Zannah Mustapha is a Maiduguri-based lawyer who stood for Boko Haram members arrested during the 2009 insurgency and proprietor of Future Prowess Islamic Foundation School which caters for orphans and vulnerable children in the city. In this interview, he gives his opinion on the ongoing peace talks between government and Boko Haram insurgents as well as how lasting peace can be achieved in the North-East Q: What do you think of the ongoing negotiation between the government and the Boko Haram insurgents group? The issue of negotiation is one which ordinarily everybody in Borno State is yearning for. There have been reports of several negotiations and ceasefire agreements reported in the media in the past, but the people involved have not been sincere. They are not addressing the issues. These problems have been there for about six years now and there is no respite and generally if you look at it, God created everything in pairs, he created peace, he created violence. If God had not created Satan for instance, we would not have had those who would be preaching peace, we will not have the police or the banks. These are evils that human beings have to tackle. Government has the ability to look for a viable way to intervene to end the insurgency and this should not be on the basis of who is involved or who is in government. Nobody has ever sat to say what brought about the insurgency in the North-East. The government has not deployed enough of its knowledge or intelligence in that area. Government first said they (Boko Haram) are faceless, they are fluid, that it cannot negotiate with terrorists; you have already created a divide that you cannot meet them. But it is for the government to create an enabling environment for the peace process to take place instead of taking what the Western nations are saying. United States of America will for instance say this is a terror organisation, but at the same time, they will go through the backdoor to negotiate with them. Where are the Tamil Tigers now? They are no longer active. So, ordinarily, government should have found avenue to engage the insurgents much earlier than now. But government has initiated that process now… Now, the insurgents have grown, they have some local governments under their control. Like one-third of Borno is in their hands; nobody goes out to Gamboru Ngala and other towns in that area because the insurgents are in control. But when they started, they were just in one enclave and it was at that time that government should have found ways talking to them. But government was busy saying we have captured the leadership of Boko Haram and this and that instead of looking for experts who could talk to these people. All the government was saying was, let’s kill them. But arms have never solved any insurgency. It is through dialogue that peace can be achieved. We must also have somebody at the centre talking, but we have a situation in which one minister will say we will engage the terrorists, another will say No, we will not talk to them. And that is not good because it shows that the centre is not strong as it used to be. But if you look at the part of the insurgents, they have firm leadership and that leader has been the one talking. But instead of government engaging him or engaging those ones they’ve captured, they are killing them, leading to accusations of extra-judicial killings and so on. But government can engage them while the military continuea to do what it is doing, though I know there is no way the issue of justice will not come up later. The insurgents have their own doctrine, they even wrote a book on it. The government can find experts to look into their doctrine and confront them with it, asking them if killing is not forbidden in Islam. If it is forbidden, why are you doing it? Engage them academically. But it is not good for the Nigeria government, for the Chief of Defence Staff to come out and tell us that the Chibok girls will be released and since then, nothing has been achieved. When you talk of dialogue, there are two parties to it, but in this instance only one party is talking. And when you look at the CDS’ speech, he said, ‘I am directed’. So, who directed him? There is so much ridicule to it and that is not good for the government. Do you think the person who claimed to be representing Boko Haram in the ongoing negotiation is a genuine member of the sect? What is happening now to the insurgency is like the HIV. When it comes to the human body, many other diseases will begin to attack you. With the insurgency, many other crimes are being committed in the name of the insurgents. For the Chibok girls, I do not have any doubt that they are safe because of the indoctrination that members of the insurgents have imbibed. I don’t think they (Boko Haram) can inflict the kind of abuse people are talking about on the girls because that is what they are preaching against. And if such abuses are happening, you would have seen some of the girls escaping. The person that came out to talk and say he is their secretary-general, as a journalist, if you have studied how they (Boko Haram members) speak, they have never for once referred to themselves as Boko Haram, but this man has said it. And ever since he has been talking, he has not mentioned God for once, or even mentioned any Arabic word. And they (Boko Haram members) don’t even lament about death or their members dying, because that is what they are yearning for anyway. And that is why the framework of engagement between them and the military has been different. The military man will want to go in, fight, come back, receive his salary and after that, retires and gets his benefits. But for an average insurgent, when he goes out he hopes never to come back. As somebody who is based in that area and is familiar with the insurgents, has the government ever approached you to be part of any negotiations? The problem was that for the whole of last month, I was in Geneva Centre for Security Policy as a participant. But we were the first to initiate dialogue with the sect and I have to acknowledge the courage of General Obasanjo. General Obasanjo knows me because I am one of the founding fathers of PDP in Borno State and he also knows about my foundation. So, General Obasanjo called me and said he was coming over to Maiduguri and that he would see me when he was at the Airport. So I met him. He was there with Comrade Shehu Sanni and General Obasanjo, being an intelligent man, didn’t tell me that he wanted to meet with families of Boko Haram members. Instead, he said, ‘You have a foundation that caters for orphans and vulnerable children, that cuts across the various sides of the divides like the military, the other security agencies and insurgents themselves”. I said that much is true. He now said, ‘Can I meet the mothers of those children at the other side of the city?’ So, from there, we went to meet them. When he went there, he sat them down and said he was there to condole them, even if it was coming late, but that it is better late than never. He said he was happy that these young children were now having this programme and that the children would have a future. He now asked them how he could help the children to have a future. But he also told them that we wanted to have peace. How do we go about it? They gave him various suggestions and conditions. He took notes and left. That was the first effort at dialogue with the sect. But after we left, Bakura, the eldest son of Baba Fugu, was killed and it was ironical because the BBC came out to report that members of the Jamatul Al Sunna were the ones that killed him. But there and then, Abu Qaqa, their spokesperson, denied it and also threatened that the group would attack BBC. So the death of Bakura was a mystery. I have stayed mostly in Maiduguri since the insurgency began and sometimes some of these deaths were mysterious. What do think should be done so that the insurgents can really to stop their war against Nigeria? The problem of insurgency is due to high neglect over the years, in which people were not being supported to even have education. We have not been lucky to have visionary leaders. It is just government comes in, government comes out. So, nobody is even trying to help to negate what insurgents are doing. The people are so much disenchanted with anything that relates to government. People will sit for exam and in a whole local government you can hardly get two students with results that qualify them for admission into the university. People are saying the insurgents are not true Muslims, not Islamic; they are inhuman and so on. But nobody is willing to talk to them, to tell them that what they are doing is wrong, and that would have been the most civilised way of approaching it. But nobody is doing that; even at the early stage of the insurgency. These people are preaching against modern civilisation and instead of countering them with a model that people will yearn to get, we are looking at them. Even with the issue of dialogue, nobody is engaging the insurgents on what they really want to get. All the leaders in Borno are not talking. When you call them for interview, they will not talk. Most of them are leaving, waiting to come back when peace returned to the state. But there is no way peace can be restored without taking steps to bring back peace. The insurgents are not even within the town for you to talk to them. But there are ways which I may not know or you cannot know but which the government may know to reach out to the insurgents, just like they went to Chad to initiate the ongoing process. But the first thing government should do is to know who are the insurgents and to also know what brought out the insurgency. You don’t think the person they are talking about now is a true representative of the insurgents? No, he can’t be a member of the insurgents because if he is a member, he would have gotten to the root of what they want. Because if you are talking of ceasefire, there has to be certain agreements it will be predicated on. They are not telling us anything that they negotiated on. Is there going to be amnesty for the insurgents because even in war situation, there is always a process for post-war amnesty. You have to talk of the 3Rs – rehabilitation, reconstruction and reintegration. For now, I know a policeman in Borno State cannot walk on the street with his uniform, he doesn’t sleep in his house, he has to sleep in his office, so how do you re-integrate them back? What government is talking about now is the peace of the graveyard. I think they should have started with the Chibok girls and get them released first because the leader of the insurgents, Abubakar Shekau, said he wanted to swap the girls with some of his people in government custody. If that is the case, government should find an avenue to engage the insurgents. The peace process is supposed to go from one phase to the other, like a sort of building block. But the man who claimed to be representing the Boko Haram people now claimed he is going to release the Chibok girls. Do you don’t think he has access to Shekau? If it is true, like yesterday (last Wednesday) we should have seen the first set of Chibok girls being released. But that never was. It would have been much easier for the government if it had gone through the right channel. But that is the work of the intelligence agencies. I may not know what the insurgents want. But the government has come out many times to say they have captured a lot of commanders of Boko Haram. Let them sit with these commanders who are in their custody and ask them what their group wants. Government can bring experts to interact with them. Some of those they captured are part of the leadership of the organisation, government should engage them. In Britain, they give parole to prisoners, so government can also give them parole or amnesty and let them also contact their leadership because they can go to meet their leaders without any problem. These things are done in other parts of the world by intelligence people: sit with them, let them put what they want on the table, and begin talking. That is the only avenue that I see can end this insurgency because we have been at it now for more than six years. And there is no other place in the world that has been under curfew for two, three years, except for my own part of the country. So we are the ones suffering more than any other people. See the quantum of money that has been spent on fighting the insurgency? If it had been put on intelligence, we would have solved the problems we are having. The insurgency is bigger now than at the beginning. The insurgents are now operating armoured vehicles, which are not the type of products you can get anywhere. How did they get them? So there are a lot of things and if you put the intelligence people on the ground, they can find out how they are getting them and then engage them by whatever means.