'Nigeria: the context for violence' (2006-2013)

[Dayuhan]

This is the sort of nonsense peddled in Nigeria and the US refusal to designate Boko Haram as an FTO only feeds the narrative that the US is somehow behind Boko Haram in an attempt to destabilise Nigeria and seize our oil.

No matter what the US does, the conspiracy theorists will twist it into someting despicable and devious. If the US declares BH a terrorist organization, they'll be laying the groundwork to send in AFRICOM and seize the oil, if they don't, they'll be backing BH in an attempt to split Nigeria and gain control of the oil. The US can't design policy to undercut conspiracy theories, because any new policy will just generate a new range of theories, even more bizarre than the last.

2. The Tamil Tigers are FTO, and they have nothing to do with the GWOT (and neither does Joseph Kony and the mad men he leads), BH fits the description of an FTO and should be labelled as such.

Again, the FTO designation is often used as a way to try and cut off external funding toward an organization. I don't know if this is the case with the Tamil Tigers, but there is a substantial Tamil diaspora and there may have been a perceived need to build a legal basis to restrict external funding.

I don't know, but I suspect that the US is reluctant to designate BH as an FTO because they think it might be seen as internationalizing a domestic conflict and because it might provoke BH attacks on US targets. Those don't seem totally illegitimate reasons to me.

3. Designating two men as "terrorists" and giving the organisation they lead a free pass, is not only illogical and nonsensical but it reeks of hypocrisy. Many Nigerians are of the opinion that the US is shying away from designating Boko Haram as an FTO because they fear that the Northern Muslim elite will win elections in 2015 and control the oil resources - predictably, the US doesn't want to antagonise them.

I can see how some would believe this, but the truth is it really doesn't matter. The oil will be sold no matter what.

4. Nigeria's Internet penetration rose sharply from 6% in 2010 to over 20% this year. We are dealing with an increasingly well informed population (in a nation of 160 million), and if the US didn't take public opinion seriously in the past, it should take it now.

Internet access doesn't necessarily make people better informed. Sometimes it just puts them in touch with a wider and stranger range of conspiracy theories.