Credit:  South Africa City Press

By Sarah Chayes, May 16, 2014, Washingtonpost.com

Sarah Chayes, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is the author of the forthcoming book “Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens International Security.”

A few Ni­ger­ian teenagers who managed to escape are telling their stories: how some 300 of their classmates were wrenched from their sleep at a village boarding school and hauled off in a stampede of trucks and motorcycles. The attack has captured international attention like few terrorist incidents since 9/11.

But amid the pressure to respond to the anguish, the United States is right not to overdo its counterterrorism assistance to Abuja. As has become an unfortunate pattern where terrorism is concerned, officials might reinforce the root of the problem in their impulse to hack off the branch. For much of the responsibility for the rise of the Boko Haram extremist group may lie with the Nigerian government itself.

Officially designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department in November, Boko Haram burst into public view in 2009 with a series of attacks on public buildings in northeastern Nigeria. A brutal counteroffensive by Nigerian security services followed, leaving hundreds dead.

The precise structure and membership of Boko Haram and its affiliates, and even the tenets of their extremist ideology, are unclear. Nigerians I spoke with on a research trip late last year unanimously condemned the group’s violent tactics, as well as its focus on imposing a locally outlandish brand of Islam.

Still, it has a real following in the country’s impoverished northeast. “Ninety-five percent of our youth in Borno have a connection to them,” Biye Peter Gumtha, a national assembly member from the region, recently told German radio. “Young men without prospects are open to radical offers.”

With the highest oil production in Africa, ample rainfall in half the country, good soil and resourceful people, Nigeria should be enjoying the benefits of economic growth. But its development outcomes have fallen since an oil boom began in the 1980s. Why so little return on such vast wealth? Because the government has been stealing the money.

In February, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan fired his respected central bank governor, who was investigating the disappearance of some $20 billion in oil revenue over a mere 18 months. Jonathan and his network are believed to have siphoned off most of the cash — with laundering help from local and international banks.

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