There are several things to be said about Boko Haram, the pseudo-religious sect whose adherents disdain Western education and, last week, violently demonstrated their opposition to symbols of authority.

One of those things is that its activities, as distasteful and anti-social as they were to the rest of society, have been known to the authorities. President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua admitted as much, when he disclosed that the government's own security agencies had been aware of such activities for the past couple of years.

Indeed the Director General of the State Security Service told the national assembly that they gave Borno State government advance warning about the Boko Haram group, well ahead of the bloody attacks that led to the death of more than 700 people in Maiduguri alone.

Secondly, the unfortunate episodes in Borno, Yobe, Kano, Bauch, and Katsina states, illustrate the fact that governments are not doing nearly enough, with the enormous resources at their disposal, to address the underlying frustrations that feed upstart fringe groups like Boko Haram.

Thirdly, it is a depressing reminder of the futility of past government measures, often taken half-heartedly, usually after a scandalously high casualty figures, such as in this case, to curb the same menace, only for it to recur over and over and over again.

It is strange to laymen in security matters that what may be considered as a red flag on the Boko Haram group was ignored when on June 11th members of the Borno State anti-robbery squad, Operation Flush, were injured in an encounter with the Boko Haram sect members in Maiduguri. Motorcycle riders among the sect members refused to wear safety helmets, in breach of the law, which the police had apparently tried to enforce. The leader of the sect, Malam Mohammad Yusuf, accused the police of an unprovoked act hinting at revenge.

Ignored also was our advice, offered in an editorial on June 22: where we stated that "The Maiduguri incident must not be allowed to escalate further. This behoves both Malam Mohammed Yusuf and his followers, on the one hand, and the law enforcement agencies on the other, to maintain the peace."

Clearly, the Malam Muhammad Yusuf's group was preparing for escalation; contrary to the president's assertion that the group was being monitored, it served no purpose as it was not used to preempt the bloody event that followed.

The eruption last week of Mohammad Yusuf and his group ill-informed, perhaps brain-washed followers, was therefore as a result of a combination of factors but, chiefly, failure of the state to act proactively and thus spare us such carnage. It could have been prevented; at least it could have been contained. But because the security reports were ignored by political leaders it led to the death of over 700 dead in Maiduguri alone. There is also the way in which the leader of the sect Mohammed Yusuf was summarily executed after his capture by soldiers. We have also heard of reports of innocent people who were killed on account of their appearance suggesting that some innocent people may have lost their lives in the fracas.

All these suggests that the whole matter needs to be investigated to establish firs if indeed as claimed by the SSS, State government officials refused to act in their advise and therefore led to the death of so many hundreds on such brutal way. The investigation should also establish possible cases of extra judicial killing during the course of the operation to stamp out the Boko Haram insurgency. The authorities should also immediately begin to address the underlying causes that give rise to such sects that are so out of tune with the larger society. Doing anything less could allow the conditions that may give rise to another violently misguided groups to flourish.