RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT
Insinuations by a U.S. member of Congress that American taxpayers’ money may have been used to fund terrorist groups around the world, including Boko Haram, have prompted Nigeria’s federal lawmakers to order a probe into the activities of USAID in the country’s North East.
Despite assurances by the U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria, Richard Mills, who said in a statement that “there was no evidence that the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, was funding Boko Haram or any terrorist group in Nigeria,” Nigeria’s lawmakers appear intent on investigating.
No doubt, a probe into Nigeria’s long drawn counter-terrorism operation is long overdue. Since 2009 with the rise of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, billions of dollars have poured into the North East, an area the size of New England, ostensibly to assist aid groups providing vital humanitarian relief for civilians caught in the rapidly degenerating security landscape.
This vital aid has now stopped due to Washington’s decision to freeze foreign assistance for 90 days. According to the U.N., a total of $910 million is required this year alone to respond to the humanitarian needs of 3.6 million people in the states of Borno, Adamawa and Yobe in northeast Nigeria.
It would not be the first time we have heard accusations of this nature. What is different, however, this time around is that the current furor risks distracting from the real problem: Nigeria’s war against Boko Haram. Over the years, Nigeria’s military have been increasingly unable to contend with the insurgency’s extraordinary resilience.
As recently as January, General Christopher Musa, Nigeria’s Chief of Defense Staff, told Al Jazeera, “as we speak, over 120,000 Boko Haram members have surrendered, and most of them came with hard currency. How did they get it? How are they funded? How did they get the training? How did they get the equipment?… How are they able to sustain themselves for 15 years? That is one question I think everybody should ask themselves.”
These are tough questions that Nigeria’s military and intelligence services claim to have no means of answering. Hence aid groups, flush with foreign currencies, have become easy scapegoats. In October 2019, the Nigerian army banned two NGOs — Action Against Hunger and Mercy Corps — from providing humanitarian services in the North East, accusing them of working with Boko Haram. The groups rejected the accusations, with Action Against Hunger stressing they only deliver “neutral, impartial and independent” aid to the most vulnerable, especially women and children in the North East.
Since fighting began in 2009, approximately 35,000 people have been killed, while 2.5 million people have been displaced from their homes and a further 230,000 people have fled to neighboring Chad, Cameroon and Niger. Often, aid workers themselves have been caught in the crossfire, with 37 killed since 2009. In 2018, Médecins Sans Frontières was forced to briefly halt its operations when a deadly strike by Boko Haram fighters on a military base in Borno state killed at least three aid workers. The military base was near a camp hosting about 55,000 internally displaced persons.
Meanwhile, contrary to Nigeria’s chief of defense staff, there appears to be plenty of evidence, dating back to 2014, of where Boko Haram gets its funding. “During this period, Boko Haram relied on local sources of funding, including robberies, kidnappings for ransom, and extortion of communities under their control,” Zagazola Makama, a counterterrorism and security expert in the Lake Chad region, told Responsible Statecraft.
