Your iPhone shoots better photos than most cameras. Apple just leaves half the settings switched off out of the box.
Here are the 7 to change tonight:π
The story of Boko Haram is exactly this. It did not drop from the sky; it was systematically incubated within the legal & political architecture of the North. The political elites who armed, funded, & normalised them are still walking the corridors of power today, entirely untouched. That is the tragedy of it all.
These are things that are often just whispered & debated, & it's high time more prominent voices give direct callouts like this.
In the run-up to the 2003 elections, Mohammed Yusufβs followers were heavily utilised as political muscle (known then as ECOMOG thugs) to secure Ali Modu Sheriffβs gubernatorial victory in Borno State. It was a calculated political alliance.
The reward for this violence was state integration. Sheriff appointed a prominent financier & member of Yusuf's sect, Buju Foi, as the state's Commissioner for Religious Affairs. A radical sect was literally given a seat in the state executive council.
The 2009 crisis was primarily a violent divorce between politicians & their attack dogs. When Yusuf was captured alive by the army in 2009, he was extrajudicially murdered in police custody. It wasn't just the usual police trigger finger syndrome. It was the political class trying to destroy the evidence of their own complicity.
This absolute lack of accountability guarantees the cycle will continue because you cannot defeat an insurgency when the men who incubated it are walking free, negotiating political appointments in Abuja, & facing zero judicial scrutiny, or even are leading said Judiciary.
Boko Haram is sometimes treated like some organic, faceless terror group by some commentators, when in reality, it is a Frankenstein monster created by local politicians & the feudalism that is Nigerian politics. Until the state is willing to prosecute the political godfathers/class/elites who funded the first bullets, the blood will keep flowing. More "Boko Harams" will continue to rise through the same rusted politician-thug pipeline.