how has nigeria's current president done so far against the group?
Earlier this month, twenty-one of the recently freed Chibok girls of Nigeria, who had been kindapped by Boko Haram and living in captivity since 2014,
met the man who orchestrated their release, President Muhammadu Buhari.
President Buhari was elected on a mandate to wipe out the terrorist group and bring back all of the schoolgirls, many of whom are still living in captivity. So how has Buhari done? It's been a mixed bag, says Eurasia Group's Africa analyst
Ayso van Eysinga.
Video and full transcript below.
Nigeria's Boko Haram problem was a serious one in 2014. Boko Haram controlled large areas of the country and it was a crucial element that brought the current President, Muhammadu Buhari, into power. He promised to fight Boko Haram and be more effective than his predecessor.
Where are we now? We're not quite there yet. Boko Haram's abilities have been reduced. They are no longer controlling territory but they remain a significant threat to security in the northeast. They still hold small pockets of territory and still manage to threaten the lives of people in the northeast. There has been other good news. For example, most recently, 21 of the Chibok girls were released. The Chibok girls were a group of girls who were abducted from the northeast in 2014 and has been one of the major social media campaigns concerning Boko Haram, “Bring Back our Girls”.
So this will be a big PR stunt for President Buhari and a big success, but the fact that it is only 21 and that it is taking so long will be frowned upon in Nigeria as a whole. There can be many problems in the northeast, whether it is the scale of the humanitarian disaster there which is only now being recognized because only now people are having access to the northeast, or whether it is the fact that there are other security tensions in Nigeria. Notably, in the oil-producing Niger Delta region, where you have militants attacking infrastructure and crucially hitting production which is a major source of revenue for the government. The government will be more thinly stretched as they try to deal with these different security threats. And can the government balance both securing the south and securing the northeast? That is what we are going to see in 2016 and 2017.
Nigerian soldiers hold up a Boko Haram flag that they had seized in the recently retaken town of Damasak, Nigeria, March 18, 2015.
