Implications of Boko Haram Insurgency on Integration: Evidences from Northern Nigeria

Abstract

The paper investigated the implications of Boko Haram Insurgency on integration in the northern states of Nigeria. It utilized secondary data sourced from books, research journals, reports, magazines, newspapers, and thesis to trace the evolution of Boko Haram insurgence and its implications for integration. The study was anchored on the Relative Deprivation Theory to argue that the inability of the people especially the youth, to benefit from resource allocation, was a factor in the emergence of Boko Haram insurgency. It utilised the qualitative method of content analysis to discuss secondary data sourced online. It found that several factors precipitated the Boko Haram insurgency, such as poverty, unemployment, etc., resulting in social, economic and political consequences; and the federal government responded to the insurgency using soft and hard measures. This paper concluded that while the sect’s mission to institute a strict version of Islam and introduce sharia law across Nigeria, especially in the north, has failed, it has succeeded in disintegrating the southerners and the northerners who hitherto had lived together in peace and harmony. The paper recommends that the government could still adopt the soft approach for dialogue with the insurgents by granting amnesty to the repentant members of the sect, provide employment, and allow the uneducated or illiterates amongst them to either go to school or to acquire skills for self-employment as part of short run measures. Needless to say that long or longer term measures have to be put in place to concretely and holistically resolve the insurgency in hope that peace might return to the volatile northeast in particular and northern Nigeria generally.