Boko Haram cover-up: CAN indicts Sherif

From MODESTUS CHUKWULAKA, Abuja
Tuesday, August 4, 2009

•Photo: The Sun Publishing
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The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) on Monday accused Governor Ali Modu Sheriff of complicity in the emergence of the fundamentalist Islamist group that unleashed violence across five northern states last week. The association also alleged a cover-up by the Borno State Government in the manner the sect leader, Mohammed Yusuf, was hurriedly killed in police custody.

CAN alleged that Alhaji Buji Fai, Sheriff’s former commissioner for Religious Affairs, who was said to be a key financier of the Boko Haram sect was the link between the group and the administration, and wondered why the man was immediately taken to the Government House by security forces upon his arrest, only to be given a summary execution moments later.

“The real sponsors are in the Government House, Maiduguri ,” Elder Samuel Salifu, CAN’s national secretary, told journalists in Abuja. He said the motive behind the hurried killing of both Yusuf and Fai was to silence them before they could spill the beans on who the actual backers of the mayhem were.

“Why were the sect leader, Mohammed Yusuf and the ex-commissioner in Sheriff’s government, Alhaji Buji Fai, who was reported to have been taken to Government House silenced so quickly? We sense a cover-up by the Borno State Government,” Salifu said.

However, CAN said it was convinced that the last was yet to be heard of what it described as an unfolding drama, adding that the Sheriff administration had some explanations to make on the relationship between the government and the sect. “Let Sheriff tell us what is happening, it is important. There are so many things, and I am sure facts will begin to come out,” Salifu said.

Although CAN said the perpetrators of the mayhem in which hundreds of lives were lost should not have lived after wreaking untold havoc to innocent citizens, it said the motive behind their summary execution was suspect and was meant to prevent security agencies from getting to the roots of the matter.

Questioning why Boko Haram was allowed to establish its headquarters in the Borno State capital despite knowledge of its criminal motives, Salifu asked: “Who were the people in government who sheltered Boko Haram sect from being treated as criminal gang based on security reports? Is the Borno State Government under the leadership of Ali Modu Sheriff which has a penchant for pretentious religious public display telling the world that for two years - while the Boko Haram sect fertilized, watered, germinated, matured and started bearing fruits – that it was ignorant?”

Accusing the northern governors of complicity in the violence, which claimed the lives of three pastors in Maiduguri alone, the CAN general secretary said: “The North should be ashamed for the incessant outbreaks of religious violence year after year.”

Wondering why the group was left to operate undisturbed, even when it had been designated as security risk in the nation’s security circles, CAN said although the conflict was not between Christians and Muslims, the burning of churches and killing and maiming of Christians in Maiduguri evidenced what the sect had in store for Christians.

“We have no doubts in our minds that they would have perceived Christianity as a Western religion, which to them is also Haram (sin), which also must be eradicated,” the association said.
Indicting the security apparatus for treating the group with kid gloves, CAN noted that it only took the attack on law enforcement agencies for the government to act despite obvious and previous security reports on the threat that the sect posed to the nation as a whole.

“It appears that some people in government, who should have acted, paid deaf ears to this security threat purely out of complicity, incompetence or sympathy for the fundamental objectives of the Boko Haram sect…It was only when government felt its own security threatened that it acted,” Salifu said.
According to him, questions as to why the group was being preserved; how it acquired arms without security notice or government intervention; its sponsors; how it established a headquarters in Maiduguri for at least two years and became a law unto themselves, as well as how criminality has become synonymous with freedom of worship remain posers for the government.

“Christians are apprehensive that there is more to it than what is manifest about Boko Haram sect crisis. We need to be reassured that the federal and state governments, where the sect had taken root, were not part of the Boko Haram scheme,” said the CAN general secretary.

The implication of the various crises, CAN said, was that its members had lost confidence in the ability of government to provide security for lives and property, adding that if government continued the way it had been going, the association would have to give conditions for the co-existence of the various groups in the country.

Reacting to the CAN allegation, Borno State Director of Press, Usman Ciroma,, said it was preposterous and laughable that the tragedy, which befalls the state, could be trivialised in that manner.
Ciroma told Daily Sun that only on Sunday, the CAN leader in the state, Archbishop Pana Mani, wrote a letter to Governor Sheriff commending him over the way the Haram Boko crisis was handled.
The Borno State Government spokesman wondered whether allegations by CAN in Abuja were not just armchair criticism.

He queried: “Which politician would be suicidal to set a group to kill his own people?”
Ciroma urged the CAN leadership not to spark another round of crisis with its allegations, which according to the government spokesman, were not only preposterous but a cruel irony.