have been questions over whether an explosion in June 2014 claimed by Boko Haram signalled the end of the city's relative peace. If so, the insurgency would reach yet another, far more dangerous stage, and the shoots of progress that have taken root would be tragically ripped out.

There have of course been other bright spots, and recently Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former World Bank
managing director, and Central Bank Governor Lamido Sanusi have worked to bring about reforms where possible and reduce corruption. But the frequent refrain in Nigeria is that when one fights corruption, corruption fights back. When Sanusi began to publicly ask questions in 2014 about billions of dollars linked to the state oil firm missing from Nigeria's accounts, he was removed from office by the president. From an aristocratic family, he has since become the emir of Kano, one of the country's most highly respected traditional rulers. He has not entirely abandoned his criticism of government corruption.

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By May 2012, Maiduguri, still considered the home base of Boko Haram, resembled something approaching a war zone. Entire neighbourhoods appeared deserted and security checkpoints kept the city on edge. Christians trying to attend church passed through metal detectors and razor wire, with women forced to leave their bags outside. It was by no means only Christians being targeted; Muslims were often the victims. Residents were caught between the incessant attacks and the heavy-handed response of soldiers, who had been accused of rounding up young men for arrest, burning homes and killing civilians.

The extremists had taken to burning schools, and yet classes were still being held in at least one of the damaged buildings. At that school, a teacher said parents insisted that it remain open, so students dressed neatly in yellow and green uniforms were there scampering among piles of broken glass and shards of cement. ‘I'm not scared because I think the worst has happened', one 14-year-old girl said as she stood near scorched walls and collapsed tin sheets. ‘There's nothing left for them to attack.'

How tragically wrong she would turn out to be. On the night of 14 April 2014, hordes of attackers would descend upon the town of Chibok and swarm the boarding school where several hundred girls were sleeping. They were dressed as soldiers and they told the girls not to worry, that they were there to protect them. They led
them outside and towards waiting pick-up trucks, and it slowly began to dawn on the girls that these men were not members of the military. They fired their guns and shouted ‘Allahu Akbar', and they forced the girls into the trucks before driving away towards a camp in the forest. Military reinforcements did not arrive. Parents, their daughters gone and the school burnt, set off towards the forest on motorcycles. They had no choice but to try to find the girls themselves.

Geoffrey Njoku heard it, the sound of a bang and the screech of metal on metal, a distant crash somewhere outside. It was a Friday morning, and the 53-year-old was inside a Standard Chartered bank branch on the ground floor of United Nations headquarters in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. He had gone there to take care of some routine personal banking before returning to his work at UNICEF offices on the third floor. Besides the bank staff, there were only two customers inside, Njoku and another person, but other areas of the sprawling, four-storey UN building, spread out over three wings in the shape of a Y in the city's diplomatic district, were already buzzing with the day's activity. When the crash rang out around 10.20 a.m., Njoku said out loud in the bank, ‘What's that sound?'

Up above on the first floor, at least two meetings were in progress. Soji Adeniyi, a UNICEF specialist in emergency planning walking with crutches at the time because of a broken leg, was leading one of them, attended by around 10 colleagues from various UN departments. It had started at around 9 a.m., more than an hour earlier, and was supposed to wrap up by 10 a.m., but it ran over, so they were all still there, in one section of an open-space work area cordoned off with movable partitions, a large table set out in the middle. Adeniyi, too, heard a sound, ‘as if it were a crash through a door or something', and also did not know what to make of it.

Vinod Alkari, a UNICEF expert from India who had worked in post-invasion Iraq, had not heard anything. He was on the third floor speaking with his colleague Shalini Bahuguna, asking whether she had seen his email related to a water, sanitation and hygiene programme. She seemed distracted and did not respond, confusing Alkari, and instead asked him if he had ‘heard something falling'.

Presumably sometime before that – perhaps days, perhaps weeks – a 27-year-old, softly spoken man in a polo-style shirt had stared into a video camera, his head wrapped in a turban, an AK-47 rifle in his hands and two others leaning against a wall on either side of him. Two gas cylinders, the type used to manufacture bombs, sat in front of him. He was thin, and the way he occasionally smiled made him appear meek. He spoke in Hausa, the predominant language in northern Nigeria, and seemed almost apologetic at times as he meandered through his speech. He was wearing something that looked like a suicide vest.
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As the young man explained what he was preparing to do, he said that he had no choice, that he must carry out Allah's bidding, and he asked his mother, father and wife to understand, while also hoping that his son would follow in his footsteps. At certain points, the sound of what seemed to be a child could be heard in the background along with the clanking of someone apparently tidying up or putting away dishes.

‘I am going to shed my blood and I pray to Allah to make me steadfast', said the young man, later identified as an auto repair worker named Mohammed Abul Barra. ‘May he take me there safely [...] My mother, my father and my wife, these three people, I call on you to be patient. I know you will be at great pains by losing me, especially you, my mother [...] It is the love of God that made me to be obedient to you and it is the same Allah that commanded me to go and carry out this mission. He even wonders if we prefer our parents, children or relations or the wealth we amassed, or a mansion you built. If you prefer this to Allah, his Prophet and jihad, then you should wait for the outcome.'

His described his belief that a suicide attack would lead him to paradise and hoped the same for his own son.

‘Then my son, my son Barra, the son of Allah, may Allah nurture you on the path of the Prophet to make you useful to Islam, to make you follow my footsteps and do what I am about to do now, which is called suicide attack.'

Later in the video, a group of unidentified men took turns giving him hugs, presumably to bid him goodbye. He was then shown sitting in the driver's seat of a grey car and spoke again, this time offering a disjointed message to the US president. When he finished, a blurry and shaky sequence showed a car being driven down a road.

‘I tell Obama and other world leaders they were created by Allah in the same way he created us', he said while seated in the driver's seat. ‘So whoever rebels against Allah and goes against his dictates, whatever his status, especially Obama, who is their leader, if he does not repent and convert to Islam, if he dies, he's going to hell and live therein for ever. Obama and other infidels should know God knows about them and is only giving them a respite. And if he seizes them, they have no excuse.'

On the morning of 26 August 2011, as Njoku was banking, Adeniyi was conducting his meeting, Alkari was trying to sort out his sanitation project and many other UN staffers were going about their usual business, the driver of a Honda Accord would make his way into the diplomatic district of the Nigerian capital, a city newly built with petrodollars, its wide boulevards and concrete office buildings giving it an artificial feel in comparison to much of the rest of the country. The driver would pull on to the street leading to UN headquarters, where some 400 staff worked, before directing his car towards the exit gates of the compound and barrelling through.

In the building itself, the atrium and reception area were located where the three branches of the Y converged, facing out in the direction of the two angled arms, about 100 metres away from
the gate. The driver moved towards it, crashing through the glass and entering the building. When he did this and burst into the reception area, shattering the glass front and colliding with a wall on the inside, a bizarre moment of uncertainty would occur. Those inside the building seemed unsure how to react, and one woman would walk towards the car. After a few moments, some would begin to run away, seemingly realising that this may not have been an accident. It would be more than 10 seconds before the bomb exploded, pulverising much of what surrounded it.
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The force of the blast collapsed walls and shattered windows, raining down shards of glass in parts of the building as if it were a hail storm.

Njoku and others inside the bank on the same floor were thrown to the ground by the impact. Something heavy had fallen on his leg, but he did not notice the pain as panic set in and he and the others began figuring out what to do. They could not see the area where the bomber had crashed into the building from where they were, but it was by then obvious that something terrible had happened and they had to escape. The entrance to the bank had collapsed and was blocked, so they were forced to look for another way out. They made their way to a back door, Njoku somehow moving under his own steam despite his injury. When he and the others finally arrived at the back of the building where everyone was gathering, he collapsed on the grass and could not stand again, his leg now swelling. While waiting to be evacuated by an ambulance, he sent a text message to his wife, telling her ‘we've been attacked and I'm injured, but I'm OK'. He was unable to make calls, possibly because of network congestion since so many people were trying to phone out, but the message had reached his wife, who tracked him down at a hospital in the area.

On the first floor where Adeniyi was holding a meeting, parts of the ceiling crashed in, windows shattered and the fire alarm rang out. Adeniyi, then 44, sensed it was a bomb and told colleagues to get under the table, worried there could be a second blast. He manoeuvred himself despite his broken leg as they all took cover.
As they did so, they could hear people wailing and crying for help from the room next door, the main auditorium, located just above where the car bomb detonated and the site of some of the worst suffering. They waited briefly under the table – Adeniyi estimates it was between three and five minutes – until they heard the sound of voices from UN security workers calling out from downstairs for everyone to evacuate to the back of the building. Adeniyi was able to get a signal on his phone, so before evacuating, he called the director of search and rescue from Nigeria's National Emergency Management Agency – someone he knew through his work – and spoke to him briefly. He was assured that the fire service was on its way. He and the others then began determining how they could get out. The partitions surrounding them had collapsed, and they had to clear one out of the way. A glass door was stuck, so Adeniyi used his crutches to break through it, and they made their way to the stairs past a gauntlet of debris. They arrived at the evacuation point at the rear of the building about 10 to 15 minutes after the explosion, everyone from Adeniyi's meeting having made it out alive. He repeatedly sent text messages to his entire contact list, telling everyone he was fine, and received calls for about an hour from those hoping to confirm with him, including his wife, before his phone battery died. He also went back into the building to try to help and document what had happened. He remembers people yelling; he took pictures and video and directed arriving rescue workers to where victims were trapped. He later found out that two of his close colleagues were among the dead on the ground floor, and he wondered what could have happened if his meeting had wrapped up earlier. ‘It would have been more disastrous for us, because maybe by then some of us may have been in the lobby or in the lift', he said.

Alkari, further up on the third floor, described a surreal series of events, followed by tense moments where it had seemed more lives were at stake if help did not arrive. Windows along with their frames collapsed inside the room, scattering glass everywhere, and ceiling tiles fell. One of the frames crashed on to the table
between him and his colleague, lightly scraping Alkari's head and drawing a small amount of blood. The lights went out, and then there was ‘a sudden silence, the kind of silence one rarely encounters'.

‘We both say “it is a bomb”,' Alkari wrote later in a personal account of what happened that day. He said subsequently: ‘The threats have come true.'
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Based on Alkari's experience in Iraq and Shalini's in Afghanistan, they decided, like Adeniyi, to take cover temporarily under the table – a procedure taught in emergency drills in case a second blast hits and to avoid being caught up in falling debris. They heard others scrambling to evacuate, but decided to wait a few minutes longer to be sure. While sitting there, Alkari managed to think to collect his laptop and his bag, and they then decided to leave, moving a window frame out of their way. Everyone from their division had already gone. When they arrived at the central atrium on the same floor, Alkari recalled that ‘everything that was on the ceiling was now on the ground, as if the whole building was turned upside down [...] Lift doors were blown off and could not be seen anywhere. There were two big gaping holes where the lift doors used to be. The lift frame was twisted out of shape as if made of paper. At the central atrium level where the lift opens, every glass panel was blown out. A wall had collapsed.'

It was then that they heard cries for help. The collapsed wall had crashed into an area occupied by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, trapping two staffers underneath tables. Two others who were not trapped were scrambling to move the collapsed part of the wall, but it was too heavy. Alkari could not be of much assistance, either, since he had suffered a slipped disk in his back, so they decided the best option was to seek help from elsewhere. It would not be so simple. Alkari moved to a window, its frame blown out, and shouted and waved repeatedly at those below. They noticed him, but seemed not to understand amid the chaos. Some waved back, signalling for him to come down. His urgent message not
getting through, Alkari asked his colleague Shalini to go downstairs to find help, and in the meantime he continued to shout from the window as well as make phone calls to colleagues. Most did not answer their phones, but he reached one man, who told him he was on his way to the hospital. By this point, Alkari could see Shalini from his spot next to what used to be the window as she pleaded with people outside.

‘They were dazed and confused to the point that nothing registered', Alkari wrote later. ‘Finally I see Shalini waving at me saying no one is coming up. She is trying to tell me that there is fire on the ground floor. I am not able to get that message. She sends me an SMS but my mind is occupied with finding help. I did not look at my mobile.'

He then saw a man in the distance down a corridor on the same floor, but the nightmare would only continue. Alkari shouted, and when the man looked his way, he tried to signal to him that people were trapped and needed help. The man stared for a moment from about 20 metres away, and Alkari later wondered if he was debating in his head whether to put himself in further danger or simply get out while he still had the chance. ‘He just turned and left', Alkari remembered. ‘I do not blame him, but feel like a person left to fend for himself.'

Shalini returned with the bad news that no one had come with her, while the UNODC staffer leading the effort to dislodge the collapsed wall was growing angry and frustrated. Alkari decided he would go downstairs himself to recruit help, and it was while moving down the steps that he began to get a more complete picture of the devastation.

‘Stairs are littered with broken glass, blown-off wood panels, light fixtures and electric wiring. From the second floor down, the stairs have blood stains everywhere. Ground floor was a complete mess. As I step on to the ground, I am in two inches of water. The sprinkler system seems to be working and most likely some water pipe had burst. And there was acrid smoke.'

An ATM machine had been thrown towards the door by the force of the blast, partially blocking Alkari's way, but he managed to slip past and make it outside, where he saw ‘several people badly hurt, lying on ground crying for help. There is one ambulance taking in someone and another is entering the area to carry others. Some people were lying lifeless, soaked with blood, either dead or in shock. Sirens are wailing, adding to confusion [...] I approach the first person I see and ask him to come with me to the third floor. He is in another world. What I am saying does not make any sense to him.'