By John Campbell
From
2011, when it re-emerged, until early 2015, Boko Haram inflicted one defeat
after another on the Nigerian security services, principally the army. Boko
Haram carved out a territory the size of the U.S. state of Maryland, and
threatened Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state and a major Nigerian city. For
many observers, the seeming collapse of the Nigerian military, once regarded as
the best in West Africa, was bewildering, and a sign that Boko Haram was a
formidable fighting force. Boko Haram was beaten back in 2015 by a
multinational effort, South African mercenaries, and a revived Nigerian
military.
However,
since Muhammadu Buhari assumed the presidency in May 2015, there have been
regular revelations of spectacular levels of theft of funding intended to fight
Boko Haram during the Jonathan administration. The latest chapter is the early
May 2016 disclosure by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo that the previous
administration lost some $15 billion to fraudulent security spending. The
previous estimate had been that $5.5 billion had been misappropriated. The vice
president observed that $15 billion “is more than half of the current foreign
reserves of the country.”
Boko
Haram’s ostensible success clearly owed more than observers thought at the time
to the criminal misallocation of resources away from the Nigerian army and the
other security services into private pockets. Boko Haram’s success was not so
much the result of its strength and the weaknesses of the Nigerian military,
but in large part the result of theft.
John Campbell is the Ralph Bunche Senior Fellow for Africa
Policy Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
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