BY now, the Nigerian military should be picking up a few useful insights into guerrilla warfare, which is going to be the preferred face of armed confrontation in the foreseeable future. During the conflict in the Niger Delta between the militants and the Nigerian Armed Forces, the militants used two names to issue public statements and threats: Jomo Gbomo and Cynthia Whyte.
Gbomo has fallen mute since the Independence Day bombing in Abuja 2011, when the leader of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND), Henry Okah, was apprehended and put on trial in South Africa.
It is Cynthia Whyte that is still talking any time MEND or those parading with the name issue a threat or claim responsibility for some mishap in the Niger Delta to prove they are still active even after five years of the Amnesty programme.
Boko Haram under its founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was not more than its predecessor jihadist anarchists led by Maitatsine and “Musa Makaniki” in Maiduguri and Jimeta, respectively in the 1980s. But when he was captured and killed and the original Abubakar Shekau emerged, Boko Haram assumed the toga of a full guerrilla outfit, feeding off sumptuous funding, floating arsenal of the deposed Muammar Gadhafi armoury and internal sabotage in the military and government by Boko Haram acolytes.
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