THE INSIDER: How FG officials turned ‘Boko Haram ceasefire’ to multi-million dollar scam

The recent Chad-brokered phantom ceasefire agreement between Nigeria and Boko Haram has further exposed an intricate money-spinning scam involving top federal government officials in the last two years.

The latest fraud has left President Goodluck Jonathan red-faced, Aso Rock sources told TheCable, because this was not the first time he had been deceived into believing there was negotiation with genuine insurgents.

In addition to the disappointment that the insurgency is yet to end, the government has been fleeced millions of dollars by those who claim to be putting peace deals together ─ in what can now be termed as a well-organised scam involving even some trusted aides of the president.

The scam was perfected a couple of years ago when Jonathan was hoodwinked into setting up the Committee on Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of Security Challenges in the North, otherwise known as the Boko Haram Amnesty Committee, with the belief that it would reach out to the leaders of the sect and end the insurgency.

The stated aim of the committee, which was inaugurated in April 2013, was to develop a framework for the granting of amnesty as well as work out disarmament within a 60-day time frame.

Billionaires’ Club

But some members of the committee were apparently more hopeful that they too could become billionaires, given that the Niger Delta amnesty programme has also been used to create a new generation of billionaires under fraudulent circumstances.

Probably unknown to Jonathan, it was an impossible task, as no one in the committee had a clue on how the Boko Haram leaders would be brought to the table for negotiation, unlike in the Niger Delta. Still, he was made to believe that some committee members had direct contact with the group.

However, this was not a big problem for some government officials ─ including some Aso Rock insiders ─ who quickly devised a way of arranging fake Boko Haram leaders and collecting millions of dollars from government, funded from the security budget.

First blood money

When the committee, headed by Tanimu Turaki, minister of special duties, was inaugurated, it began a tour of the north-east, visiting military formations and gathering information from the military chiefs.

On a visit to Damaturu, the capital of Yobe state, in June 2013, the members were scheduled to see other parts of the state when they were suddenly summoned to return to Abuja “immediately” following a claim that a “major breakthrough” had been recorded.

Hassan Tukur, the principal private secretary to the president, was said to have put a deal together with the help of Aisha Wakil, a member of the committee who claimed to be very close to Boko Haram and even nicknamed herself “Mama Boko Haram” ─ a strategy that worked very well.

The committee members were told that a “top” official of the sect, Imam Muhammadu Marwana, had been mandated by Abubakar Shekau, the leader, to sign a deal with the government.

Several government officials were now jumping on the bandwagon in order to have a slice of the action. The office of the secretary to the government of the federation offered to sign the deal on behalf of the federal government, but Jonathan insisted that the committee was fully mandated to act for the government.

Everything seemed set to consummate the deal.

High-level drama

Marwana, in a well-orchestrated drama, told Radio France Hausa Service: “We are seeking forgiveness from the people over the number of people killed in the country. I appeal to those who lost their loved ones to our activities to forgive us and on our side we have forgiven all those who committed atrocities against us.”

Turaki himself told the media: “We have sat down and agreed that Jama’atu Ahlul Sunnah Lidda’awati wal Jihad, known as Boko Haram, will lay down their arms as part of the agreement so as to end the insurgency. Government agreed with ceasefire and will look into ways to ensure that the troops relax their activities till the final take-off of the ceasefire.”

It was all a ruse.

Shekau denounced those who said he sent them to sign a ceasefire deal, and to demonstrate how serious he was, Boko Haram immediately launched an attack on Government Secondary School, Mamudo, Yobe state, killing 29 students and a teacher.

He said: “Let me assure you that we will not enter into any truce with these infidels. We will not enter into any truce with the Nigerian government. We believe in the massacre inflicted on the secondary school in Mamudo and Damaturu and other schools. We earlier warned that we were going to burn all schools. They are schools purposely built to fight Islam.”

But the drama did not stop. Turaki said it was a faction of the group that carried out the attack, and that Marwana led another faction which was genuinely Boko Haram.

Marwana was back on radio, defending his “peace deal” and saying: “I  want to state clearly that we have no hands in the unfortunate attack on the secondary school.”

Indeed, he had no hand. He was just an impostor.

More bloodshed

Meanwhile, the Nigerian military had been directed to “relax” their operations in the spirit of the ceasefire ─ and in no time Boko Haram was back in full force, killing and looting. It became clear to all that there was no deal; it was all a game.

But Nigerians, thinking the government genuinely fell into the hands of impostors, were unaware that it was some government officials that were conniving with some committee members to bring forward fake Boko Haram members in order to collect millions of dollars as “settlement fees”. TheCable could not verify how much money has exchanged hands in the last two years.

After the first deal failed, security agencies began to monitor some members of the committee and soon discovered that at least three of them were complicit in organising fake Boko Haram representatives for phantom agreements.

One of them was using his connection with the international media to arrange interviews with fake representatives of Boko Haram who often claimed that they were ready to do a deal. Another helped to recruit young men from the streets of Abuja to pose to the committee as Boko Haram members.

The end game

However, the failure of the first deal had been a blessing of sort, as members of the committee became very suspicious. They also became more rigorous in interrogating other impostors who kept streaming to their secretariat.

On one occasion, for instance, when Wakil, or “Mama Boko Haram”, brought a Boko Haram “representative” to discuss with the committee, the impostor was told to get a video from Shekau saying in clear terms that he had been mandated to negotiate on behalf of the sect. The impostor said he could not do that. He was promptly dismissed.

The final straw came when “Mama Boko Haram” again brought some young men, who claimed to be bodyguards of Shekau, to negotiate with the committee. A committee member told the impostors that the security agencies would like to interview them to ascertain their claims. They became jittery. One of them immediately confessed he knew nothing about Boko Haram, that he was a labourer in Abuja who had been recruited to pose as a member of the sect.

All of them, including “Mama Boko Haram”, were immediately arrested and interrogated by the security agencies, but Wakil, whose husband is a retired judge in Borno state, was released in order to save the face of the committee.

A serving government official, who nominated her into the committee and who was believed to be part of the scam, made a strong case for her, saying any attempt to publicly shame her would put the entire job done by the committee in jeopardy. Somehow, his position was bought.

Indeed, Wakil, who is always dressed in niqab from head to toe, had been strongly believed as having direct links to Boko Haram and this clearly made her a celebrity during the work of the committee. Interestingly, in November 2012, she and her husband had been named by another Boko Haram “representative” to negotiate a peace deal on their behalf.

The name of Muhammadu Buhari, a retired major general and former head of state, was even dragged into the list of “negotiators” either to give it some credibility or to stoke the belief that he was complicit in the insurgency. Buhari sternly rejected his nomination.

But Wakil’s fame spread, nonetheless, and she became a frontline member of the negotiating committee until the bubble burst.

Thunder strikes again

However, memory is very short in Nigeria, and so another scam was organised in 2014 to fleece the government of another tranche of millions of dollars. This time, the scam had an international dimension.

The sect members were said to have written to President Idriss Deby of Chad asking that he should mediate a peace deal with the Nigerian government. Deby got in touch with Nigeria and there began again another phantom ceasefire deal. With all pre-meeting formalities concluded, Jonathan nominated a government official to represent Nigeria at the meeting.

His name? Hassan Tukur. Again.

Tukur was a key figure in the first failed deal, and his relationship with some members of the amnesty committee had put others on the alert, but he is regarded as one of the most powerful people in Nigeria who cannot be touched.

The security agencies objected to the Chad meeting, telling the president that they had the list and profiles of Boko Haram commanders and the hierarchy, and that the men claiming to represent the sect were not genuine. The president told them to give Tukur a chance.

Voice of fraud

On October 17, a man named Danladi Ahmadu, claiming to be the “general secretary of Boko Haram”, told the Voice of America that “Abubakar Shekau” had mandated him to discuss a ceasefire with the Nigerian government and negotiate the release of the Chibok schoolgirls in captivity.

A cursory look at his claims would have alerted Nigerians to the fact that Ahmadu was fake. Boko Haram members do not call their organisation Boko Haram. They call it Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’Awati Wal-Jihad. They also do not call their leader Abubakar Shekau. They call him Imam Shekau. These facts somehow evaded government scrutiny.

Ahmadu promised that the girls would be released “in batches” because they were “scattered” all over West Africa. He also said Nigeria should release members of Boko Haram in detention while their leaders should not be prosecuted for war crimes. The scam was well packaged.

Alex Badeh, an air chief marshal and chief of defence staff, was then mandated by presidency to announce a ceasefire “following talks between representatives of the Nigerian government and Boko Haram”. Badeh addressed the press, asking the Nigerian soldiers to observe the ceasefire. Ironically, the military commanders heard the directive in the media just like any other Nigerian.

History promptly repeated itself. Shekau denied the peace deal. He threatened more attacks and said Ahmadu would be killed. Soon, his group began to launch a series of attacks. Aminu Wakil, foreign affairs minister, attributed the attacks to a faction of Boko Haram ─ just as Turaki did in 2013.

Boko Haram gained more Nigerian territory after the “ceasefire” deal, and has launched more attacks on schools, killing over 50 students of a secondary school in Yobe state on November 10 and bombing Azare twice, Kano and Kontagora.