NIGERIA’S war against Boko Haram is going from bad to worse. The country’s army, on paper the strongest in west Africa, suffered its latest humiliation in late August when some 480 soldiers fled across the border to Cameroon after coming under attack from the jihadists.
Cameroon’s ministry of defence said the Nigerian troops crossed the frontier after militants attacked a military base and police station in Gamboru Ngala, in northern Nigeria. The deserting forces apparently holed up in Maroua, some 80km (50 miles) inside Cameroon, where they were disarmed by local troops. Nigeria’s government insists this was but a “tactical manoeuvre”.
It was the latest of many setbacks in the struggle to contain Boko Haram (its name means “Western education is forbidden”), which recently proclaimed an Islamic caliphate in Nigeria’s north-east, mimicking the one set up by Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The security situation in the north has continued to deteriorate. Thousands of people have been killed this year. The government has failed to rescue more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in April.
A large part of the problem is Nigeria’s army itself. It may boast one of the largest budgets in Sub-Saharan Africa, after Angola and South Africa, but it suffers from poor morale, training and, among some units, questionable loyalty. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think-tank, says its equipment often malfunctions and is anyway better suited to fighting states than insurgents.
Days before the cross-border escape, a group of soldiers rebelled, saying they were outgunned by the insurgents. In May soldiers in the north fired on a car carrying their commanding officer after they suffered casualties in a search for the kidnapped schoolgirls.
Some Nigerian officials fret that their army’s heavy-handedness is feeding the insurgency. In early August Amnesty International, a British human-rights group, said that all sides were committing atrocities, and released video footage of what appear to be soldiers slitting the throats of detainees.
The army’s poor showing also bodes ill for efforts to strengthen Africa’s own peacekeeping. Nigerian troops have in the past been the backbone of multinational interventions in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Mali. Now the diversion of troops to foreign conflicts is more difficult to justify, given the instability at home.
On August 24th Boko Haram’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, issued a video proclaiming the establishment of an Islamic state in towns seized by Boko Haram, mainly in Borno state. That is fanciful. If the group were to try to hold territory permanently, says Thomas Hansen of Control Risks, a London-based consultancy, it would lose the advantage of being able to hit and run at will. For now it is the Nigerian army that seems to be doing the running—and precious little hitting.
