April 23, 2013

Boko Haram in Boston

The past week has been very eventful especially if you are a resident of Boston. It all started when two bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston marathon. Three people were killed and scores were injures as a result of the explosions. Security operative swiftly responded to these attacks and started a manhunt to get the suspects whose photos they released few hours after the attack. At the end of all the house to house searching, shoot outs and the likes, one suspect was killed and the second one was captured just after 4 days.

Seeing how fast it took to track down the bombers, Nigerians took to their BBs, tablets and what have you and started comparing the event that happened in Boston to that in Nigeria. The hashtag "#ifitwasnigeria" was trending on twitter nationwide. After studying tweets from that trend, i came to the conclusion that all what they were saying was that if the bombings happened in Nigeria, the suspects would not have been caught. They used Boko Haram to justify their claim.

I think its a little bit unfair to draw a comparison between the Boston bombings and the frequent or occasional bombings that occur in Nigeria. Seriously, I was surprised when people were comparing the Tsarnaev brothers (the suspects of the Boston bombings) to Boko Haram. The latter is a well organised group with a well defined hierarchy and loads of cash from both local and international sources while the latter is just a duo of disturbed brothers with no allies nor mega bucks. So please tell me where the comparison is? The only thing the Tsarnaev brothers and Boko Harm have in common is that they have maliciously detonated bombs in public places. Furthermore, studying some of the tweets from #ifitwasnnigeria, I could infer that some Nigerians believe that all Book Haram members would be caught within four days if they were operating in the US. That is just pure delusion.

We all know the state of security in Nigeria but let us not be blind when criticising it and it is very unfair comparing it to that in the US. The defence budget alone of the US can equal the National budget of all African countries put together. So the resources their security operatives would have access to would definitely out weigh that of Nigeria. I am not trying to say that the government is doing well in as regards boko haram but the impression that if we had Obama as president, Boko Haram would be completely flushed out is false and inaccurate.
PS: This post was typed with a phone so please forgive any typos you see because editing is very difficult when posting via phone.