By Ndubuisi Nwafor & Ben Mukoro
The Sahel is the semi-arid region in Africa between the Sahara and the Sudanian Savanna. The Sahel has been a conduit for North-West exchanges for centuries; resource exchange through the trans-Saharan trade, as well as cultural exchange through Islamic proselytization and jihad. As it was in the past, so it is today in the Sahel where elements of belligerent actors in North Africa and elsewhere transit through and impact the socio-political and economic landscape in West Africa and Nigeria in particular.
Terrorist groups pour through the Sahel and link with friendly hosts most of which were already radicalized by Sahelian or trans-Sahelian influence. The yet increasing radicalization going on in and through the Sahel demands that stakeholders take an introspective view in order to frame an effective outward-facing strategy. This is why it is necessary to address the identity crises of Sahelian citizens in the fight against terrorism. It is also necessary to understand the question of terrorism in relation to other factors at play in Sahelian society.
The major problems troubling the Sahel region can be summed up as social and physical insecurity, climate-related environmental crisis, ethnic clashes, and religious conflicts. These problems are themselves related and require an x-ray view in order to uncover the dynamics of conflict in the region as apparent issues are often symptomatic of underlying ones.
As regards the interconnectivity of the issues, for example, one discovers that insecurity ordinarily created by religious extremism is aggravated where ethnic divides align more or less with religious border lines. Where climate change has generated a scramble for scarce resources, these already fractured populations find little impetus for dialogue when the search for sustenance leads one community to cross the traditional border. Therefore, existing tensions lead to further insecurity because of deep-seated cross-perceptions between opposing groups.
Having mentioned the pivotal role of underlying and age-long ethnic and religious divides, it is necessary to state that there is a clear absence of satisfactory government intervention on the part of governments in the region. This is largely because Sahel governments or at least key players in Sahel governments, and other important players in the region suffer from an identity crisis.
This identity crisis relates to Islamic Jihadism. Ideological grey areas encourage infiltration, radicalisation and take-over of territories as citizens and officials are often indecisive in the face of a challenge that seems to bear some elements of their own belief DNA. Stakeholders should however not be inhibited from action if beliefs are properly articulated and ordered. As long as there is a proper understanding of the principles of statehood, freedom and natural law, players should be able to act with conviction and a clear conscience.
One approach to managing conflicts is containment. By this strategy, conflicts are prevented from spreading to other areas while efforts are underway to totally eliminate them. Containment is bi-directional; interveners try to prevent export of the localized conflict and also insulate the concerned region from external aggravators.
However, containment is especially difficult to implement in the Sahel because of the transnationality of most of the major ethnic groups in the area. For example, ethnic groups such as the Fulani, Hausa, and Shuwa Arab are indigenous to widely dispersed areas of the Sahel, often having pockets of communities geographically distant from each other and ensconced amidst other groups. These transnational ethnic groups usually have a great measure of religious convergence and thus a strong group identity, woven from ethnicity, religion and common rivals. When juxtaposed with governments that are burdened with a crisis of identity, these groups tend to act with greater sense of purpose and tenacity.
The danger here is that terrorist groups tend to meld their teachings with the collective interests and fears of local groups with which they share a religious commonality. What this means is that in the crisis of identity, terrorist groups are the overall beneficiaries, taking advantage on one hand of the naivety and contemplativeness of local communities, and on the other hand the indecisiveness of officials trying to be good leaders and faithfuls at the same time. As has been mentioned already, such dilemmas ought not to exist if certain principles are properly articulated and ordered.
What then is required is a firming up of ideological positions among governments and communities; positions rooted in sound universal principles and guaranteeing the free practice of faith. When this is done, a line can more easily be drawn between the intolerant terrorist and the ordinary ‘sahelian’. This of course requires individuals, institutions, and governments to rightly divide the relevant issues and provide guidance on principled action.
Nwafor is a barrister and solicitor of the Supreme Court of Nigeria. He is a Senior Lecturer and Acting Head of Department of Jurisprudence & Legal Theory, Faculty of Law, University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus
