Widespread poverty, illiteracy, high rate of youth unemployment and youth anger provided a fertile ground for the Boko Haram insurgency and the government at various levels must go back to the roots in order to bring an end to it, Borno State Governor Kashim Shettima said in Abuja at the weekend.
The governor said the seeds of the problem had been sprouting in Borno State and in the country for the past 30 years due to a failure of leadership at various levels. For example, he said, in the last two years, the ten local government areas that make up Borno North produced only two students with 5 GCE credits and above, "and even those two, I heard, were the sons of soldiers posted to the area. So apart from the children of elite, there were no children of ordinary persons in the whole of Borno North who were qualified to secure admission into the university." Shettima said the late Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf, "despite his misguided ideology, retained the loyalty of his supporters by providing one meal a day to each of his disciples. He also had a youth empowerment scheme, under which he helped his disciples to go into petty trading and wheel barrow pushing. He also arranged cheap marriages between sect members, which enabled many of them to marry, which gave them personal dignity and self worth."
He described the current deployment of soldiers to tackle the Boko Haram insurgency as "not the preferred solution, but the soldiers are needed for now to protect lives and property." He said unless a political solution is found, "we could be in for a war of attrition."
He described Boko Haram as "a Bermuda Triangle made up of three legs, the sect members, the political wing of Boko Haram which hobnobs with leaders of the PDP in the state, as well as ordinary criminals who cash in on the situation."
Shettima added, "What is needed now is not blame game but to find a solution. We need a holistic approach, including dialoguing with the sect's moderate elements in order to rehabilitate them. Borno State government will pursue a socio-economic empowerment program at the grassroots with agriculture as its centerpiece. My administration inherited N62 billion from former governor Ali Modu Sheriff, which has since increased to N72 billion. Next month, we shall convene a Borno Stakeholders' Conference to work out a Marshal Plan for the state's progress."
He said as part of the plan, the government will plant 20 million Gum Arabic and one million Jathropha seedlings in order to fight desertification and create wealth and employment. It will also rehabilitate the Chad Basin Development Authority's abandoned 30 KVA power station to augment supply to Borno State which currently gets only 5 KVA of power a day.
DailyTrust