The Boko Haram insurgency is quite simply the biggest security threat Nigeria has faced since the 1960s. It is a two-pronged insurgency: the one violent, the other ideological. The two are fused, but while all federal, and indeed, national, and global attention has focused on the first, the second is no less pernicious--if not more so. For all our sakes, however, we must pay attention to this second strand, too.
The ideological premise of Boko Haram insurgency rests on the simple but false and destructive idea that Western education is unacceptable for Muslims, and especially for Muslim children. But as the author, Virginia Comolli argues in her 2015 book, Boko Haram: Nigeria's Islamist Insurgency, this ideology didn't just grow out of nowhere. It emerged, she says, from an explosive mix of religious absolutism, distrust of the Nigerian state and its constitutional order, anger at elite corruption, and a rejection of Western education, which the group believes is the foundation of our, in their mistaken view, "illegitimate" political system.
The surest counterweight to this false ideology, therefore, is to make education succeed in Borno and elsewhere in northern Nigeria, in every possible sense of the term. This is what I mean by Boko Halal. That is, as a counter-ideology: the idea that 'boko' is not only permissible and acceptable, it is key. After all, when stripped of the name and its cultural relativism, what is now called "Western" education is not strange to Islam at all. Muslims were early and original contributors to modern science, engineering, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and as the work of Ibn Khaldun shows, even today's social sciences. Therefore, when everyone can see the benefits of all forms of education--both secular and religious--in the lives of ordinary families and communities in Borno, then no one would need to be told that Boko is Halal.
That possibility is already underway in today's Borno. Quietly, unevenly, and with many ongoing challenges, Borno state appears to be making a strong counter statement: that the long-term answer to an anti-education ideology is more and better education, the sort of education whose functional value is everywhere visible to society. This quiet but steady progress in education is Borno's fitting response to an insurgency that killed school boys in their beds, abducted schoolgirls from their dorms, and razed down whole schools.
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The human cost of the insurgency on education across the most affected states of the North-East--Borno, Adamawa and Yobe--has been devastating. According to UNICEF, more than 2,295 teachers were killed, over 19,000 displaced, and almost 1,400 schools destroyed across the three states during the peak of the crisis between 2011 and 2017. This left about three million school children in need of emergency education support across the states. Borno State is of course the epicentre of the crisis and the worst-hit state of all, where more than half of all the schools in the state were closed for months at one time, according to the report.
The attacks on schools had a destructive logic, however: to make them unsafe for everyone so no one will turn up. And for a while, it worked. After all, schools are not just places of learning, they are also foremost symbols of modern citizenship and socialization into Nigeria's current constitutional order, which the insurgency sought to upturn above all. In this sense, rebuilding the schools is not just a regular government project. It is a counter-ideological statement that Boko is Halal.
That is why recent efforts in Borno deserve the attention of all. Reports in the news indicate that dozens of new mega schools have been commissioned across the state, including large primary and secondary schools equipped with laboratories, libraries, and sports facilities. Similar projects have reportedly extended into other local government areas, including schools combining formal curricula with Islamic studies and vocational training. Two of these mega schools were commissioned last December by the Minister of Education, Dr Tunji Alausa, who reportedly said the quality of infrastructure in the schools "blew me away" and praised the state government's investments in education as the right step in the right direction for the state.
Nigerian governments generally exaggerate their performance in news reports, but Governor Umara Zulum's chief innovation is the very idea of "mega schools" itself. Schools in urban and rural northern Nigeria tend to be scattered by the dozens across town and villages in blocks of a handful of classrooms. This makes many of our schools vulnerable to terror attacks, but also difficult to protect by limited security agents. In a context of repeated attacks, the solution is a return to the old colonial approach of constructing big schools with dozens of classrooms in relatively safer areas. These are the new mega schools in Borno.
By a happy coincidence, I have been told that the brain behind Zulum's education project in Borno is my uncle, Dr Mustapha Ibrahim Lemu, a former Commissioner of Tertiary Education in Niger State, who is now working on a similar project in a state where, like Borno, bandits destroy and displace hundreds of schools and pupils at will. But the broader and more important point is that mega schools, in Borno state or elsewhere in northern Nigeria, offer a new hope for education where once there was little. A functioning school cannot solve all the problems caused by a persistent insurgency. But a functioning school is where solutions can begin.
It is also why Boko Halal must go beyond building new schools, however big or well equipped. The real significance of education in Borno lies in all the things that go into the real meaning of education. A mega school without qualified and well-motivated teachers, books, sound administration, and equally-motivated pupils and parents can only go so far. The mega school project must carry along with it the things that make teachers, pupils and parents all feel 'mega' in their hearts and on their way to and from the schools. Equally important, the Boko Halal mega school project, as I conceive it here wholly, must provide credible pathways into viable and life-changing careers and livelihoods for the students after graduation.
The challenge for this exciting prospect, then, is to transform educational infrastructure into a life-long system with tangible returns. When the daughter of a trader becomes a nurse. When the son of a displaced farmer becomes an electrician. When a child born at an internally displaced persons' (IDP) camp becomes a teacher, a digital coder, a doctor or an entrepreneur, Boko Halal would have earned its place, and Boko Haram would run out of new recruits.
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But to move the Boko Halal idea beyond a single newspaper column, or even the policy instinct of a state governor, it must be complemented with two other things. First, Nigeria as a whole must embrace this idea as a wider national ethic. This is not a challenge for Borno state alone, or for the North-East, or a problem for the north alone. It is a Nigerian problem: no more, no less. For years, public debate about "non-kinetic" responses to this insurgency has lacked concrete proposals. If I have said anything today, it is that Boko Halal is one such proposal.
A non-kinetic approach is one that sends a message and solves the problem by other means. That is, without bullets and tanks, even though those have their uses in this crisis. In that sense, few things will be more useful than quality education linked to opportunity. Few approaches can change the narrative of this conflict as effectively as a beehive of functioning primary and secondary schools, technical colleges, skills centres, teacher training, good salaries, school feeding, scholarships, and then of course, well equipped classrooms and safe schools.
This is why Boko Halal cannot be left to the Borno state government or a handful of states alone. It must become the national model of education for northern Nigeria, and other parts of the country. The Federal Government of Nigeria, the North East Development Commission, northern political leadership and communities, private philanthropy, religious institutions, and civic organizations all have a stake in this project. Everyone must do their part. If just 10% of what we spend each year on kinetic security were invested in this non-kinetic revolution, Boko Halal would move from idea to practice. And change everything.
