Maitatsine and Boko Haram

There was this three way push-and-pull at the weekend involving Gover-nor Rotimi Amaechi, General Muhammadu Buhari and a certain Alhaji Adamu Muhammed  concerning the violent pseudo-Muslim sect leader Muhammadu Marwa alias Maitatsine and how the lessons of that old case could apply to the ongoing Boko Haram war.

Adamu Muhammed’s one-page advertorial on page 14 of yesterday’s Sunday Trust was titled “Buhari killed Maitatsine in 1980: Amaechi and APC lied!” In it he quoted Amaechi as having said that if General Buhari is elected president next year, he will bring Boko Haram to an end much as he eliminated the Maitatsine sect in 1980. If indeed that was what Amaechi said, then I agree with Adamu Muhammed that his statement contained serious errors of historical fact. Buhari was not the ruler of Nigeria in December 1980 when Maitatsine was killed by the army and his sect members were dispersed. Nor, for that matter, did the violent Maitatsine phenomenon end in 1980.

 
Now, in the same Sunday Trust edition, there was a story on page 3 titled “How I ended Maitatsine crisis, by Buhari.” In it General Muhammadu Buhari was quoted as telling the story of how he ended the Maitatsine riots in the 1980s. Buhari was reported to have said that if he is elected president next year he will end the Boko Haram insurgency like he ended the Maitatsine crisis in the 1980s. He was quoted to have said in a video that the Maitatsine problem arose when the sect leader was exiled by then Kano emir Muhammadu Sanusi and how he returned and was killed by the police. When the group resurrected in Adamawa, Buhari said “I flew into Adamawa as Head of State and that was the last you heard of Maitatsine.”

If indeed that was what he said in the video, then some aspects of what he said were correct but some others are wrong. The first Maitatsine riot took place 34 years ago so it is understandable if there are some memory lapses as to the sequence of events. According to accounts given by various persons at the time, Maitatsine was indeed sent back home to Maroua town in Cameroun by Emir of Kano Muhammadu Sanusi in the 1950s due to his cantankerous preaching, in particular his sect’s refusal to recognise the sayings of the Holy Prophet.

 The man however slipped back into Nigeria either in the late 1960s or early 1970s and set up a vibrant community of followers at Yan Awaki Quarters in Kano. After ceaseless complaints by the community of harassment and abductions by ‘Yan Tatsine, the police tried to arrest him in December 1980 and a full scale revolt followed. The sect members held Mobile Policemen at bay for two weeks until the Army moved in and crushed the rebellion.

 
Even though Maitatsine himself died in that encounter, his supporters launched two simultaneous riots at Bulunkutu ward of Maiduguri and at Tudun Wada, Kaduna in late 1982. Both were put down by soldiers and policemen. General Buhari became the military ruler on December 31, 1983 and about a month into his rule, there was another Maitatsine uprising in Yola. It was led by Musa Makanike, a disciple of Muhammadu Marwa. The army deployed brute force and ended the revolt in a matter of days. Makanike himself fled and was only captured ten years later. There was yet another Maitatsine riot during Buhari’s rule. This was in Gombe in 1985. It was also put down by the army.
After Gombe, there was only one major Maitatsine riot.

 It took place in Funtua in early 1993. I was quite familiar with that one because I was in Funtua to report on it for Citizen Magazine. It was led by a man who was said to be a dealer in perfumes and textile materials. He led a queer pseudo-Muslim sect, which had lots of almajirai that went out everyday to the market and motor park to sell water, fruits and to cut people’s finger nails. I remember interviewing the then Sarkin Maska Alhaji Idris Sambo and he said even though the sect members were queer, he never thought they could turn violent and attack the entire community.

If Amaechi’s account contained some errors and Buhari’s account also contained some errors, Adamu Muhammed’s account contained even more errors, some of them probably deliberate. He put the date of the Yola riot as April 1985 when in fact it was February 1984, in the early weeks of Buhari’s rule. Adamu Muhammed also published a picture that he said was of Maitatsine “being exhibited by soldiers after a previous arrest.” As far as I recall, Maitatsine was not captured in the military operation led by Major Haliru Akilu.

 Accounts at the time said the sect leader’s remains were unearthed from a shallow grave where his followers had buried him as they were fleeing from Kano City. A bullet caught him in the foot. Adamu Muhammed also said “the army assisted in bringing him to justice.” Maitatsine was never brought to justice; he bled to death from an army bullet. 

According to Adamu Muhammed,  “the only thing Buhari has in common with Marwa are that they share a common name Muhammadu...and a common belief in governance through Sharia, a strictness and high handedness which manifested itself in the retroactive execution of Decree No 20.” The only question I would like to ask here is, if indeed Buhari shared a common ideology with Maitatsine, then why he did he use the army to heavily suppress the sect on two occasions during his short rule?
Much more important than this foolish allegation is the parallels that can be drawn between the Maitatsine episode and its Boko Haram cousin.

 As a reporter who once covered the aftermath of a Maitatsine riot, I could see some fine distinctions between those episodes and the current Boko Haram war. First of all there is the scope. All six major Maitatsine eruptions in Kano, Bulunkutu, Tudun Wada, Yola, Gombe and Funtua were localised and were relatively easy for the army to put down. The sect members usually lived in a defined city area which they tried to hold on to, in addition to their queer appearance of cloth or hair that set them apart from other people.  Yan Tatsine were also much less ambitious than Boko Haram, perhaps because they did not have international models such as Al Qaeda and ISIS to emulate. They were also much less well armed; for the most part they had no firearms.

 
It is true that if Buhari were to become Commander-in-Chief again he would have certain advantages over a civilian, including the ability to decode hidden military language. It reminds me of a passage I read in a book many years ago about US President Dwight Eisenhower and his vice president Richard Nixon receiving a military/CIA briefing in 1960 about a planned invasion of Cuba to topple the then nascent Communist regime of Fidel Castro.

 The military presented a plan which they couched in a lot of jargon; they were saying in short that the operation was doomed to fail. Eisenhower, a Five Star Army General, understood the message but Nixon did not and he kept pushing for an invasion. At the time Nixon was the Republican Party’s candidate for the 1960 election and he stood to gain politically if Castro was toppled. President John Kennedy later inherited the same program, also misunderstood the hidden jargon, approved its launch and it ended in the Bay of Pigs fiasco. 

Yet, if Buhari gets to become the C-in-C again he must remember the old saying that Generals are always fighting the last war, not the current one. Trying to fight the Boko Haram war with the same methods and tactics that routed Musa Makanike in 1984 would aptly lend credence to this saying. A short, sharp surgical military operation to uproot Boko Haram is no longer available as an option. In which case the two major contenders for 2015, the civilian as well as the General, should tell us what their plans are.