Boko Haram: Racing to Reclaim the Initiative

It also complicates things for these groups. There have been suggestions of discord within Boko Haram (in its early days its two founders went their separate ways once they found they did not share the same vision for the future of the group). But complex politics, relationships and disagreements are likely to emerge among the various groups in the event of competition over territory, resources, and profile.

While it is too reductive to explain Boko Haram's emergence through socio-economic factors alone, it is no coincidence that it emerged from Nigeria's most impoverished region, the north-east. Delivery on reforms in the power and agricultural sectors, critical to economic diversification in the country, would change the lives of all Nigerians - but in particular would allow for regeneration of the northern economy.

Local Focus

Nigeria's federal and state governments and critically, local authorities and traditional leaders, need to (re)gain some credibility among their northern constituencies. Boko Haram - the core organization in its original form - emerged as a local group that recruited locally. In the shorter term therefore, gaining the trust of communities and engaging at this level is the best route to understanding and containing such groups, and to preventing further recruitment and r adicalization.

What started as a local issue has taken on a regional dimension - which is inevitable with porous borders spanned by family ties, communities and trade.

Policing Nigeria's borders with Niger, Chad and Cameroon but without crippling the border economies is a key challenge.

International Response

International partners can provide advice, technical assistance and logistical support. But overt and overly interventionist involvement by international partners could worsen the problem: conferring upon Boko Haram an international profile that it does not - at least thus far - warrant and thereby motivating it to up its game.

International partners can play a crucial role in frustrating the development of Boko Haram's relationships with regional and international terrorist groups. While informal relationships may already exist, Boko Haram and its affiliates/copycats remain largely Nigerian - the conflation of Nigerian groups with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is unhelpful at best and damaging at worst. In terms of regional dimensions of the problem there is also a need to better understand illicit trading routes across the region.

Boko Haram presents one further challenge to this nascent democracy. There are serious concerns about what it is doing to the cohesion of this at times seemingly divided nation. But it is also thanks to Nigeria's scale and diversity that Boko Haram cannot on its own put the country on a negative trajectory. Nigerians often remark that no condition is permanent, and the political will to implement a careful, nuanced and multifaceted strategy could shift the balance and start to slow and then reverse Boko Haram's damaging march.

For additional reading on this topic please see:

Nigeria in 2012: Crises and Reforms
Boko Haram's Evolving Threat
The Threat of Terrorism in Northern and Sub-Saharan Africa