Boko Haram; Still too early for IDPs to return home?

By Blogger

It is more  like placing the cart before the horse for the persons internally displaced by Boko Haram to be pushed back home at a time soldiers are still clearing more  territories  controlled by Boko Haram. 

There are hundreds of hamlets, villages and farming communities too remote for the reach of security coverage. 

Borno state government insistence that IDPs should  return quickly to 'reclaimed' territories is like packaging multitudes for a slaughter. 

Though the Nigerian troops have effectively decimated the beligerent capacity of the Boko Haram from being the  commando-like attackers to a coughing bunch of suicide bombers, does not mean the insurgents are not still around and lethal.

The recent attack on Dikwa IDP camp which left over a hundred people killed and injured had left a bitter taste on the mouths of those considering the option of returning to the reclaimed but dangerous territories.

Whether we like to hear it or not, the about 100 thousand Nigerian Army capacity, which can be rationed to one soldier per 1700 people, cannot protect the entire Borno state.
Borno state alone is almost the size of Sierra Leone, which has 13,000 soldiers (Army) to protect the 5.7 million citizenry.

Borno state is populated by 4,588,668 people that dotted a land mass of 70, 898sqkm, while Sierra Leone as a country has 5, 743, 725 people on a land mass of 71,74sqkm.

So if Sierra Leone has a  total of 13000 soldiers in its army, a state like Borno alone should have about 11000 troops of the Nigerian Army to manage the Boko Haram conflict. But it is not certain , as it is still left to conjecture, as to whether the total number of soldiers deployed to the more volatile  northeastern states of Borno, Yobe and Adamawa are upto 13,000.

Reason, I believe, why the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General TY Buratai said, in January this year, that there is need for the current size of soldiers of the Army to be increased to 200, 000 in the next coming years. The Army chief said he intends to achieve that by recruiting at least 12,000 this year.

Until that is done, it is safe to say that much as Nigerian troops are clearing and recovering one terror  camp and the other, it still, for now,  lacks the capacity to hold unto every  cleared area.

"We cannot establish a Base in every village we recover from Boko Haram, because there hundreds of them", said a top soldiers who also leads in the ongoing counter insurgency war.

The Army officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of official restrictions on speaking to the press by non assigned soldiers, said "the best place for the displaced people is still the camps.

"They are safer there. But if you allow them to return to the cleared villages, there are assumptions that some of the dislodged terrorists would find their way to those isolated villages and possibly attack the people".