Boko Haram and the Media

Flo­ri­an Plaucheur/AFP/Getty Images

A girl watch­es oth­er chil­dren on a mer­ry-go-round in an aban­doned amuse­ment park in Maid­uguri, Nigeria.

Boko Haram is a mil­i­tant group pri­mar­i­ly locat­ed in Nige­ria. The ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion is fight­ing to over­throw the Niger­ian gov­ern­ment and cre­ate an Islam­ic state.
Nige­ria is a very reli­gious coun­try with Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam­ic faith being its most pre­dom­i­nant reli­gions and hav­ing a near­ly-equal ratio split between them.

Accord­ing to Hei­di Schultz, an author on Nation­al Geo­graph­ic News, “Boko Haram aims to make north­ern Nige­ria an Islam­ic state.” This is iron­ic because the major­i­ty of peo­ple in north­ern Nige­ria are already Muslim.

BBC News pro­vides a good rea­son as to why Boko Haram does what they do. Accord­ing to BBC News, “Boko Haram pro­motes a ver­sion of Islam which makes it…forbidden…for Mus­lims to take part in any polit­i­cal or social activ­i­ty asso­ci­at­ed with West­ern society.”

And con­sid­er­ing the fact that Nige­ria was col­o­nized by Britain in 1906, a lot of its activ­i­ties are West­ern-based. For instance, even though Hausa, Igbo, and Yoru­ba are major lan­guages in the coun­try, Eng­lish is still con­sid­ered Nigeria’s offi­cial language.

But even with all this infor­ma­tion, the ques­tion still remains. “Why Nige­ria specif­i­cal­ly?” Well, accord­ing to Guy Bir­chall, a jour­nal­ist at The Sun, Boko Haram “believe[s]…Nigeria is run by infi­dels even when the coun­try elects Mus­lim presidents.”

Due to the fact that Nige­ria is a very reli­gious coun­try, athe­ism is con­sid­ered taboo there with about 10% of the Niger­ian pop­u­la­tion being athe­ists, accord­ing to Nations Encyclopedia.

Since the major­i­ty of peo­ple in Nige­ria are already Mus­lim, there is no rea­son for Boko Haram to attack Nige­ria. Not only that but forc­ing reli­gious beliefs on a group of indi­vid­u­als takes away their right and enti­tle­ment to free­dom of belief.

How­ev­er, there might be anoth­er rea­son why Boko Haram chose Nige­ria as their base of attacks. Since Nige­ria is Africa’s most pop­u­lat­ed coun­try, the ter­ror­ist group might have cho­sen Nige­ria specif­i­cal­ly since there are more peo­ple con­vert­ing to Islam.

After all, even though Islam (Sun­ni Islam to be exact) is the most prac­ticed reli­gion in Nige­ria, that doesn’t change the fact that a good half of Nigeria’s pop­u­la­tion are Chris­tians and a fair­ly decent minor­i­ty of Nigeria’s pop­u­la­tion are athe­ists, giv­ing Boko Haram about 40–50% of peo­ple to con­vert to their pre­ferred faith.

Addi­tion­al­ly, since Nige­ria has the largest African pop­u­la­tion, look­ing at it from a terrorist’s per­spec­tive, that gives Boko Haram more “toys” to play with.

But even with all the rea­sons for Boko Haram’s attacks and in Nige­ria specif­i­cal­ly, none of that jus­ti­fies their attacks. Every­one is enti­tled to their own beliefs respec­tive­ly, includ­ing atheists.
A per­son should nev­er impose their reli­gious beliefs on anoth­er indi­vid­ual because then that indi­vid­ual who is being forced to engage in a par­tic­u­lar faith may be com­pro­mis­ing their own faith or beliefs.