TEN

NIGERIA

 

Fifty days had passed since Boko Haram had kidnapped an entire school of 276 girls in north-eastern Nigeria and the general wanted me to see what he was up against. He invited me to his office in the capital, Abuja, and opened his laptop.

The general clicked on one folder entitled ‘Abubakar Shekau’. A first clip showed the future leader of Boko Haram in his years as a preacher, in a white cap and white babban riga, the traditional Nigerian pyjama, tunic and cape. A second was more recent, from 2013, and showed Shekau in a clearing in the scrub looking far bulkier and in full combat camouflage, an ammunition vest across his chest and a Kalashnikov in his hand.

The general clicked on a folder called ‘Bama Attack’. The first clip showed Shekau’s former No. 2, Abu Sa’ad, a few months before his death in August 2013. Abu Sa’ad was giving a speech to his men on the eve of an attack on an army barracks in Bama, a town on the Nigeria-Cameroon border. The fighters, who appeared to be mostly teenagers, grinned shyly at the camera. Abu Sa’ad, dressed in camouflage with a scarf tied under his eyes and a Kalashnikov across his chest, said the attack had been long planned and that most of its architects were dead. ‘You should look for victory or martyrdom, which is victory in the eyes of God. There is nothing more beautiful than martyrdom. A martyr knows he is going to die, knows there are enemies, but goes to the battlefield anyway without fear of death because he loves God and he knows God will smile on him.’

The attack began at dawn. Hundreds of Abu Sa’ad’s men were filmed strolling through the bush. They began firing. When they started receiving return fire, they did not change pace or even look for cover. They kept walking almost casually into the fusillade. Bullets whistled over the cameraman’s head. ‘Allahu Akbar!’ he shouted. ‘Allahu Akbar!’

All around, the fighters were being cut down. Ten made it to the base fence and took cover behind a toilet block. The cameraman filmed one fighter shouting back at his comrades. ‘Stop firing from behind,’ the man yelled. ‘You’re hitting us.’ Suddenly the camera went down on its side. ‘They’ve killed me,’ said a voice. The general whistled. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he said. ‘Just walking into death.’

He opened another video. This time, Abu Sa’ad was standing in front of the black flags of al-Qaeda surrounded by 20 boys, all in headscarves, all carrying guns. The boys looked as young as four. The heads of the smallest just reached Abu Sa’ad’s waist. ‘You must wage war,’ he said, his hands resting on the boys’ heads. ‘You must perform every violent act you can.’ ‘Allahu Akbar!’ cried the boys. Abu Sa’ad turned to the camera. ‘You can kill us,’ he said, ‘but these children will continue. Children are the future.’

The general found another clip. Two men in the black uniform of the Nigerian police were on their knees in the bush in front of a black banner held up by two militants which read in Arabic: ‘There is only one God and Muhammad is his prophet.’ Abu Sa’ad stood to one side, holding a book. Several dozen fighters were gathered around. All were wearing scarves across their faces. The video featured a soft soundtrack of Islamic chants.

The cameraman asked the two policemen to speak. The first gave his name as Corporal Mehmud Daba. ‘I know mine has ended,’ he said. ‘My legacy is to ask my wife to please bring up our children in Islam. Let my mother hear this and pay all my debts for me.’ The second policeman said his name was Sergeant David Hoya, a Christian. He did not raise his head and mumbled into the ground. ‘What is your message for your wife?’ asked the cameraman.

‘That she should take care of my children.’

‘In Islam or as unbelievers?’

‘I’m not an unbeliever,’ said David.

‘How can they see you if your face is down like that?’ asked the cameraman. ‘Lift your face up!’

The camera turned to Abu Sa’ad. ‘I want to give an explanation for what we are about to do,’ he said. ‘We are punishing in terms of what Allah prescribes. I want to tell Nigeria and the world that we give them the gift of these two policemen, this sergeant and corporal. We want to give these men the judgement of Allah.’ Abu Sa’ad lifted up a book he was holding. ‘I am going to read from this book,’ he said, showing the cover to the camera. It was an interpretation of the Kitab Tawheed, the Book of Unification, originally written by a conservative thirteenth-century Saudi Islamist scholar, then reworked by another Saudi scholar from the nineteenth century.

Abu Sa’ad began a long monologue, showing the pages as he quoted from them. ‘We are going to do things in accordance with the book,’ he repeated. ‘We will do this to anybody we catch. In Kano, we entered the police headquarters and we killed them as they shat themselves. We did the same in Damaturu and Maiduguri. Let the world know that we will never compare anyone to God. No government, no constitution, can compare to God.’

Ten minutes later, Abu Sa’ad finished. ‘Let’s thank God and give him more bodies,’ he concluded. He then pulled a knife from his combat vest, grabbed Corporal Daba and laid him on his side. The crowd started cheering. ‘Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!’

Two men held Daba’s chest and legs. Abu Sa’ad held his head with one hand. He started sawing at Daba’s throat with the other. Blood jetted onto the sandy ground. Abu Sa’ad kept sawing. He couldn’t get through the neck bone. He switched to the back of the neck and started sawing again. Still the head wouldn’t come off. Abu Sa’ad dropped the knife and twisted Daba’s head around a full 360 degrees with both hands, trying to snap it off. It didn’t work. He picked up the knife and sawed again. Finally, after half a minute, Daba’s head came free. Abu Sa’ad lifted it up by the hair and showed it to the crowd. Its eyes were closed. Flesh and ligaments were hanging loose. Abu Sa’ad placed the head on Daba’s body.

Then he moved over to David Hoya, whom his men were already holding in place. This time Abu Sa’ad worked ferociously. He took David’s head off in half the time.

I said nothing. The general was silent, too. He clicked on another video. A woman was being held on the ground, next to a newly dug grave. ‘I didn’t pass on any information,’ she said. ‘I didn’t tell anyone anything.’

‘Allahu Akbar,’ said the cameraman.

The men set to work. The woman shrieked. She screamed again, then went silent. Blood spurted on the ground. Her head was off in 15 seconds. The men tried to arrange it on her body but couldn’t balance it. They tried propping it on her hair. Eventually one man lost patience and punted her head sharply into the grave. The other men shoved her body in afterwards.

The general clicked on another clip. This time it was a young boy. I told the general I couldn’t take any more and he froze the frame.

We sat there for a while, the two of us. The general was examining me for a reaction. Finally he said: ‘We found over 200 graves like this in the area. All beheaded. A lot of them were young boys.’

Nigeria is a creation of colonial expediency. In 1914, its British rulers fused two of their existing West African protectorates, southern and northern, each of which already contained several kingdoms, scores of languages and more than 250 tribes. The amalgamation of this vast and diverse territory was overseen by Lord Lugard, one of the Empire’s most industrious servants, who before his time ruling Nigeria had fought in Afghanistan, Burma and Sudan, mounted expeditions to Uganda, Benin and Botswana and been Governor of Hong Kong. Lugard justified the unifying of Britain’s Nigerian possessions under the ‘hinterland principle’. ‘By this dictum,’ wrote Lugard in The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, ‘a power in occupation of coast lands was entitled to claim the exclusive right to exercise political influence for an indefinite distance inland.’

It never occurred to Lugard to consult his subjects on their impending union. They were, after all, little more than ‘attractive children’ with minds ‘nearer to the animal world’ than other humans. ‘Happy, thriftless, excitable, lacking in self control, discipline and foresight, with little sense of veracity, fond of music and loving weapons as an oriental loves jewellery,’ he wrote.

Predictably, Lugard’s union was contentious. Southerners were especially opposed since Lugard never intended a union of equals. Early in his career, Lugard had been posted to northern Nigeria and his time there had left him with a lasting admiration for the feudal northern dynasties. By contrast, he despised the ‘Europeanised African’ he found in the south who, he wrote, was less fertile, had worse teeth and was prone to lung problems–ailments he ascribed to southerners’ taste for Western clothes, ‘which [are] enervating and inimical to the health of the African’. Southerners’ superior education, wrote Lugard, was a particular problem. ‘Education has brought to such men only discontent, suspicion of others and bitterness, which masquerades as racial patriotism, and the vindication of rights unjustly withheld. As citizens they are unfitted to hold posts of trust and responsibility where integrity and loyalty are essential. They have lost touch with their own people. Some even appear to resent being called negroes.’

Far better suited to the backwardness of Africa, in Lugard’s view, were the medieval northern emirates, dominated by the Hausa and Fulani tribes. ‘We are dealing with the child races of the world, and learning at first hand the habits and customs of primitive man,’ he wrote. ‘The finer negro races’–by which he meant northern Nigerians–‘have reached a degree of social organization which, in some cases, has attained to the kingdom stage under a despot with provincial chiefs.’

Aside from prejudice, there were practical reasons why Britain might be disinclined to educate the natives. Imperial administrators in India and Egypt had learned to their cost that well-intentioned efforts to give their subjects a Western education could backfire. Irritatingly, the students’ first act on graduation tended to be to demand their liberation.

Lugard would not make the same mistake in northern Nigeria. Schools there were pragmatic and conservative, producing clerks, engineers and technocrats, but not thinkers. Teachers stressed a respect for hierarchy, underwritten by white supremacy. Since education could be so dangerous, it was also strictly limited. At independence in October 1960, there were just 16 secondary schools in all of northern Nigeria.

Restricting enlightenment was not only shrewd colonialism, it was cheap, too. Lugard ruled through a handful of officials who co-opted the structures of the emirates. In this way, the emirs’ interests were also protected. Several felt the added protection of British authority made them untouchable and became little more than tyrants.

The emirs also saw the value in maintaining their subjects’ ignorance. They drew on their religious authority to give their anti-enlightenment stance some religious justification. Since education often came in the form of Christian missionary schools, it was to be resisted in the name of God. Islam had to be protected. The people had to be insulated. Western education was a sin.

Since a united Nigeria was a fiction founded on colonial convenience and prejudice, the idea might have been expected to die at independence. But by the time freedom arrived in 1960, the concept was ingrained in government structures and many southerners had developed a customary deference to northerners. Accordingly, the northern elite dominated the new Nigerian independent government and its army from the outset. It was more than three decades before a southerner became President.

Expediency and chauvinism are no foundation for a stable nation, however. Even before liberation, northerners killed thousands of southerners in Kano in a pogrom in 1953. After independence, once southerners discovered that, for them, freedom meant rather less than promised, it wasn’t long before they rebelled. In 1967 Igbos from the south-east unilaterally declared the secession of a new country they called Biafra. More than a million people lost their lives in the civil war and mass starvation that followed.

The discovery of Africa’s biggest oil reserves in the southern Delta in the 1950s only heightened the sense of grievance. The northern-dominated state quickly developed a habit of appropriating the billions of dollars that began flowing to Nigeria from foreign oil companies. So immense were the oil revenues, which by 2015 still accounted for 80–85 per cent of all government income, they allowed Nigeria’s rulers to create new lives for themselves as detached from their countrymen as the offshore rigs that sustained them. An example was the state petroleum authority, which collected more than $40 billion a year from foreign oil companies but did almost nothing to build or maintain Nigeria’s oil-refining capacity. Britain’s biggest export to Nigeria was petrol and diesel, much of it originally extracted from Nigeria, then processed in Britain and shipped back. Making matters worse, every few months Nigerian importers throttled supply to hike prices–and Africa’s largest oil producer ground to a halt as fuel stations ran dry.

So much larger were oil payments than domestic taxes, foreign businesses effectively replaced Nigerians as the government’s constituents. The Nigerian state served them. It felt little need to work for a people who did not, in the end, pay it. Likewise, since the people did not pay for their government, they had few ways to make it accountable. And the riches on offer in Nigerian politics attracted the most venal kind of kleptomaniac. In 2007, Nigeria’s own anti-corruption watchdog estimated that its rulers stole $300 billion in oil revenues between 1960 and 1999. More cash was leaving Nigeria for foreign banks than all the foreign aid being sent in the reverse direction to Africa.

This world-record corruption made oil a curse rather than a blessing. Nigerians resented the thieving, of course, but the state brooked no dissent from a people from whom it had largely disassociated itself. In 1993, military dictator Ibrahim Babangida held an election and then annulled it when the southern Yoruba leader Moshood Abiola won. In 1995, Babangida’s next-but-one successor, the Kano General Sani Abacha, executed Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists from the Delta who opposed the way their land was being polluted and sucked dry of its riches. In time a more violent group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), stepped into the space left by Saro-Wiwa. Members of this loose alliance of heavily armed militant groups rode around the Delta in speedboats, attacking pipelines and army bases and, by siphoning off oil, managed to halve Nigeria’s official output by the middle of the last decade. In the end, that rebellion led not to greater transparency and equality but more corruption: the state simply bought off the rebels with government posts and contracts.

But if the elite’s riches largely insulated them from their country’s poverty and their people’s dissent, they did not live in gilded harmony. Rather, the rewards brought by power ensured the state was consumed by an intense and endless struggle for it. Nigeria’s first coup was carried out by a group of Igbo majors in January 1966. A northern counter-putsch followed in July and there were more coups or attempted coups in 1975, 1976, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1990, 1993, 1995 and 1996. Democracy was revived in 1999 but in rigged form. Olusegun Obasanjo, a former military dictator and a southerner, oversaw a deal between north and south under which each would allow the other to rule alternately every eight years. Naturally, Obasanjo reserved the first two presidential terms for himself.

Over time, lower levels of the Nigerian state learned to take their lead from their political masters. Government teachers played truant for years at a time. Government doctors required patients to pay a bribe before they were treated. Bureaucrats purchased their positions, and then set about earning the money back by charging for permissions and other paperwork. Customs came to see their job not as taxing imports but taking a cut. For policemen, the roadblock became a favoured bribe extraction point. The general who showed me the Boko Haram videos insisted the majority of the security services were good men earnestly battling to save Nigeria. But he admitted that, yes, some officers sold weapons and equipment to Boko Haram, yes, some political leaders backed the militants and, yes, the effectiveness of both army and government was crippled as a result. ‘One bad apple can drag the whole country down,’ he said. In the north-east, the damage done to the state’s credibility was near-total. ‘We’re not in control of anywhere out there,’ the general said. ‘We are living in denial and have been for a while now. I’m convinced there is no greater threat to Nigeria in its 100 years of history.’

This vacuum inside the state left a hole where Nigeria’s national heart should have been. Public interest was replaced by self-interest and, towards the people, disinterest. Left to fend for themselves, Nigerians retreated to their sectarian identities, to the delight of communal politicians, who stoked division further in their own narrow interests.

Perhaps the greatest damage done was to public trust. Politicians lied, banks stole, heads of industry bribed, even football players fixed–and the infection spread. Soldiers’ salaries were pocketed by their commanders. Medicines turned out to be counterfeit. Cheaply serviced airplanes fell out of the sky. Email scamming was one of Nigeria’s few growth industries. Even in 2015, few Nigerian businesses accepted anything but cash. Trust was experienced mostly in the negative: in the firm belief that it was every man for himself and everyone was out to con you. And in a country where crime equated to money, and money to status, and status to everything, all shame evaporated.

In this nation of a million conspiracies, all but the most sophisticated and devious explanations were dismissed as naïve. Every leader was said to be the puppet of a hidden hand, every businessman a money launderer or a tax dodger or secret stasher. Boko Haram was viewed alternately as a creation of northern power brokers, or of the presidency, or even of the CIA. The army was whispered to be co-ordinating troop movements to leave villages like Chibok undefended, or ferrying in new supplies to the militants, or even shipping in Delta militants as reinforcements. Shekau was in Saudi Arabia. Shekau was a guest of the government in Abuja. Shekau was dead. Prejudice, rumour and suspicion ruled. Certainty and knowledge were lost. This, to borrow a phrase, is how things fall apart.

When Portuguese explorers arrived in 1472, so scattered around marshes and lagoons was the settlement of Eko that they renamed it after the Portuguese word for lakes. Lagos first became a trading hub for slaves, then a British administrative city, then, after oil was discovered in the Bight of Benin in the 1950s, a boom town. As it was transformed into the biggest city and port in West Africa, Lagos became a destination for migrants across the continent. As we dropped out of the clouds, the city appeared below me and it was endless–a plain of dusty tile and tin roofs extending all the way to the horizon. Veins of traffic, electric-red and white, glittered prettily in the evening light. This was Africa’s megacity, the biggest metropolis in its most populous country and the third largest in the world although, with a new resident arriving every minute, beyond a broad guess of 20 million, nobody could say how many people lived there, even to the nearest million.

The Dutch architect and urban theorist Rem Koolhaas has eulogized this chaotic, crushing growth and the ingenuity it inculcated in Lagosians. The reality was less romantic. Almost every tree had been cut down and every garden built on. Offices and factories were squeezed into residential apartments. To cope with the gridlock, businessmen converted their car back-seats into offices, complete with phones, laptops and secretaries.

Oil’s disconnecting effect on government exacerbated Lagos’ decline. When oil prices collapsed in the mid 1970s, work on Lagos’ infrastructure stopped. When prices recovered, no one thought to resume it. Instead, as the city began to buckle, the federal government abandoned it for a new purpose-built inland capital, Abuja. Soon, foreign investors and tourists were also staying away. As the city crumbled, ‘Area Boys’, self-proclaimed vigilante street gangs who ran protection rackets and mugging syndicates, began terrorizing neighbourhood turfs.

In the first decades after independence, a time when many southerners discovered they were effectively barred from national politics by their ethnicity, Lagosians found an outlet for their frustration in the music of a home-grown superstar, Fela Kuti. Fela was from a middle-class, southern and Christian background. But after a few months in 1969 spent with the Black Power movement in Los Angeles, he returned to Lagos a musical maverick. He set up a commune and recording studio in Lagos, which he called the Kalakuta Republic and later declared independent from Nigeria. Four nights a week at his club, the Shrine, he would castigate Nigeria’s leaders to a musical style he called Afrobeat. ‘Go Slow’ cast Lagos’ gridlocked traffic as a metaphor for Nigeria’s spiritual standstill. ‘Zombie’ was a satire on the Nigerian military’s unthinking brutality. ‘Coffin for the Head of State’ recounted how, in 1977, 1,000 soldiers attacked the Kalakuta Republic and the Shrine, burned both down, beat Fela and killed his mother by throwing her from a window. (The coffin was Fela’s mother’s, which he imagined dumping outside the gates of government.) ‘I see see see all the bad bad bad things them dey do do do North and South,’ sang Fela.

One Christian and the other one Muslim.

Them steal all the money.

Them kill many students.

Them burn many houses.

Them burn my house too.

Them kill my mama.

Fela tried to run for President in 1979 but was barred. In 1984, the regime jailed him for 20 months. In 1997 Fela, who had formalized his promiscuity in 1978 by marrying all 28 of his women composers, dancers and singers, died of complications brought on by AIDS. More than a million Nigerians attended his funeral at the site of the old Shrine.

‘I’m depressed that it’s happening, I wish we were not falling into this deep black hole, but as my father’s son I’m not surprised,’ said Femi Kuti. ‘I do not see a way out for this country. The corruption is just too big.’

We were in Femi’s backstage dressing room. After Fela’s death, Femi took on his father’s mantle, keeping Afrobeat alive at the New Afrika Shrine, which he and his sister Yeni built on a new site 14 years ago. Femi reckoned the need to speak out was more urgent even than in Fela’s time. Unlike many Lagosians, ‘who don’t even know where the north is’, Femi had visited regularly since 1985 when his father was sent to jail in Maiduguri, the town where Boko Haram was founded 17 years later. ‘I was shocked,’ said Femi. ‘It was just flies everywhere.’

Femi thought Nigeria’s divides–north-south, Muslim-Christian, rich-poor–had only widened since. ‘It’s been years and years of neglect now. The gaps have got larger. You see the number of children coming out of school and you have to be scared. Where are the jobs? Where is the future? They grow up begging on the street. They have been so deprived that they do not know respect. They do not have values. They do not care for human life. They do not care about anything. It makes it easy to brainwash them.’

Femi let out a long sigh. ‘This country is in big trouble,’ he said. ‘Nothing works. We don’t have good education, we don’t have health, we have no electricity, we have bad roads, the airport is shit. And the Chibok girls–what about the military? They have the highest budget. Where’s all that money? The truth is we don’t have an army either, just generals with big stomachs.’

In Lagos, just as they did in Fela’s time, the elite used their money to separate themselves from the rest of the country. This was the Lagos of Gucci boutiques, Porsche showrooms, 2,000-guest weddings, weekend beach house parties–and even the elite’s own in-house magazine, a publication called Luxury Reporter. Somehow many foreign investors had taken this small band of super-rich, living apart and above like potentates, as an indication of Nigeria’s national economic health. In this imagined Nigeria, the rich were the tip of a golden iceberg rather than what they were: inhabitants of a tiny, free-floating offshore haven. These foreign investors also used a string of superlatives to describe the country–the biggest population in Africa, its biggest economy, its biggest oil reserves and, at 7.3 per cent, among the fastest rates of economic growth in the world. The reality, said Femi, was that Nigeria was the ultimate example of how money hadn’t fixed anything. ‘Growing for who?’ asked Femi. ‘The multinationals, maybe. The telephone companies? The elite? Nobody else. The poverty is greater than before. Primary school education costs 10 times the monthly wage. Who can afford that?’

It was the lack of change that most depressed Femi. The same corruption and anarchy existed in his father’s time. Now they had acquired a permanence, woven into the national fabric. In the end, said Femi, the damage was spiritual. Humanity became degraded. ‘It gets into everybody this corruption. You cannot trust anybody. Today people in Nigeria are not brought up to love. Nobody reads them a bedtime story. They don’t know how to take care of each other any more. Anybody who says they love you, you don’t believe them.’ The Chibok abductions might be ‘finally waking people up’ but, said Femi, too late. The country’s soul had already been corroded. ‘Because, you know, we’ve had kidnappings for years. My kids have to go to school with security guards. Here in Lagos you hear about children taken for human sacrifice.’

It sounded incredible. But I checked and Femi was right. In March 2014, a case of mass kidnapping and suspected ritual sacrifice was discovered outside Lagos when eight men and women were found in chains close to starvation in an isolated building in a forest. Near by was a well filled with bones and body parts belonging to an unknown number of people.

Femi said he hadn’t always been this pessimistic. When he rebuilt his father’s temple to Afrobeat, he intended it to improve on the original. There was to be less chaos and less of the sponging that came with commune living. More outreach. More social concern. Entry was free at least once a week. Drinks were kept cheap. Small food and jewellery stallholders were invited to set up inside the club. Staff would be encouraged to think of themselves as members of a family, with Femi more of a father than a boss.

The experiment had been a grinding lesson in disillusionment. Only that day Femi had discovered that some of his own bar staff had been ripping him off for years, hauling in their own beer and selling it rather than the club’s. ‘I was a big believer in pan-Africanism,’ said Femi. ‘I thought: “People love us. The Shrine is great.” These are the people I fight for and work for. So I did everything for free. People come to the Shrine for free. I sacrifice my whole career for this. Fourteen years. And they stab you in the back.’

Femi had 12 children, some his own, some adopted. I asked him how it was to bring up a family in Lagos. ‘I love my kids too much,’ he said. ‘But today I do not know if I made a big mistake. If I did not have all these kids, I would not remain here in this country of pain. But I’m stuck. How can I run with a family?’ It was hard to think of anything more disheartening than a father who loved his children but regretted having them. I winced, and Femi caught me. ‘I cannot lie to you,’ he said. ‘There are many times I wake up and I just want to be dead. I told my son the other day: “Some days I wish I would not wake up any more.” Really. I wish I was dead.’

I hung around to watch Femi and his band, Positive Force. They played in front of a #BringBackOurGirls banner, the Chibok girls’ social media hashtag. To one side was another poster: ‘United we stand. Divided we fall. Africa must unite.’ A thick cloud of weed smoke hung over the audience. The band, six guys on horns, three singers, two drummers, a congo player, two guitarists, two keyboard players and a bassist, hit its groove instantly. The chorus was simple and catchy.

One people.

One God.

One Love.

That’s the way it should be.

After a few minutes, Femi came in on an organ. The chord he was playing was off-key and jarring, like a horror movie. It was deliberate, I realized. Femi held the chord, letting the discord and chaos swell. It became louder and louder. People in the audience began to stop and stare. Even the band started to lose its way. It was becoming agonizing. I noticed Femi was shaking, like a man with his finger in a power socket.

Finally, he let go. The drummer hit a cymbal and it was as if a bottle had been thrown against a wall. There was silence in the club. For a moment Femi stood alone, stage front, eyes down. Then he was gone.

In the Sokoto jihad of 1804–8, Nigeria’s northern tribes rejected the rule of the northern Hausa dynasties, accusing them of un-Islamic corruption, elitism and self-indulgence. The jihadis were led by an Islamic scholar called Usman dan Fodio. His anti-authoritarian opposition to an avaricious, distant elite inspired several copycat revolutions across West Africa, and his influence endures even now. Several northern Nigerian emirates trace their lineage to commanders of the Sokoto jihad. Dan Fodio’s writings, and those of his daughter, still sell well across northern Nigeria.

In the 1970s, a group of imams from a sect called the Izala blossomed in Maiduguri’s deprivation. The Izala took a similar line to dan Fodio, preaching a purist morality in life and politics and denouncing the greed and corruption of Nigeria’s rulers. By 2005, a young preacher called Mohammed Yusuf, who said he had studied in Saudi Arabia, was beginning to steal the Izalas’ mantle. He too copied dan Fodio’s anti-elitism.

Nigeria’s divisions, corruption and suspicions, not to mention the north’s history of jihad, were a gift to a northern Islamist revolutionary. Yusuf could also draw on popular dissatisfaction with foreign aid. The international humanitarian movement was founded for the Biafran war. In the years since, aid had become so entrenched that it was a permanent part of the state. Yet aid workers had done nothing to hinder the Nigerian state from becoming one of the world’s most autocratic and most flashily uncaring. Nor had they done much to change the lives of millions of Nigerians who were worse off than they had been at independence or even, in the north-east, about as close to the bottom as a human being could be in the twenty-first century.

But, unlike dan Fodio, Yusuf did not campaign for more enlightenment but less. Dan Fodio’s daughter had been one of the great progressive Islamic scholars of her age. Yusuf, however, had no tolerance for women intellectuals or any other modernizations. Why bother with Western-style education, Yusuf would ask in his sermons, when there were no jobs even for graduates? Hadn’t money and oil given them a government that stole from its people? Hadn’t Western influence given them Ali Modu Sherrif, a state governor who built himself a palace of marble pillars and golden gates in the centre of Maiduguri? Yusuf advocated going back to a purer, pre-enlightenment Luddite age, before ‘so-called education, democracy and rule of law’. Yusuf called his group Jamaatu Ahlisunnah Lidawati wal Jihad, Arabic for ‘People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad’. It soon became better known by the nickname given it by Nigeria’s journalists, Boko Haram, which translates loosely as ‘books are blasphemous’ or, in an ironic echo of Lugard, ‘Western education is forbidden’.

By all accounts Yusuf was an impressive speaker. Many of his ideas, however, were half-baked, inauthentic imports. In line with his medievalism, he rejected all rationalism, denouncing as Godless ideas like evolution, the roundness of the earth and the evaporation of water. He copied other concepts wholesale from the Middle East and South Asia. He set up a camp he called ‘Afghanistan’ to instruct volunteers for his revolution against the evils of progress. Copying images of the mujahedeen, his followers began wearing the South Asian kurta pyjama and asking their women to wear the full veil.

The spark for violence came in late July 2009 when police officers watching a Boko Haram funeral procession saw some mourners riding motorbikes without helmets. In Maiduguri, helmets had become a point of contention. The security services insisted on them. Boko Haram resisted, since wearing one required a man to remove his traditional Islamic cap. ‘It was not about safety,’ said one Maiduguri elder recounting the story. ‘People felt it was just a way to control them.’

The police watched the helmetless funeral cortège pass. Then they attacked. The mourners retaliated. Three people died. Riots erupted. A few days later, on 28 July, the army surrounded Yusuf’s compound in Maiduguri, arrested him, then executed him. A bloodbath ensued. By nightfall on 29 July, barely 36 hours later, around 1,000 people were dead.

The killings briefly halted Boko Haram’s rise. But within a year the group was operating as a 5,000-strong rebellion across all northern Nigeria that threatened to split the country in two. Boko Haram’s response to state repression had been to elevate what had been an ideology of peaceful obscurantism to nihilist destruction. There was a connection between politicians’ wives’ $1 million shopping sprees and the high rate of malnutrition and death of pregnant mothers and children, the Islamists were saying. That was money that could have saved people. This was corruption escalated to murder. Worse, the people taking the money were the people entrusted with protecting those lives. They were killing the same people who voted for them. Everything was rotten. So everything, and everyone, had to die.

Boko Haram’s apocalyptic vision had no room for freedom other than that promised by a jihadi’s death. Its men slaughtered whole columns of Nigerian soldiers, cleaved their way through Christian congregations with machetes, cut down moderate Muslim families as they left Friday prayers and staged co-ordinated attacks that wiped out small villages and devastated cities such as Kano and Damaturu. In June 2011, they hit the national government when a suicide bomber killed himself and an officer as he tried to assassinate the Director-General of Police at the national police headquarters in Abuja. Next on Boko Haram’s target list was aid.

Created by decree in the 1970s when overpopulation first threatened Lagos’ collapse, Abuja was somehow never finished. Today it remains less a capital than a collection of unfinished highways, empty lots and car parks in search of a city. Even Nigerians who have lived there for 30 years will tell you Abuja is not so much a place as a state of mind. What at first appears to be a resident population is in fact a slow-motion mass transit of visiting politicians, diplomats on three-year postings, travelling businessmen, itinerant traders and migrant workers.

In this city of strangers, Mohammed Abul Barra was able to drive his grey Honda Accord right up to the gates of UN House before anyone noticed him. In a second, he swerved off the road into the UN’s 100-metre driveway and sailed past a guard-post at 30 kilometres an hour. He bounced over one speed bump, then another. Maintaining his deliberate unhurried pace, he drove straight at a three-metre sliding steel security gate, hitting the right corner so it popped off its rail and fell with a deafening clanging to one side. Mohammed drove on and repeated the manoeuvre with a second gate a few metres away.

It had taken perhaps 12 seconds for Mohammed to breach all the security between him and the UN’s Nigerian headquarters. Five storeys high and shaped as a three-pointed star, the building’s lobby was in a high glass atrium attached to its front. Mohammed drove at its glass doors and smashed into the lobby. Finally halted by a low wall, the car bounced back on its wheels.

Mohammed did not try to get out. In the lobby, security cameras captured a guard to one side, apparently frozen in shock. Perhaps a dozen others–UN staff, security personnel–ran away, then, unsure, stopped and turned back. Regaining his composure, the guard walked up to the car and peered in. Others also started edging forward. A full 12 seconds passed. ‘Was he having second thoughts?’ wondered the US Ambassador to Nigeria, Terence McCulley, after watching the video. ‘Was he praying? Was he searching for the detonator?’ Suddenly one of the onlookers seemed to see something. He turned and grabbed the man next to him. The pair started running. Inside the car, Mohammed leaned forward.

Flying bits of car and glass shredded most people in the lobby to a bloody pulp. Few of the rest of the 24 dead and 115 wounded had visible injury marks. Instead their insides were crushed by a blast wave so big it crumpled a water tower 90 metres away as if it were cardboard.

An FBI forensic team examining the 26 August blast later determined the bomb was colossal, and clever. Around 125kg of plastic explosives had been placed inside a metal cone–a shaped charge –to focus its force. Nigeria’s then National Security Advisor, General Andrew Owoye Azazi, was effusive about the professionalism of the attack. ‘This was very, very carefully planned,’ he said. ‘They did thorough surveillance, they knew the weaknesses of the gates. And the materiel was very volatile, very specialized. This was not just a local guy from Maiduguri.’

What Azazi meant was: al-Qaeda. Despite a long history of Islamic militancy that stretched back centuries, this was Nigeria’s first ever suicide attack. The Nigerian government immediately blamed international terrorism. This was ‘just like other terrorist attacks in the world’, said President Goodluck Jonathan. It was simply Nigeria’s bad luck that it had become the latest battlefield in this global war.

The trouble was, as Azazi and President Jonathan well knew, Mohammed Abul Barra was a local guy from Maiduguri. Within days he was identified as a 27-year-old mechanic and father of one from Nigeria’s north-easternmost city. A month after the attack, the French news agency AFP was sent a video of Mohammed shot immediately before the attack. In it, Mohammed was wearing the same black-and-white striped T-shirt and a white turban that looked too big for his head. He was standing in front of a sheet painted with Arabic slogans in a rough hand and as he moved, the camera revealed he was wearing a green canvas vest of the kind used in suicide bombings. Mohammed also had a Kalashnikov, which he apparently found unfamiliar and awkward to handle. Initially he held it by the barrel, then he folded it in the crook of his arm like a baby.

Mohammed smiled shyly at the camera and spoke so softly that the microphone struggled to pick up his words. ‘I’m going to shed my blood,’ he said. ‘I am going there now. God willing, and I pray to Allah to make me steadfast. May He take me there safely.’ The camera then showed two men, whose faces it did not reveal, embracing Mohammed. Perhaps because he was unaccustomed to the attention, Mohammed reacted stiffly, beaming and nearly knocking heads with the second man. These were Mohammed’s last goodbyes. He looked like a boy setting off for camp.

Maiduguri stood out even amid the poverty of the Sahel. Its roads were lined with ancient rusted signs and broken street lamps and the surface had potholes the size of swimming pools. Behind the checkpoints of policemen and soldiers, in their roadside igloos of sandbags and barbed wire, were a few solid-looking buildings. But most houses and businesses seemed to have been patched together from whatever–wood, car doors, flattened oil drums–was to hand. The statistics described true destitution. More than three-quarters of Maiduguri’s population lived in absolute poverty. Just 3.6 per cent of children were vaccinated against disease. Only one in five children went to school. The average girl managed three weeks of school in her lifetime.

Nigeria’s army and police responded to the UN attack in August with a cruelty that matched Boko Haram’s. They raided villages and towns, rounding up young men and executing them–even gutting them–and dumping hundreds of bodies in trenches and mass graves. They razed at least one town near Maiduguri, Baga, and massacred around 200 people. In Maiduguri a group of elders showed me a cell-phone video of 20 uniformed Nigerian soldiers using truncheons and whips to beat a crowd of young men, stripped and on their knees, in Maiduguri’s market. ‘They do this daily,’ said one. ‘They can just take you and shoot you. Whenever there is a bomb blast, they just call the youth and shoot some of them.’ One time, he added, they shot an entire wedding party of 20. ‘Does a young man need any other reason to rise up after this?’

Professor Shettima Khalifa Dikwa from Maiduguri University was unequivocal. ‘Boko Haram is about injustice and freedom,’ he said. Nigeria’s economy and finances were in the hands of a few. Teachers’ and doctors’ salaries were stolen. Ordinary children were denied school, ‘but the children of corrupt politicians rode around town in cars’. The professor continued: ‘The system is as rotten as hell. It’s like the people of Maiduguri are aliens in their own country.’ The army only made things worse, he said, by using the war to make money in corrupt contracts for equipment. They built big hotels using contractors from the south. In these, ‘they fornicate and they protect gay rights, which are an abomination. Instead of talking to people, they beat them with cowhide whips and kill them. They kill everyone, rape their children and burn the place. They want to Somali-ize Maiduguri: make it lawless and then make more money.’ Bodies are not counted in a dirty war. By 2015, the dead were estimated at around 13,000, though nobody could be sure even to the nearest few thousand.

The Nigerian government was keen to present Boko Haram as an international threat–something it could do little about. Counter-terrorism officials briefed journalists on how some former Izala activists had formed a small group, Ansaru, with global ambitions. They added that the UN attack was carried out by a Boko Haram splinter with similar aims and that Boko Haram had also reached out to other militants in Somalia and Yemen.

The Americans shared this analysis, to a degree. In 2011, the then Commander of US forces in Africa, General Carter Ham, had warned of the emergence of a pan-African al-Qaeda that merged Boko Haram, AQIM and al-Shabab in Somalia and had ‘very explicitly and publicly voiced intent to target Westerners and the US’. The US embassy in Abuja reckoned Ham’s ‘Africanistan’ scenario was overstated but added that several hundred Boko men had travelled to Mali for bomb-making and propaganda training by AQIM.

In Maiduguri, Nigeria’s army was also eager to endorse Boko Haram’s link to al-Qaeda. Describing an attack on a police station at a village called Mainok the night before, Lieutenant Colonel Hassan Ifijeh Mohammed said it had been ‘a bomb attack, an IED’ and that was all the proof anyone needed that ‘we are fighting terrorists’. ‘Here they call it Boko Haram but Boko Haram is totally al-Qaeda,’ he said. ‘The name does not matter. The characteristics are the same. All the terrorists are in one group. They have one activity, one [way of] thinking. Al-Qaeda has no boundary. There are perfect links. It’s exactly the same as al-Qaeda.’

I drove the 45 minutes to Mainok. There had been no bomb or IED. A small group of Boko Haram fighters had arrived by motorcycle, shot at the outside of a small hut belonging to the Federal Road Safety Corporation and a tiny adjoining police post. When a man stepped outside his house to investigate, they also shot him dead. The militants then burned a clinic inside the Road Safety Corporation’s hut and slashed the tyres on a government jeep parked outside it. After 45 minutes, they left.

September 11 this was not. The colonel had initially dismissed Boko Haram as ‘a bunch of nobodies from the countryside’, and that was much closer to the truth. Boko Haram’s concerns were local. They hated the Christian President and they hated the state government in Maiduguri even more. Without Yusuf to guide them, they no longer thought much beyond that. Killing had become the religion. Killing, in itself, was the end.

Such ideological weakness only underlined what hick town rebels they were. At times, they had a hard time even making sense. They said they wanted to be left alone in the purity of their poverty by an outside world that had long ago left them behind–but by taking up arms, they had forced the government to try to stop them. Their reasoning for attacking the UN was just as flawed. Several weeks afterwards, a Boko Haram spokesman called Abu Qaqa tried to explain. ‘We are at war with infidels and all over the world the UN is a global partner in the oppression of believers,’ he said. ‘In Nigeria, the federal government tries to perpetuate the agenda of the United Nations.’

Boko Haram’s cult of violence was exactly what bin Laden wanted to avoid. It made a nonsense of its claim to fight oppression. The group’s behaviour and reasoning displayed all the wilful distortion and witless simplicity of fascism. But in the way it blew apart the dark mysteries of power in Nigeria, that was its appeal.

Boko Haram’s tactics had another effect. They attracted attention. Its kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in April 2014, in particular, drew worldwide notice. Among those moved to demand international action to #BringBackOurGirls were Jesse Jackson, Angelina Jolie, the Iranian government, the Coca-Cola company, the Prime Minister of Nepal and the cast of the Sylvester Stallone shoot ’em up, Expendables 3. Pakistani schoolgirl and Taliban attack survivor Malala Yousafzai called the girls ‘her sisters’. Michelle Obama commandeered her husband’s weekly address to tell Americans: ‘In these girls, Barack and I see our own daughters.’ The US, Britain, Israel and China offered drones, spy planes and advisors to assist Nigeria’s government in the girls’ recovery. French President François Hollande hosted a Paris summit for President Jonathan and four other West African leaders. The head of the Anglican Church, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, who once lived in Nigeria, flew to Abuja to pray with President Jonathan.

None of this did anything to bring home the girls, whose fate was a deepening mystery. Boko Haram initially said it would marry off the girls or sell them as slaves, then claimed 100 of them had converted from Christianity to Islam. Scattered reports located the girls as all together in Sambisa, a remote, roadless area of dry scrub close to Chibok, or split up and moved to different areas, in Nigeria and across the border in Chad and Cameroon. By their own efforts, more than 50 girls escaped.

And rather than buckling to outside pressure, Boko Haram responded enthusiastically to the publicity by stepping up its attacks. Northern Nigeria became a bloodbath. Almost 1,000 people were killed in seven weeks. More or less every day, it seemed, Boko Haram was massacring another village, slaughtering people and burning their huts to the ground. The attacks were often reprisals for the assistance the villagers provided to Nigeria’s army, either in the form of intelligence or self-defence groups made up of village hunters. Further afield, hundreds more Nigerians died in a series of bombings in the country’s cities, including in a twin blast in Jos, which killed 130, and another in Abuja, which killed close to 100.

Many of the attacks seemed designed to draw the same outrage as Chibok. Boko Haram staged two more mass kidnappings near the village. It began using girls as young as 10 as suicide bombers. Then in January 2015, it staged its bloodiest attack to date, massacring hundreds of people, possibly even up to 1,000, in and around the remote north-eastern town of Baga–the same village to which the Nigerian army had laid waste in April 2013.

The result was to force #BringBackOurGirls to confront an awkward suspicion: that by ‘raising awareness’ as the humanitarian imperative required, the campaigners might be giving Boko Haram precisely the global profile it wanted. Any time the limelight threatened to fade, the group would stage another atrocity to recapture it. Additionally, the campaigners’ narrative was feeling increasingly forced. The promotion of girls’ education was a favourite humanitarian rallying cry. But the idea that the Chibok girls’ abduction was another example of how violent Islamism was, at root, a problem of sexism was given the lie by the revelation that the girls’ gender may have saved their lives. In other raids on mixed schools, Boko Haram slit the throats of all the boys. Similarly, the notion that Nigeria was the latest battleground against international terrorism, as Jonathan, Hollande and United States Senator John McCain maintained, seemed increasingly off the mark when measured against the hyper-local focus of most of Boko Haram’s atrocities.

The campaign did at least expose the corruption and indifference of the government. For close to three weeks after the girls first went missing, the government had appeared not to even notice. It then claimed they had been set free, then said al-Qaeda was to blame. After that President Goodluck Jonathan’s wife Patience accused the girls’ parents of inventing the whole affair to embarrass her husband; then had one of the #BringBackOurGirls organizers arrested; then told people not to criticize Jonathan since his presidency was the work of God; then, to press her point, went on live television to evoke God’s presence, wailing, ‘There is God-o!’ over and over. The President’s office later displayed the same sensitivity when it claimed, without any basis in fact, that it had a peace deal with Boko Haram, before going on to announce that the slogan for the President’s re-election campaign would be #BringBackJonathan.

The drive north to Jos passed from dirty coastal swamps into thick forest and out onto wide river valleys and finally back into lush flatlands planted with yams and maize and small forests of giant mango trees. Out of the fields rose colossal single-boulder mountains of smooth, dark granite, as though the skin of the earth had been peeled back to reveal the bone beneath, which had been left to bake to black in the sun.

If Nigeria was going to disintegrate, it was a fair bet that the rupture would start in Jos. The southern half of the city was mostly Christian, the northern half mostly Muslim. Though the two sides had lived together for hundreds of years, both still described the Christians as indigenous and the Muslims as incomers. Christians accused Nigeria’s many Muslim rulers of ripping off the country. Muslims complained of being marginalized in Jos–excluded from government jobs and schools and services and budgets. These communal grievances, and attempts to protect turf, found a focus at elections, which were often violent. Every few years Jos simply exploded. Mobs from one side ran wild through neighbourhoods belonging to the other, bombing churches and mosques, wrecking businesses and schools, and slaughtering families in their homes.

Two days before I arrived, two car bombs detonated 10 minutes apart in the city’s central market. Around 130 people were dead, possibly more. Body parts were thrown hundreds of metres in every direction and rescuers were finding it impossible to put them back together. Sadeeq Hong, a 30-year-old former journalist who gave up the trade to focus on reconciling the two sides of his home city, agreed to show me around. We took a three-wheeled bike taxi to the market, ducked under the yellow police tape and walked in.

Where thousands of people had once crowded hundreds of stalls there was now an empty double-lane highway, perhaps 800 metres long. The road was flanked by wide, bare-earth verges and, to one side, a double-storey row of shops. Many of the shop windows were blown out. Every few metres there were the ashes of fire. We found the site of the second bomb: a small crater in the road, 30 centimetres deep and wide. Two hundred metres away was the hole made by the first bomb, twice as deep and the size and rectangular shape of a small car.

A policeman with a surgical mask draped around his neck walked up. ‘The bodies were on the roof,’ he said, pointing to the tin roof of a two-storey building a block away. ‘Pieces, pieces, pieces,’ he said. ‘The women… it cut their neck and throw the head down. We pick them. Pick, pick, pick.’ I looked over to where the officer was pointing. A wall perhaps three metres from the blast had ceased to exist, blown back to its stumps. Towering television aerials, 20 metres high, had been bent back by the explosion’s force. Next to them was a palm tree. Three bras–maroon, white and beige–hung from a frond. Stuck in others were pink and green knickers. The policeman kicked at the rubble absently. ‘The people who do this expect something from God,’ he said.

‘What do they know of God?’ snapped Sadeeq.

After putting out the fires and removing the bodies and limbs, the clean-up team brought in bulldozers. The pile of detritus they pushed together was the height of a man and 30 metres long and wide. It seemed incredible, bigger even than the market that created it. How stacked were the stalls? How packed was the market? Tight enough to absorb a bomb, I realized. I couldn’t see a single shrapnel hole in the buildings around us.

Sadeeq and I picked our way around the smouldering mess. Here were the remains of a bag stall: a brown and silver backpack, a black laptop case, a fake designer handbag. Here was a shoe stall: black sandals, smart leather loafers, turquoise heels, a blue-suede zipped platform boot. A pile of mattresses had fused together in the heat. Next to them was a stack of kitchen flooring, melted like wax.

Here was a DVD stall. I could see covers for Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. The blast had exposed a second, hidden business: there was porn everywhere. ‘Indian professional prostitute extremely happy red beautiful women,’ read one DVD cover. ‘There was a boy selling these,’ said the policeman, watching me sift through the boxes. ‘He was killed.’ The officer made an arc through the air with his hand, high and wide, tracing the boy’s trajectory.

Sadeeq said the days after the blast had been nervous. ‘They were out on the street straight away, right after the blast,’ he said of Jos’ Christian militias. ‘They want to kill, maim and destroy. But our people informed us where the groups were moving and the security forces neutralized the forces who were about to attack.’

Sadeeq took me to Plateau Hospital, where some of injured were being treated. A list of 35 names had been pasted to the wall next to the entrance. There were Christian and Muslim names here. ‘Goodness Chimedu; Joy Christopher; Patience Daladi; Mohammed Bashir; Umar Yusuf; Hadiza Ajiji.’ One name, Elizabeth Musa, suggested a mixed family. We found Elizabeth surrounded by relatives on a ward in the back. There were bloody bandages around her left foot, her left knee, both her arms and around her head. One eye was obscured with a patch, the other closed by swelling. She looked unconscious, but when Sadeeq said a few words of introduction, she sat straight up and started talking all of a tumble, swaying alarmingly as though she might fall out of bed.

‘BOH!’ she said, throwing her arms up. ‘Ra opposite me! BOH! And I can na see anything. Ma eyes are forever blind. De luggage from de luggage stall just fall on ma head. I ma covered. I said: “Oh help me! Oh help me! Oh help me!”’

The women in the room began to sway and murmur. ‘Oh!’ they said. ‘Mmmm-huh!’

‘Oh help me!’ repeated Elizabeth. ‘I can na move ma head. I see maself going down, down, down.’

‘Mmmm-huh,’ said the women.

‘People were moving around,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I was shoutin’. Shoutin’! But they could na find me under de luggage.’

Elizabeth said that eventually she heard two men approach. They heard her shouts. ‘No, dat one over there is much more in need,’ said one. His companion disagreed. ‘We might lose her if we just pass her,’ he said. The second man won. ‘Dey said: “Let’s go, let’s go.” And dey carry me.’

Elizabeth was 50. She sold rice and beans in the market. She was a Christian, but her husband was Muslim. The bombers had found their target, I thought. Elizabeth’s religious mongrelism was an affront to the purity they demanded.

Sadeeq told Elizabeth to rest and she sank back onto her bed. He asked the men and women in the room if the government was following up on its promise to pay for the bomb victims’ treatment. ‘We payin’,’ said one man. ‘We see nuthin’ from government.’ Sadeeq grunted. ‘Politicians!’ he spat as we left. ‘There are politicians who will try to make money even from this.’

Sadeeq and I walked back to my guest house. On the television behind reception the evening news was showing a portly man in uniform with gold and scarlet brass on his shoulders. It was the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Alex Badeh, strolling through the scene of the attacks. A reporter shoved a microphone in his face. The Air Chief Marshal smiled. The security services were like a well-trained goalkeeper, he said. They saved many goals but let one in and the whole team blamed them. The Air Chief Marshal beamed at his metaphor.

Sadeeq insisted his efforts to breach Jos’ divide had had some success. Still, it was a daily and sometimes losing battle. It was not uncommon for priests and imams to carry Kalashnikovs in Jos, he said. Some had even led attacks. This sectarianism was not, Sadeeq insisted, unique to Jos. The city was merely where the rents in Nigeria’s national cloth were most exposed. The stakes of what happened in Jos could hardly have been higher. ‘Some people say the country will split apart even by next year,’ said Sadeeq.

I asked Sadeeq to introduce me to figures on either side of the divide–community leaders and militiamen. By the next morning he had arranged for several to come in careful sequence to an office in an area of town considered neutral territory. The militiamen were mostly unemployed graduates in their twenties. They were careful about what they said. Though their members were routinely attacked or killed, they denied carrying anything more than machetes. They also claimed to enjoy semi-official endorsement. Their neighbourhood patrols were in constant contact with the police and army.

All sides described Nigeria as effectively two countries, north and south, Muslim and Christian, with Jos straddling the border. One 28-year-old Christian militia leader seemed almost to be looking forward to the day the country fell apart. ‘The north contributes nothing to the economy of the nation,’ he said. ‘They are only parasites. I feel let them just go. Them be there and we be here. With this segregation, they cannot come between us and plant bombs.’

Both sides also agreed it was state failure–a government that did not provide security, or jobs, or education worthy of the name–that made vigilantes necessary. Abandoned by an indifferent and incompetent government, Nigerians had been forced to create their own services, setting up their own private schools, employing private security guards, plugging in their own electricity generators and digging their own water boreholes. ‘The government has totally failed in its responsibilities to the people,’ said Muslim militia leader Litty Omar, 32. ‘In Nigeria, the people are on their own.’

Like many Nigerians, Sadeeq believed the failure went deeper than disinterest. The state was not just unfocused on its citizens, it was sometimes complicit in the violence. The bloodshed suited politicians, said Sadeeq, who found their contest for power made easier by forcing Nigerians into sectarian trenches from where they voted along communal lines. Violence also worked for the security services, whose national budget of $5.8 billion a year depended on them having a conflict to address. ‘The whole thing is a creation,’ said Sadeeq.

Sadeeq introduced me to Sani Mudi, a spokesman for an umbrella Muslim group called Jama’atu Nasril Islam. Sani agreed the authorities were ‘deeply involved’. And Sani would have known. He was a former deputy chairman of north Jos and ex-assistant to the state governor. ‘It’s partisan, it’s intractable, it’s barbaric and it’s callous,’ said Sani. ‘It’s almost beyond imagination how the struggle for power could get this bad. It’s the opposite of patriotism. And it’s our rulers doing it.’

Next came a 51-year-old evangelist who worked with Sani in conflict mitigation and who had formed his own Christian-Muslim vigilante force, which gave early warnings of brewing violence in Jos. Yohanna Garba agreed that Nigeria’s rulers stoked the country’s divides for their own purposes. But he considered the security services most to blame. ‘There has to be trouble for there to be money,’ said Yohanna. ‘The more crisis, the more money. So they allow trouble. They even make it.’ Yohanna said he had a friend, a colonel, at army headquarters in Abuja. ‘Some of the conversations there disturb him,’ he said. ‘A common opinion among the generals is that the insurgency may cost 1,000 deaths a month but there are 200 to 300 births a day. So it’s not really a problem because there are replacements.’

The next day, I left Jos. That evening a suicide bomber killed himself and three others at the entrance to a crowded community hall on the outskirts of town. The following week the newspapers reported that a Boko Haram militant arrested in Jos had confessed there were six more devices and 100 more militants in the city.

The news reminded me of something Yohanna said about the other big Nigerian story that year: the country’s surging economy. Yohanna seemed to share Boko Haram’s dim view of Western-style development. ‘Today people talk about a great, bright, wonderful future for Nigeria,’ he said. ‘But what they are saying is: “We will have more and more business and more and more power as we get people to support us.”’ Yohanna said this was not the path to progress that it was commonly held to be. ‘The Bible says in the last days, we will be lovers of money, people will hate each other and brother will rise against brother. And I tend to believe the Bible. I tend to believe there is no brighter future for Nigeria. It will get worse and worse. I see the end of the world.’