The Director GenCleric reveals those behind Boko Haram, their agendaeral, Centre for Justice on Religion and Ethnicity in Nigeria, Rev. Kallamu Musa-Dikwa, has revealed why the dreaded insurgent group, Boko Haram was started by some powerful politicians in the north.
According to him, it started shortly after return of democracy to the country in 1999 when Olusegun Obasanjo became the President of Nigeria in 1999, and appointed service chiefs – all from the North Central zone – Benue, Plateau, Kogi and Kwara states. Incidentally, all of them were Christians.
“The development prompted three northern governors to come up with the idea of creating and raising Islamic militants to fight for Islam because they felt Obasanjo did not appoint their own (what they described as pure Hausa/Fulani northerners as service chiefs).
“From there, they created Islamic militants. Those governors contributed N100m each to buy working equipment, uniforms and so on for the militants. Immediately, Nigeria started experiencing religious crisis.
Rev. Musa-Dikwa said the aim was to intimidate and oppress the Christians. “They started attacking churches and killing people. Any time elections took place and they did not favour them, they would burn churches and attack their members. They never went to offices of political parties or the Independent National Electoral Commission office to carry out their attacks.
“On February 18, 2006 in Maiduguri, those boys came out and said they wanted Sharia law and that a governor in the state then did not cooperate with them. And because of a cartoon that was designed in Denmark in 2006, they protested and burnt down 66 churches in the state and killed many Christian men, women and children. After that, they started moving from house to house, church to church, yet nobody talked – we were the only ones talking or raising the alarm about what was happening”, the clergyman said.
He added that in July 2009, the insurgents “burnt down 27 churches and killed many Christians. At that time, they did not touch any Muslim man or woman. They only killed security agents and Christians.
“From 2009 till 2014, they were attacking churches – going from house to house, slaughtering Christians. They started attacking people, including Muslims in 2014 when they felt their leaders had deceived them by not backing them to fight ‘infidels’ in the North. Four of our reverends were slaughtered in 2009.”