Nigeria: Report Gives Details, Says Terrorist Groups Gaining Foothold in Nigeria

Thompson recalled that President Umaru Yar’Adua, when he was governor of Katsina State, personally supervised the activities of the Sharia Court without any publicity. He was the executive governor when Amina Lawal was to be stoned to death. "If a country has a president that approved a death by stoning, why would you blame a man for putting into practice, the true form of Islamic fundamentalism now?" he asked.

The breakdown of the university system in Nigeria has also contributed to the problem. As Sani argued, many Nigerians take delight in sending their wards to universities in the Middle and Far East that offer free admission and scholarships to young Nigerians. Now, if they get in touch with people with bad intentions and those that can indoctrinate them, the result is what we have in Farouk Mutallab, he reasoned.

"There is no doubt that young people are vulnerable because their minds are fertile. It is a period of exuberance and reception to new, even if bad ideas.

Coupled with this is the problem of illiteracy. There is a low level of western education in the North and as such, northerners are prone to involvement in acts of violence. Also, there is a high level of ignorance, which renders people who have limited education and enlightenment vulnerable to a distorted and misleading ideology, whether religious or political.

The environment and types of religious doctrines that the youth are exposed to are another factor. Sani wants Nigerians to realize that the radical thoughts and violence which people like Farouk attempted to perpetrate in the United States was because he went to Yemen. "He grew up in Kaduna, a city that hardly knows religious tolerance… He grew up in a society that is hostile to the concept of unity and peace that is far divided. He grew up in a society where individuals preach violence and the authorities are helpless because they say religion is a very sensitive issue and such individuals act with impunity."

Sani described as ironic and hypocritical, Islamic leaders that are condemning what Farouk has done. The statements and conduct of some of such leaders, Sani argued, inspired people like him to export hostility to the level of terrorism. "Terrorism is not the major problem in Nigeria and there is no al-Qaeda base in northern Nigeria but one thing is clear: there is a steady growth and spread of Islamic fundamentalism. And it is this extremist philosophy and concept that has produced people that will take Islamic fundamentalism to the next level," he said.

Poverty is said to be another fertilizer for fundamentalism.

People who decide to pick up arms in the name of faith or God have nothing to lose because, in the words of Sani, they have kept nothing.

Another problem is the Almajiri phenomenon - where parents give out their children to Islamic scholars who have low level of education. According to Sani, these categories of children who grow up homeless and uneducated are vulnerable to dangerous ideas.

"And if you look at the development, foundation and strength of the Maitatsine group in the 80s and the recent Yusuf-led Boko Haram group, you will find out that they draw their followers and strength from this kind of arrangement," he pointed out.

According to a report on the Maitatsine crisis produced by a Tribunal of Inquiry headed by Justice Anthony Nnaemezie Aniagolu, "The traditional practice of teaching children the Holy Quran popularly known as the Almajiri system, whereby an Islamic teacher collects young boys from their parents to elsewhere other than their home villages for the purpose of teaching them Islam was a major remote cause of the disturbances in Kano."

The most important ingredient in the smooth operation of the fundamentalists is the funding provided by Saudi Arabia and some other oil-rich countries. While some of these funds are channeled towards the propagation of religion, analysts said, a lot of arsonists divert these towards fundamentalism. Some of the financial help come from the Islamic Bureau and another body based in Lahore, Pakistan.

Indeed, there have been over 150 different religious crises that consumed between 50,000 and 70,000 lives. Religious violence in northern Nigeria could be classified into different areas. In his words: "There is inter-religious violence, the one you have between the Christians and the Muslims. And there is intra-religious violence which occurs among the Muslims.

You also have isolated cases of response to international issues and you see the rise of sects. Inter-religious crises like that of Zangon Kataf in Kafanchan, Kaduna and Kano in the 80s and the intra religious clashes are those between the Sunnis and Shiites that we have in Sokoto."

He added that there had been the rise of sects, one of which was led by Muhammed Marwa Maitatsine and Boko Haram, led by Mohammed Yusuf. He mentioned the riots that came up as a result of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the crusade held by Reinhard Bonnke in Kano in the 90s and the lady that was killed in Bauchi.

There was also the case of the beheading of John Akaluka in Kano State for using a page of the Koran after going to toilet which was reported by the defunct Tempo magazine in December 1994. Jaishul Islam, a sub-sect of the Shiites killed the man because, according to them, he used the Quran as toilet paper.

The political class in the North and the clerical authority, analysts say, exploit the religious bigotry and dogma to manipulate the people and neutralize resistance against evil and injustice, effectively insulating political office holders against scrutiny and checks.

The North has, since 1980, been a theatre of war. In December 1980, Muhammadu Marwa, a one-eyed man popularly known as Maitatsine, masterminded what has been described as the worst violence against the state and humanity in Kano, Yola, and Maiduguri.

Though security operatives captured and killed the Islamic extremist and some of his followers, terrorist uprisings that have cropped up since the 1980/81 saga, have proved that the disciples of the queer Islamic fanatic believed to be a foreigner from the border-town of Jappai in northern Cameroon are still holding sway in Kano.

Twenty six years after the Maitatsine saga, precisely on April 2007, another terrorist group described simply as Taliban invaded Kano through the Panshekara axis and launched a bitter attack on uniformed men. It was a consistent reign of terror in Kano within that period as they held sway for two weeks, killing over 21 policemen and innocent citizens.

The gunmen, dressed in Islamic attire and chanting Islamic slogans, stormed the Panshekara police station where they seriously wounded three officers on duty, including a woman, before breaking into its armory where they made away with assorted arms and ammunition. Military men were immediately dispatched to the area to confront the terror group. A gun duel between the group and a combined team of the Army and Police lasted for a week, after which the Army claimed it gunned down 25 members of the group linked to the Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. They were said to be foreigners from Sudan and neighboring Niger’ Republic who are on a dangerous terror mission.

On Friday 13 April 2007, some unidentified gunmen attacked the Doroyi Juma’at Mosque on Bukuru Road in Kano, killing a renowned Islamic scholar and critic, Sheik Mahmud Jaffa Adam who was, before his gruesome murder, the Chief Imam of the mosque. Jaffa was gunned down with one of his followers during the early morning prayers.

Three other persons sustained first-degree bullet wounds. The terrorists were believed to be Taliban members. Adams was a member of the Hisbah committee but pulled out over disagreement with the state on issues bordering on Hisbah or Shariah Enforcement Agency.

On Friday 28 September 2007, some rampaging youth at Tudun Wada, a sleepy community on the outskirts of Kano metropolis, took advantage of a minor argument that ensued among students of Government Day Secondary School to cause havoc which resulted in burning of some buildings, including St. Mary Catholic Church in the area.

Similar to the Sumaila crisis, a cartoon of Prophet Mohammed allegedly sketched by a student of the school (a Christian) caused the upheavals. Some Muslim students had protested over the cartoon, a situation which compelled the school authorities to close down for the day.

Then came, the Boko Haram menace which filtered into Kano on Monday 27 July 2009, when scores of the fundamentalists invaded Wudil Police Station in Kano in search of arms and ammunition to carry out their activities. They had wanted to attack security outfits and government establishments in the ancient city but the timely intervention of the police in Kano stopped them.

They disarmed two policemen on duty and wounded the station’s divisional police officer, Sagir Idris. A police reinforcement led by Deputy Commissioner of Police, Tanko Lawal, gunned down three of the Islamic militants in a gun duel that lasted for several hours.

The following day, the police, in a cracking raid, made more arrests when they ransacked the thick forest of Gaya Local Government Area and fished out 20 remnants of the extremists. In all, about 63 members of the terror-gang were arrested and charged to court.

Days after dislodging the group from Wudil, the police in Kano arrested four people, including the vice chairman of Wudil Local Government Area, Alhaji Yusuf Ibrahim Lajawa, 50, suspected as sponsors of the Boko Haram sect in Kano.

About 30 persons, including four soldiers from the 33 Field Artillery Brigade, Bauchi, were killed in a fresh clash between members of an Islamic sect called Kala-kata and security personnel in the Zango area of Bauchi Metropolis last week. The sect claimed to be an offshoot of the original Maitatsine. Among the dead were a cripple, Yusufa Abba, and 15 children between the ages of three and seven.

All these acts point to the fact that terrorists are gaining a foothold in Nigeria.

[Description of Source: Lagos TheNews in English - independent weekly news magazine]

Nigeria: Interviewee Says Terror Elements Infiltrate Government, Security Agencies

AFP20100108619004 Lagos TheNews in English 04 Jan 10 - 11 Jan 10 pp 26027

[Interview with Rev Ladi Thompson, head of Faith-based NGO committed to religious peace in Nigeria by TheNews correspondent Alex Akinyele; date and place not given]

Reverend Ladi Thompson, the presiding pastor of Living Water Unlimited Church and head of Macedonian Initiative, a faith-based Non Governmental Organisation committed to religious peace in Nigeria, in this interview with ALEX AKINYELE speaks about the presence of international terrorists in Nigeria

Q: People see riots In Nigeria as a form of terrorism. What is your view on this?

A: The people’s views on riots as a form of terrorism in Nigeria are welcome. I remember we had an interview with media people in the year 2000. In that year we showed that there is a pattern to terrorism in Nigeria. At that time, a lot of people were arguing with our NGO. But we had seen the pattern of terrorism in this country.

We saw the difference between moderate Muslims and Muslim extremists. We have seen that the government has been infiltrated. We have seen the intelligence pattern behind terror in the country. We have seen the logistics they supplied. We have seen the communication pattern behind their operations. And I remember saying in 2000, not now, that if this problem was not addressed, it would ultimately destroy this country.

Q: You were reported to have said that the Jos crisis was not religious. Why?

A: Was everybody in this country so naive as not to know that what happened in Jos then was not religious but a form of terrorism. I was in Jos just as the crisis was going down. And I also listened to first-hand report on the crisis. The truth, first of all, is that if you go to Jos North, where the election took place then, they did not burn any political vehicles or secretariats.

They did not bum any electoral office where the election took place in Jos. It was in the middle of the night they start chanting Allahu Akbar. The bloodbath that started in Jos could have been worse than that. The question is; did the Islamic militants that struck in Jos then arrive on the day of the incident? Did they just arrive on the night of the incident? No, they had been camped in Jos.

The reason why these things are not well reported, as I said before, is that the terror elements have infiltrated the Nigerian government, including the security agencies. Let me take you a step further, because we pretend we don’t know what is happening.

At a time Nigeria itself was hardly informed about what was going on in Jos, the international community was fed with first class level of information on what was happening, including the use of Blackberry (phone) to disseminate information about the crisis. In the wake of that crisis, a world press conference was taking place in a mosque in Jos during the violence.

At that time, a lot of dead bodies were being taken off the streets, especially those of Christians. And the international press conference was taking place in a mosque while the killing was still going on. Within a few hours the report was on CNN and all over the place, including a well-prepared documentary on the crisis that had not even been concluded, being sent from phone to phone worldwide.

Before we knew what was happening, Abuja was sending instructions, everybody was calling for the removal of the governor of Plateau State at that time because the real news was being cloaked. Look, if Nigerians do not know, experts in terror know how to carry out their operations without anybody’s knowledge.

I am a consultant on conflict resolution. I have been working on this for the past 10 years. I want to know who is that person or organisation that has covered the length and breadth of this country in terms of religious crisis more than our organisation. Show me that person or organisation.

I want to tell you that 10 years ago when we began to speak about these things, people refused to listen to us. The only reason we have not gotten much cooperation is because we have never worked much with American government agencies because, on behalf of Nigeria, I disagree with America’s policy on this area.

American policy on Nigeria has been what they call dialogue. With their approach of dialogue, they ignore what is known as the doctrine of deception, which fundamentalists use, something that is an established doctrine in all schools of theology of Islam.

Let me tell you point blank the issue of Boko Haram. We have a report that we sent out earlier in February on Muhammed Yusuf the leader of the radical Islamic sect known as Boko Haram in Maiduguri. Nobody can deny this because we sent all the reports to all agencies and all security forces had the report. The pattern of terror goes beyond violence.

In the pattern of terror there are certain things you must understand; there is white collar terrorism that attacks institutions. Now, all these forms of terror are happening in Nigeria. They have gotten to about 65 percent now.

Q: Do you believe that al-Qaeda has a presence in Nigeria?

A: Those security forces know that there is presence of al-Qaeda in Nigeria. If you go to the United States report on the September 11 attack on America, Nigeria was mentioned in the official report. Nigeria was mentioned because there were some Nigerians that were directly trained by bin Laden. Beyond the training of Nigerians by bin Laden, the evidence of terrorism in Nigeria is obvious. Look, one Nigerian was arrested in Cairo with pictures of key installations in Nigeria.

The point I am making is that, churches in Nigeria, because of the money that comes from foreign funding, have found it convenient to follow the official line of foreign countries to the disadvantage of our country. You see, we need to go back to 1958 that is where the real solution to this problem lies because there is no leader now to correct these anomalies.

If you go to the northern states, there is an information blanket. These are states that are so dominated by minority Islamic fanatics, so much so that if you are a Christian working in the civil service, you will never be promoted.

Zamfara State pretends as if there are no Christians in that state, whereas we have Christians there in their thousands. Zamfara was about to introduce discriminatory school fees a while ago; that is, if you are a Muslim, you pay this fee and as a Christian you pay that fee.

The last time they said one trouble started in the North over one woman who was said to have worn trousers and walked by a mosque. We traced the woman, it was all a lie. Even before the Jos crisis started, sharpshooters were posted by the police commissioner to go and guard the mosque before the trouble started.

If you don’t know, Boko Haram is just one of the sects operating in Nigeria. We have about 26 Boko Haram groups in Nigeria. And Muhammed Yusuf was boasting of 1.6 million followers in Nigeria. So I want to tell you that what happened in Maiduguri only disabled 10 per cent of Boko Haram’s capabilities.

Where are the rest? One of the things we should be careful about is that these things would happen again. Why was Yusuf summarily executed without any trial? I want to say point blank that if Yusuf was allowed to talk, many people in high positions in the government would have been indicted including people in the security forces. Had he not been arrested before? He was arrested before and taken to Abuja but was later released? Who are the people who worked for his release?

Q: So, what is the role of foreign agents in all these?

A: First of all, I think the problem that we have is that the nation as a whole including the church is yet to understand that, from Boko Haram crisis to the one in Maiduguri, where people were slaughtered and churches burnt, we are not dealing with a local problem, we are not dealing with a regional but global problem.

You see, they are hoping to downplay it. They want to downplay the global dimension. What I am trying to tell you is that there is intelligence behind what is going on in Nigeria. I am going to give an example. I said this once and I am going to say it again. If people think it is insensitive, it is their business, because these are the people that are responsible for deaths in Nigeria, who work behind the scene.

When the present president who has refused to relinquish his position due to his ill-health was the serving governor of Katsina for eight years, he personally supervised the activities of the Sharia Court without any publicity. Yar’Adua was the executive governor when Amina Lawal was to be stoned to death.

Now, if a country has a president that approves of death by stoning, why would you blame the son of Mutallab for bringing the true form of Islamic fundamentalism? Didn’t you hear that his family said that he was in Maiduguri during the Boko Haram riots?

Let me ask you a question; Are our children normally murderers? Before children can be turned to murderers, is there not a process? Did that happen outside the country? Was anybody brought to book? Was anybody jailed? The answer is no in spite of all the rumors they spread.

Then, what signals are we sending to terrorists when they see that children under the tent of Islamic fundamentalism successfully killed their Christian teacher in Gombe State without being brought to book? So, we need to put our heads together and acknowledge the fact that we have a huge terrorism problem in Nigeria. They even have training camps established all over Nigeria. Not all training camps, they have also influenced people in high positions all over Nigeria.

We must not support all the fraud that took place in the banking sector involving the Ibrus and Akingbolas. We mustn’t support them for any reason. But at the same time, we must realize that ever before the shakeup in the banking industry, there were reports that some axis felt that banking was too southern and was too Christian.

And that banking has to be Islamized. This publication came up ever before Lamido Sanusi was appointed the Central Bank of Nigeria governor. And after he was appointed, he has consistently made remarks about the failure of western banking; that it is now time for Islamic banking.

The problem now is that if Islamic banking is allowed to take over in Nigeria, Sharia funding will take over and none of the profit must be spent on anything that is haram (taboo). And there must be a governing body that dictates what is haram and what is not haram. And according to my findings, there was nothing like Islamic banking during the time of Prophet Muhammed.

And Islamic banking has been traced to terrorism. The first person who started Islamic banking was a terrorist. And he was the one that said that it can be used as a tool of terror. Go and do your research and you will find out all these facts.

Q: Was the Bauchi riot also part of terrorism?

A: It was another form of terrorism. The Bauchi riot in which the governor traveled out of town while killing was still going on - a riot where we saw the mosque where the trouble started and the ammunition that were used. When the police came to Bauchi, Bishop Musa Tula, who is the Christian Association of Nigeria [CAN] chairman of the state, told me, and this is first hand information, because I called him:

When government forces landed with ammunition, they were planted at particular places to cut off non-Muslims from escaping. They were given instructions to intervene. When the Islamic militants swooped in, they came with guns and ammunition. The innocent citizens, including Christians, were left at the mercy of these people.

When they thought it had died down in the middle of the night, they started again. While this was going on, the governor traveled. So, let me ask you, who is going to save Nigeria, if the forces of terror polarize the Nigerian Army.

Q: Your NGO has done extensive work on killings in Nigeria. What are your findings?

A: Horrible is the word. Our findings are simple. Nigeria does not have a local problem, it has an international dimension. Secondly, the infiltration of the judicial system in Nigeria has made it possible for this crime to be committed without checks, such that terrorism is further emboldened in Nigeria, because nobody has ever been punished for it.

In addition, the public relation of this organisation is so effective that Nigeria is considered as an Islamic country outside Nigeria. The country is also descending, it lacks leadership. Morals have gone, human life has no meaning. Youths are walking across deserts and dying. Kidnapping is becoming normal in Nigeria.

Corruption is increasing and nobody has the boldness to check the advance of these decays. The only people who have the courage and the strength to do this are the Islamic fundamentalists. The terrorists are the only people with the future plan for Nigeria because they are well coordinated.

Q: So what do you think are the goals of these groups of people; to divide Nigeria?

A: They are not planning to divide Nigeria. But their plan is to Islamize the whole country. They want Sharia in every state of this country. They said that they don’t want Western education. Western education is minor in their agitation. If Western education was really the problem, how many schools did Boko Haram bum in Maiduguri?

How many professors were attacked? How many universities were destroyed? All they did was to bum churches and beheading non-Muslims.

[Description of Source: Lagos TheNews in English - independent weekly news magazine]

Nigeria Report Decries Lack of Security Reports, Surveillance on Religious Sects

AFP20100111642001 Lagos TELL in English 04 Jan 10 pp 32-33

[Report by Abdulrafiu Lawal: "At the Mercy of Bigots"]