Nigeria has just suffered one of its worst terrorist attacks since the death in May 2021 of Abubakar Shekau, leader of the Islamist sect Boko Haram. Indeed, terrorists opened fire, on June 5, on worshipers at the Saint Francis Catholic Church in the town of Owo, in Ondo State located in southwestern Nigeria. They also reportedly detonated bombs killing at least 50 people.
What ignominy! What cruelty! This carnage, which was deplored by the authorities and the Holy Father, shows that the terrorist hydra seems to have regained the hair of the beast in Nigeria. This is to say that the death of Aboubakar Shekau certainly weakened his movement but did not put an end to the atrocities which constitute the trademark of Boko Haram.
For the time being, we do not know the identity of the group that committed the carnage. But, unless a new movement is born in this time, this indiscriminate killing is either the work of Boko Haram or that of ISWAP [acronyme anglais de l’État islamique en Afrique de l’Ouest]. And the least we can say is that this ignominy is a blow to President Muhammadu Buhari, whose term ends in 2023.
40,000 dead and two million displaced
This is all the more true as it is the perfect illustration of the failure of its security policy implemented over the past ten years. The mandate of the septuagenarian Buhari will have been one of the bloodiest, he who had nevertheless promised as soon as he took power in 2015, to put an end to the terrorist hydra in sixty days.
But a decade later, the report is sad because General Buhari has neither succeeded in carrying the blow to Boko Haram nor prevented the rise in power of the rival movement Islamic State in West Africa (ISWAP) whose leader n was other than Abu Musab Al-Barnawi given for dead in 2021 by the Nigerian army. In a dozen years, terrorism will have caused more than forty thousand deaths and forced more than two million citizens to flee their villages in Nigeria.
And everything suggests that it is not tomorrow the day before that this giant with feet of clay will succeed in overcoming terrorism. That said, by making Pentecost bloody, the message of the engineers of evil is unambiguous, to mourn the Catholic community as much as possible and no doubt hope to influence the choice of the future leaders of the country. This is to say if the Nigerian army must keep the gun at its feet.