Africa’s radical groups exploit ungoverned spaces

On Feb. 7, Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission announced a six-week postponement of national and state elections scheduled for February. It was meant to address the threats posed by Boko Haram.

Nigeria’s inability to project force outside certain regions has created a vacuum that has been filled by nonstate actors. Boko Haram controls the northeastern part of the country, effectively hampering the delivery of services there. This threat has extended beyond Nigeria and become a regional problem. Last month the African Union authorized a multinational force to fight Boko Haram in a conflict that could metastasize across the region.

The challenge posed by nonstate actors is not limited to Nigeria. The gap between the center and the periphery has been widening in most African states since their independence. This ever-expanding chasm has led to a deficit in governance that political scientists refer to as the ungoverned space.

States tend to devote most of their resources to high return areas, an excuse for allocating resources to certain places on the basis of ethnic nepotism, to the exclusion of others. This practice has led to the creation of pockets of long-standing disenfranchisement across Africa, making them a fertile breeding ground for radicalization.

Transitional groups such as Boko Haram and the Somali armed group Al-Shabab have created safe havens in these regions by exploiting the central state’s semipresence or near or total absence. In Somalia, for example, the rise of Al-Shabab has required intervention by other countries in the region. The African Union mission in Somalia boasts a 22,126-strong force drawn from Burundi, Djibouti, Kenya, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Uganda.

The concept of Africa’s ungoverned space has gained traction in the post-9/11 era. As a result, Western powers have increased their footprints in Africa, making the continent more militarized than at any other time since the end of the Cold War.

The governance failures in Kenya and Nigeria occupy a league of their own. Large parts of the two countries are chronically misgoverned, undergoverned or ungoverned. Corruption is pervasive, undermining citizens’ faith in state institutions. The northern regions in Kenya and Nigeria have been undergoverned for decades, left to their own devices as long as they do not threaten their respective countries’ sovereignty. In both countries, the central government has intervened militarily when threats of succession became imminent. The ungoverned space exists at the extreme end of being undergoverned or misgoverned. In ungoverned areas, the state has more or less ceased to exist, either by choice or unconsciously. Parts of northern Kenya and Nigeria fall under this category.

In both countries, the local elites who replaced the colonialists after independence failed to institute fundamental institutional reforms. These leaders hardly expanded the state’s sphere of influence outside the confines of what the British left behind.

Criminal gangs, terrorists and ethnic-based liberation fronts filled the resulting vacuum. Al-Shabab and Boko Haram exist because of such incompetence by Kenyan and Nigerian authorities. The armed insurgency in Africa is not the cause but rather a symptom of deficits in governance.

Beyond their rhetoric about the establishment of caliphates, Al-Shabab and Boko Haram project themselves as the vanguards of the downtrodden. They thrive by exploiting the pervasive crisis of second-class citizenship that has been allowed to fester. A cursory glance at key development indicators in the regions where Boko Haram and Al-Shabab are active reveals shocking levels of poverty and marginalization, providing the groups with a ready source of recruits. They have appropriated this marginalization as their raison d’être.

“Sokoto state in the northwest [of Nigeria] has the highest poverty rate (86.4 per cent), Niger state in north central the lowest (43),” according to the latest report by International Crisis Group. “The northeast, Boko Haram’s main operational field, has the worst poverty rate of the six official zones.”

The annual Ibrahim index on African governance uses four indicators — rule of law, human rights, economic opportunity and human development — to assess the quality of governance in African countries. Nigeria has consistently ranked poorly in virtually all of them. In 2014, Nigeria was ranked 49th out of 52 countries in personal safety and 48th in national security categories. The lot of Kenyans at the peripheries is not different. For example, a 2013 integrated household budget survey ranks Kenya’s coast below all regions except its North Eastern province in rural poverty. Urban poverty in Mombasa is higher than in other major cities in Kenya.

Potential engagement with these groups has been hindered by pervasive security-sector corruption and heavy-handed militaristic responses.

Kenya’s former anti-corruption czar John Githongo knows a thing or two about corruption. “National security became the final refuge of the corrupt,” Githongo wrote in a 2013 column for The Star, a Kenyan newspaper. “When you eat from procurement deals meant for the police, military, customs, immigration at the top, then bureaucrats below watch and learn. Like termites munching at the wooden foundations of the house of state, everything soon becomes porous.”

In the past, African government could safely cast the fight against corruption as an elitist business. Not anymore. Today corruption threatens the very edifice of most African states. Kenyan and Nigerian security agencies top Transparency International’s annual corruption index. And police corruption is matched by venal corruption of the governing elite.

This culture of graft has undermined counterterrorism efforts. Nigeria and Kenya, both of which face credible terrorist threats, passed anti-terrorism laws in 2011 and 2012. However, the legislation handed blank checks to unreformed security forces to commit further atrocities under the guise of fighting terrorism, exacerbating already tenuous situations. The lack of oversight for these laws further undermines any efforts to reform the security sector.

This in turn inoculates the security forces from scrutiny by creating a false and pervasive dichotomy: You’re either with the state or with the terrorists. A vicious cycle results. The indiscriminate use of force engenders more grievances against the state, giving radical groups a ready-made recruitment tool. For instance, along the Kenyan coast, where tourism is the biggest source of income, strings of terrorist attacks followed by Western travel advisories have left local youths who rely on tourism revenue potential recruits for terrorist groups.

In countering terrorism, security officers must maintain a delicate balance between credible threats and genuine local grievances that require political solutions. Overreliance on surveillance and the use of force would yield only more problems. Nigeria and Kenya need to employ a mix of policy options to combat terrorism. This entails going back to the state’s fundamental function of properly governing its space. Otherwise, extremist groups such as Boko Haram and Al-Shabab will be around for a while.