THE ‘HARAM’ IN ‘BOKO’

WHY THE GLOBAL NORTH’S NEW DEVELOPMENT IDEOLOGY FOR AFRICA’S DEVELOPMENT MUST BE REJECTED

The IMF recently concluded its Article IV Consultation in Nigeria and slammed the CBN for not sticking religiously to its preferred neoliberal diktat in the management of the macroeconomic policies of the government. Put simply, the IMF was irked at the audacity of the CBN to engage in massive infrastructural spendings and interventions in the economy and warned of dire consequences in the future if it was not discontinued. Without responding directly to the IMF’s now discredited favoured economic model and prescription for the CBN,I reproduce here,an article I had written recently to expose the deceit of Bretton Woods institutions and their policy panacea for the so-called developing nations(I don’t like using this deceptive description of the development trajectory of poor nations) . Through an etymological unpacking of the Hausa phrase “boko haram” I draw parallels with the deceit of neoliberal economic policy prescriptions for poor countries in the global South. I welcome reactions.

Nigeria is facing the biggest threat to her existence as a nation in the ‘Boko Haram’ insurgency with its attendant loss of lives and property; emotional and psychological trauma wrought on the surviving victims of the cold blooded actions of the sect; deepening of dichotomous fault lines that has been gingerly accommodated since independence and worst of all, the constant fear that citizens all over the country are forced to live in-not knowing were the next bomb blast might go off. The parlous and critical situation Nigeria finds herself is best captured in the description of the nation as one of Africa’s “Big Messes” by no less a personality than Professor Richard Joseph during the occasion of the Third Chinua Achebe Colloquium.

However, I am not about to undertake another causal nexus interrogation of the Boko Haram destructive phenomenon and its consequences , for in my opinion, a lot is already in the public domain, both true and fabled in that regard, but I shall attempt to expose the misconceptions inherent in the general understanding of the Hausa word ‘boko’ by investigating its etymology with a view to establishing that Islam, in its nature ,is not averse to ‘Western education’ as elements of the Boko Haram sect would have us believe, but rather, aspects of Western education actually imbibe and corroborate not a few principles of early Islamic civilization. I will then argue that what is assumed to be a rejection of Western education by adherents of Islam in the Northern parts of Nigeria was indeed, an early deciphering of some of the deceit Western modernism which the British colonial authorities sought to entrench through their form of education, a philosophy that has been remodeled and marketed as a new development ideology for Africa and other Third World Countries. First, a few conceptual clarifications will suffice.

The name ‘Boko Haram’ is pejoratively used in reference to the terror group ‘Jamaatu Ahlis Sunnah lid daawati wal jihad’. To most people, laymen and surprisingly, scholars alike, a literal understanding of the Hausa word ‘boko’ is erroneously said to be a corruption or an adaptation of the English word ‘book’ by the Hausa population on encountering colonial style education. Interpretatively, therefore, ‘boko’, is said to mean Western education. ‘Haram’ on its own needs no contestation, being a borrowed word from Arabic that connotes things that are highly forbidden in Islam as against its antithesis ‘halal’ which refers to things that are permitted.

From the assumed definitions above, therefore, a marriage of both words i.e. ‘boko’ and ‘haram’ will literally mean ‘Western education is forbidden’ which many people ascribe to as the main ideology of the Boko Haram sect: a hatred for Western education . This wrong understanding of the Hausa word ‘ boko’ has assumed prominent position not only among most commentators on the Boko Haram insurgency but also with academics ,such that Paul Newman, arguably one of the world’s leading Hausa language experts identified eleven instances of wrong application of the word ‘boko’ by authorities and institutions that should ordinarily know better; invariably culminating in a distortion of the real meaning of the moniker of the ‘Jamaatu Ahlis Sunnah lid daawati” . The popular online source Wikipedia,the United States Council on Foreign Relations, to mention but a few, were all identified by Newman to have embraced the faulty definition of the word ‘boko, thereby creating an impression that Islam, or at least in the understanding of the Hausa who created the word, forbids or abhors ‘Western education’. This generally accepted but wrong view is further affirmed by the renowned Political Scientist, J. Peter Pham that “the name Boko Haram is itself derived from the combination of the Hausa word for book (as in ‘ book learning’) ,boko, and the Arabic term Haram designates those things which are ungodly or sinful”.

In questioning this rather simplistic etymology of the word ’boko’, Murphy, writing in the Christian Science Monitor Journal , doubted that there would exist a four letter word in Hausa to describe two English words which can be hyphenated to create a compound word like ‘Western-education”. Newman concurred and submitted that the first formal entry of the word ‘boko’ was in G.P Bargery’s 1934 Hausa dictionary which associated the word with anything “sham”,”fraudulent” “inauthentic”.

Denouncing the view that ‘boko’ is a Hausa adaptation of the English word ‘book’, Newman cited the work of the revered Hausa Scholar Liman Muhammad who forty five years ago in his study of the rich neology and lexical depth of the Hausa language listed 200 loanwords borrowed from English language in the area of ” Western Education and Culture” without the word ‘boko’ included in them. Mohammed went on to define ‘boko’ as “something (an idea or object) that involves fraud or any form of deception”.

At this point, it is pertinent to state that there is no documented record of the Hausa population’s rejection of education per se; however, the secular slant of Western/colonial style education which sought to delineate religion from governance and knowledge was viewed with suspicion. As adherents of the Islamic faith, it was incumbent upon the Hausa population to deliberately seek to be educated. In fact, in Islam, it is an obligation that an adherent acquires knowledge. So important is this requirement that in the first revelation received by the Prophet Mohammed, a direct injunction to “read” was given to him.

In keeping with this divine directive , the Prophet made it mandatory that all faithfuls acquire knowledge as a sacred duty. Little wonder, then, that the development of Mathematical and Engineering concepts such as calculus, algebra, algorithm and advancements in the field of geometry, medicine, optics, astronomy etc. were strongly linked to Islamic scholars such as Ibn Sina, Jabir Ibn Haiyan, Yaqub Ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, Abu al-Nasr al-Farabi, Abu al-Qasim Khalaf bin ‘Abbas el-Zahrawi, Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, & Ibn Khaldun etc.

The Hausa population of the colonial era, in keeping with their religious obligations, were not averse to education in the truest sense of it, but saw through the smoke screen and deception of colonial style education and quickly coined a derisive word for it in ‘boko’. This point is corroborated by the subsequent definition of boko given by Liman Muhammad, cited by Newman:

“boko occurs with the word biri, monkey as part of a fixed compound biri-boko (lit. monkey-fraud)…refers to something that appears to be important or reliable, but is not, something that looks good on the outside, but is bad in the inside, something that is empty or hollow, but with deception implied, something that is unreal, fake, deceptive, phony, i.e., a smoke screen”.

The above encapsulates what to the Hausa is ‘haram’, forbidden , in Western education, an educational system that tries to erode the values, culture, norms, and belief system of the Hausa/Fulani and to supplant them with Western secularism.

A similar situation exists today in the quest for development by Third World countries, especially in sub saharan Africa. A new development ideology, arising from the ashes of past failed development models is being marketed to Third World Countries by neo-liberal agents of capitalism. This ideology,driven by a development merchant system propelled by the Bretton Woods institutions of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund(IMF)in cahoots with the World Trade Organization(WTO) and their private collaborators in Transnational Corporations has no other objective other than the continued development of underdevelopment in Third World Countries.

To achieve this, all kinds of neoliberal policy prescriptions are foisted on these poor countries as a precondition for accessing donor aids and loans . These policies include the privatization of state enterprises, abandonment of the local economy to the vagaries of the markets, removal of trade barriers such as tariffs, devaluation of local currencies, fiscal controls that limit social spendings, dismantling of subsidies etc. The latest trend is the call for the wholesale liberalization of Third World Countries’ markets to foreign goods. Supported by the World Trade Organization(WTO), tariff and trade barriers imposed by these countries to protect their local economies and industries are feverishly dismantled, with the negative consequence of deindustrialization.

Recently, the World Bank Country Director in Nigeria gleefully announced that over $15 Billion dollars in International Development Assistance was advanced to Sub-Saharan Africa in 2014,consisting majorly of zero-interest credits and grants. As laudable as this gesture may seem on the surface, we must interrogate the concept of grants and credits advancement to Third World Countries and its larger implications. If truth must be told, the current debt burden faced by most of these countries is a direct consequence of such loans. The fact that it attracts zero interest is immaterial and a ‘boko’, a deceptive fake, akin to a smokescreen gesture. Why? The fact is that most of these loans, where properly applied, are used to provide social, non-commercial and non-profit services and infrastructure and since they must one day be repaid and having not derived any profits from the initial investments, the benefiting governments are saddled with a huge debt profile added to the interests bearing ones they are currently battling with.

The deception of this development ideology is further expressed in the double standards in the application of international trade rules as is currently witnessed in the WTO regime. While the WTO continues to pressure Third World Countries to remove all forms of trade barriers to the advantage of the global North’s interests, the Uruguay Round commitments for the granting of access to the markets of the West, especially in agricultural products remains a mirage.The disaster that is the Europe promoted Economic Partnership Agreement is a story for another day.

The perpetuation of Africa’s so-called Comparative Advantage in the area of raw material production/supply to developed countries over and above value addition to her natural resources is another ‘haramesque’ aspect of the West’s development ideology for Third World Countries that must be rejected in its entirety. While the West concentrates on export of manufactured goods and the resultant creation of jobs for her citizens, poor African countries are sold the dummy that their strength lie in the continued over-exploitation of their natural resources in disregard of environmental concerns. The poor Terms of Trade of Third World Countries aptly reveals the deception in this development ideology.

The deception of the ideology is again expressed in the insistence of its purveyors on a private sector led development as against state directed development. These marketers of a ‘boko’ development ideology conveniently forget that nowhere in the world has any economy advanced significantly to the point of development without the role of the state. Following the devastation of Europe after the Second World War, the Marshall Plan was clearly an example of the State playing its historic role in directing development and it succeeded beyond the expectations of those who canvassed and implemented the plan.

Consequently, Third World Countries must see this ideology of development for what it is, and resoundingly reject it. They must delink completely from it and commence, immediately, evolving economic plans that take into proper account the class perspectives of development. The current focus on GDP growth rather than normative development concerns is not only counter-productive but diversionary. Nigeria with its famed GDP growth in the last 7 years and positive future projections still has about 66 percent or more of its population living below poverty lines as per the 2016 figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics.

The State must not be wary of directing development, China and South East Asian Tigers’ model have shown that the State intervention or direction is not anathema to capitalism once corruption is eliminated or reduced to the barest minimum. Third World Countries must shift from begging for Development Aid Assistance to demanding for a restructuring of the global economic governance system that currently sustains their dependency status. They must demand for transparency in the WTO negotiations and insist on the enforcement of agreements that favour the export of her agricultural and textile products to developed markets without the impediment of non- tariff barriers and subsidies by the global North.

The trend of also giving Transnational Corporations the latitude to carry on as they please must also be discarded, thankfully, in this regard, The United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC), in a statement just released announced that it has “adopted, through a vote, a historic and significant resolution to start a process for an international legal instrument on transnational corporations”. Indeed, this is the time to reject the ‘haram’ in reckless neoliberalism.